Alison Stewart: This is All of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful you are here. Coming up later on the show, an hour with Russell Shorto. He's the author of the new book Taking Manhattan. It focuses on how the island was first taken from the Native people by the Dutch and then how the British swooped in and took it from them. It's an incredible look at the 17th century. We'll be spending an entire hour with him learning about the history. First, we are kicking things off with some poetry.

[music]

Reginald Dwayne Betts has a new book out of poetry. It's out today, actually. It's called Doggerel. There's a definition of doggerel on the first page, but it's kind of scratched out. Instead, he puts his own spin on the word. It reads, "Nah, just a Black man writing poems about his dog and all the dogs he encounters on the street and how having extra four feet changed his world, and then he falls in love."

The poems were written over time. Some were written when he was incarcerated as a young man. Some written later when he was a graduate of Yale Law School. Betts believes poetry matters. He believes books matter. So much so that he founded Freedom Reads, a library service to get books into the hands of incarcerated people. Freedom Reads now started five years ago, and there are about 419 Freedom Libraries in 12 states. Reginald Dwayne Betts is a lawyer, a MacArthur Fellow, and is now teaching at Harvard, I believe. He is here to talk poetry. Nice to speak with you.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: It is truly an honor to be here, particularly today.

Alison Stewart: I love that your book's out today.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yes, me too.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: I'm just going to go straightforward and I'm going to ask you to read a poem that I really like. It's called White Peonies.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Oh, cool. I love that poem too.

Alison Stewart: All right, good. This is Reginald Dwayne Betts.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: White Peonies

This is how it happens

One morning, the ground is only the ground

And then green shoots through the rich brown loam

I learned the word loam when I was starving for something

Fools would call it love and I would say it was a time machine

Longing for some days, months, years

When the sorrows didn't bloom like this thing from the ground that I can barely name

Tell me how these peonies have migrated from Asia to my garden

And found their way into my line of vision despite prison and all the suffering I don't speak

It all happens so sudden is what I mean to say

When sadness becomes a beauty before your eyes

So startling you ask friends what to name the flower before you.

I admit, I pretended to be God, to give a name to this thing that gives me joy

I called it Sunday and then called it my firstborn

Have you ever been so rattled by the unexpected that you wanted someone's blessing to name the thing?

The peonies are so lovely they frighten me

They grow on thin stems longer than my arms

With blooms heavier than the stalks

But isn't it always so?

The beauty of the world so hefty

We fear the world cannot stand it

And yet why would we not want to pray when we notice?

Why do we forget that naming is the first kind of prayer?

Even as the white fly was turned into scented oil against my skin.

Alison Stewart: That's Reginald Dwayne Betts reading from the book Doggerel: Poems. This is your third book of poetry. In the back, you explain the way the book came about, and you write very clearly that poetry matters. Why do you believe that poetry matters?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: It's wild. It's my fourth book of poetry. I'm going to say five, though, because I want all my-- and it's funny, because I say that because the images that start the book are pictures that come from poems I was writing in prison. I say I wrote five books, but really, I'm just saying that I'm counting these poems that I wrote in prison where you could see the holes I punched into the paper and how I stitched those pages together and the books I carried around the side with me.

When I was a kid and I was writing those poems, trying to understand what it meant to be in prison, and some of the themes and ideas are things that kept me alive. It all happened because of poetry. It literally opened up a world to me where some of this stuff is written in a super maximum security penitentiary where most of the people around me had life. I've literally gotten some of those guys out of prison. I mean, it's kind of miraculous.

Alison Stewart: What made you keep the images, the ones that we see in the book?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Oh, I got those poems. I got the book one day. I mean, it's one of those things, and it is really hard. I traveled to five different prisons. It's hard to keep track of things. I don't have everything that I wrote, but I mean, I got a stack of things to capture this one formative time period in my life, 1998, 1999. I've signed in the bottom of the pages. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: You were serious?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yes, I was serious. You even see me writing, I got the phone number to the publisher.

Alison Stewart: I saw that in the back. I was like, "Nobody like this out."

Reginald Dwayne Betts: I didn't get my book yet. If them brothers still around, it was the Baltimore bookstore I used to buy books from, and they would mail me books all of the time, man. I almost felt like they were part of my community because I write them and they wrote me back and they were giving me this vital thing. You see me, I got Sonia Sanchez's phone. There's people that I was reading to survive the penitentiary, and now I could call them. I mean, it's kind of humbling.

Alison Stewart: Do you remember the first poem or poet that meant something to you?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yes, I mean, I had gotten, it really was Sonia Sanchez, Lucille Clifton, Rob Hayden at the first. Man, I don't believe I'm crying on TV.

Alison Stewart: It's radio. Nobody sees it.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Oh, that's cool. I wasn't crying. No, I mean, the first book I bought, the first poetry book I bought was Sonia Sanchez's Homegirls and Handgrenades. I was going to a super maximum security penitentiary, and that's the book I bought to take with me. It served me well. Really did.

Alison Stewart: What were you thinking about when you read poetry when you were incarcerated?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: I mean, everything. I learned about move listening to Sonia Sanchez. I learned about Frederick Douglass listening to Robert Hayden. I learned about the world. Honestly, I learned to know myself better. Also, I'm reading Ethers Night and I'm learning that the penitentiary is a legitimate subject of exploration. It is a legitimate place to explore what it means to be alive. When I started to write my own poems, that's what my own poems was about figuring out how to notice something around me that was more than just the suffering.

Alison Stewart: I was sharing with you, I've been writing poetry lately. Really bad poetry.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yes, I love it.

Alison Stewart: Do you write in a journal? You see the pictures in the book, you wrote on whatever is possible. Now, do you set time aside to write? When do you write?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: I mean, I write anytime. I mean, the beautiful thing about this, some of these poems were literally written on the side of the road in Italy. Man, one of these poems, Arriving Late, I wrote at the airport. I was so mad that day. It was like Mother's Day or the day before Mother's Day. We missed out playing, and I was mad, and I was trying to salvage the day. We met a woman named Ellsberth. She said, "You should have came to us. You was running late. You should have came to me." As a Black woman, saying, "I would have made sure that you ain't messed up your mama's Mother's Day."

I said, "You know what? That's okay. Me and my mom never hung out at an airport for three, four hours." We hung out, and it was lovely. I told this woman, I said, "I'm going to write a poem for you. Watch." We were in one of the lounges, and I wrote the poem, and I wrote it on my phone. My mom was talking to my aunt, and my aunt was like, "I don't know what this boy doing. He's scribbling. He might be writing something." It became the poem. I think the poem is beautiful. For me, I write poems wherever I am. If I have my phone, I now use my phone. If I gotta use a piece of paper, I use a piece of paper. If I just gotta remember it, I just remember it in the moment.

Alison Stewart: My guest is poet, lawyer, and founder of Freedom Read's Reginald Dwayne Betts. His new book is out today. It's called Doggerel. You write in the back how you like to read your poems to people. You want to get them out into the world, you read to your Uber driver. What do you get by reading your poems to strangers?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: I get to be a poet. I get to be a poet in the world, and I get to be vulnerable. I get to admit that I have something that I want you to enjoy and to find meaningful and appreciate the fact that you might not want it and you might not hear it the way I hear it, but there's something beautiful about not holding it all in. I feel like I tried to hold it in for a long time and it almost buried me.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to read Losing Weight. This is the one you read to your Uber driver, I believe.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yes, I like this one because I lost 60 pounds, but much more than that. This poem is one of the entryways into thinking about how my relationship with a dog and also with myself radically changed.

Losing Weight

When I wanted to lose weight, when I started, it began with hunger

With needing to feel my body asking for more of it all

Butter and salt and forgiveness for Hennessy cursing through these veins

Another tide ushering me back to all my prisons

It started with fear, or not fear, but walking literally with what I'd feared

A dog with teeth that flared when threatened

Even if them vampire things wouldn't break my skin if I were another treat

We walked to the driveway's end

Then more steps into the space past the yard feel safe

Into this Jack Russell Terrier that fit inside my palm as a pistol once did

Let me slip all those memories

And yes, I began wanting the world as she did

Full gulps of ascent into my nose twitched like a conduit for what might be possible

And somehow more and more and more of me disappeared during those moments with my loves

The puppy leading in the two lights illuminating my world

And maybe it's folly for a man to admit he is in love with a son young enough to still believe

His father's burdens will not touch him

And an older son who knows it doesn't matter

Because the only burden to worrying is never seeing your father weep

And now entire pieces of who I was have begun to fall from my body

Worries and so much more as I become wildly as light

As wind as when my only burden was the sails I left behind.

Alison Stewart: That's Reginald Dwayne Betts. Tell us about your Jack Russell

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Taylor. Yes, the dog we got during the pandemic, actually. You get a dog and you gotta learn who you are by having a dog, and most of what you learn is that you're not in control. [laughs] Walking a dog is interesting, too, man. Walking a dog made me see how I had also been invisible. I've been Ralph Ellison's nameless narrator. Having a dog made me visible in all kinds of ways. It actually made me make myself visible, though, it has given me permission, a wild permission to insert myself in people's conversations because they talk about having a dog, and I miss my dog.

Alison Stewart: You have a poem here called Race, and it mentions Taylor again. Would you read that?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yes, Taylor's get to be the star of the book. That's the thing. She'd probably ask me for royalties or at least for me to walk her more.

Race

Once up 92 if a single step

I raced Taylor, a small Jack Russell

Whose heart, when resting, beats 50 times per minute

And mine beats 53, if at all

Low, low, like the resting rate of the champ

The year he quit being Cassius Clay and chose to become Muhammad Ali

And ain't we all out here trying to become somebody?

So once when Puppy wanted me to release her leash

Instead of holding tight, I say, "Down, girl"

And she lies all cool on the asphalt

Waiting to launch herself at the next child in cleats

But only with my say so and only to steal a kiss

Shahid understands the desire to be seen

As more than a threat waiting to pounce

And so instead of saying, "No, baby"

I shall race and we run in these steps

And my heart rattles and hers is audible

Even as her paws turn tay, tay, two steps at a time

And for a glimmer into the DeLorean

And maybe I'm flying back too

If to fly is to be unafraid of the sunrise in your rib cage

Alison Stewart: Shahid. That's what you used to call yourself, yes?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yes, Shahid.

Alison Stewart: Shahid. Why Shahid in his poem?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yes, it's sort of like, I write this poetic poem called The Guzzle, and it has a self referential in that you sign it in the last couplet. I was thinking about, how do I sign my name? You got artists who do things like they put some mark in every poem and they know about it. It was, how do I put my signature on all of these poems? How do I give myself permission to remember that prison is a part of my experience, but it is not all of my experience.

I'll have a line where it just creeps in, but it's not the whole thing. Shahid knows what it's like to be desired as more than something waiting to pounce, and then I'm back. It's like the poem within a poem. It's the story within the story. For me, the story within the story, it's a lot that came out of prison, and that's what it is here.

Alison Stewart: When you read the story, sometimes the dog references are really, really subtle. Sometimes they're metaphors. How did you go about-- I don't know if. Is it a newfound love of dogs or is this a recent love of dogs?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: It's new, ut also, it changed my attention and. It was just really intense, I think, what I was feeling and how dogs and this particular dog became a way that I was seeing the world. As a writer, you just want to hook, to be able to notice things differently. It was so much that I just hadn't been noticing, and it was so wildly radical that it was connecting me to people in different ways.

Then sometimes it wasn't even about the dog, but it was about how the dog was the bridge for me wanting to say something else about a person. The first times that the dogs showed up in poems, they just showed up because my homie, she loved dogs and she loved her dog, and we had both got dogs during the pandemic, and I just wanted to slip the dog into a poem, and I figured it would make her smile. I think it did.

Alison Stewart: Sounds like you love your dog.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yes. I mean, I am learning that I love a lot of things. I am learning. A dog teaches you to love the world maybe.

Alison Stewart: It does.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: I think maybe that's what I've learned in this book and I learned in writing the book, and I learned what the dog has showed me.

Alison Stewart: There's a poem devoted to your son Micah called Bike Ride. What's that about?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Yeah, Micah.

Alison Stewart: Micah. Excuse me.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: No, I set him up. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: My bad.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: He goes for the rest of his life fixing his name. Honestly, man, I was riding his bike, and I ride. I rode eight miles this morning, but back then, I could barely ride a mile and a half, and I wanted him to take a ride with me. He did, man. It was one of these beautiful father-son moments that the next time I was riding up that same hill by myself, I had stopped to get my breath, and I looked to the left and I saw the spot. My sons was there for me, have been there for me, and are really remarkable young people. Can I read it?

Alison Stewart: Yes, please.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Bike Ride

Returning from a gravel path, I ride a bike with my oldest boy

And this is where he learns how the body fails you

Each time I pause, he asks if I'm okay

And I say yes and climb back on a bike as if I believe I won't falter again

I know I will

The ride no more than two miles along an Italian road

But so much more than my body can take these days

We've been searching for a haunted house

And I should admit that my son don't like birds

But I found this abandoned church

And hundreds of wings turned it into a scene from Hitchcock

I wanted to share that mixture of joy and fear I felt

I imagine he knew

Mostly I wanted to be close to him in a way that my father has never been to me

Biking to that old church

We were interlopers and discovered barking that wanted us to take leave

Particularly the Gandalf looking like little mutt in our path

Micah would have tangled with the beast to save me

I know as we ride and I stop and he asks if I'm okay

I don't know what it means for a child to see his father weep

But know what it means to be saved by a son.

Alison Stewart: That's Reginald Dwayne Betts reading from his new book, Doggerel: Poems. I want to ask you about Freedom Reads before we wrap up. It's celebrating its fifth anniversary. Congratulations for getting to five.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: You bring new books into prisons on hand built shelves. First of all, what kind of books do people want to read?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: It's interesting. They want to read everything. I should just say, five years. If you get out of prison and you make it five years out, that means that you basically have a 0% chance nearly of going back. We need all of the listeners to help Freedom Reads have a 0% chance of ever stopping existence as long as we need it.

You say, what books do people want to read? Man, I saw this kid one day, delighted, so excited when he walked into his cell block and he saw the Freedom Library and saw the Odyssey. He was like, "Yo, they got the Odyssey. Y'all won't believe this. " Then somebody on my team said, "We got the Iliad too." He was like, "Homer wrote another book." Where we're readers in situations like this, often we get the first book of a series and we don't get the other books. People are delighted in that.

They also want to read Jasmine Guillory, they want to read romance novels, they want to read the Faulkners, the Baldwins, they want to read Toni Morrison. Somebody loved this book called The Untold History of Wonder Woman. One of these books by Jill Lepore, a woman wrote us and was delighted by the book. People have written us amazed at Hamlet, you know what I mean? Talking about interactions that they've had with each other about Hamlet.

I met somebody whose mother worked with SA Cosby. He said, "My mom worked at Lowe's with SA Cosby. She been talking about this book." Man, this guy was so happy his mom wrote us to say he hadn't had that kind of joy in his voice since he'd been locked up. I think Freedom Reads is about recognizing that literature is that bridge. I've been telling people a lot because I've been weeping a lot.

I've been riffing on a friend of mine, a poet, Sean Thomas Dougherty, had a book called The Second O of Sorrow. I've been saying, maybe the second O of sorrow is the first O of joy. That bridge from sorrow to joy, understanding that that bridge includes everything about being able to have a capacious life.

Literature is the things that provided me the belief that it was possible, but also literally, the conduit, the rampway, the bridge that I built. Everything my life is based on, every love I've had, every meaningful relationship has been built on books. Freedom Reads is my bid to say, yo, that it matters and that we could do it for people in a way that we haven't, and we could pay attention to people in a way that we haven't, and we could build more room for mercy, for forgiveness, and yes, for freedom.

Alison Stewart: If people want to know more about Freedom Reads, where should they go?

Reginald Dwayne Betts: They should go to our website, www.freedomreads.org.

Alison Stewart: My guest has been Reginald Dwayne Betts. The name of his book is Doggerel: Poems. Thanks for coming in.

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Thank you.