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Clayton Fountain interviews Steve Ely |
3 comments
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CF: You’re a limey square john never done a bit in your life. The hell gives you the right to write about the joint, about guys like me?
SE: I write about what I have to. It’s where my head lives, where my heart takes me. Something grabs hold of me, an idea, an experience and that’s it, I run with it, transform it in the imagination, make it mine. By the time pen hits paper, it’s not about guys like you – you’re just content - it’s about me.
CF: Just content, huh? You better watch your mouth, fake-ass tough guy. You got to be makin’ a million from this. Where’s my end?
SE: Up that cell-bitch’s ass, what I hear – remember Lewisberg?
CF: (Leaps up from his chair.) MUTHAFUCKA! I’ll tear out your fuckin’ windpipe -
SE: Hey bro’, cool it. Don’t forget, you’re dead, up there in heaven with those monks that turned you at Springfield. You’re supposed to be setting an example.
CF: I guess. Shit. (Resumes sitting.) That goddamn temper of mine.
SE: That was always your problem bro’. Isn’t that what I have you say in JerUSAlem?
CF: Yeah. (Sighs.) JerUSAlem. That’s the greatest literary work of the twenty first century. I know that for a fact because I’m in heaven and I got a kick-ass overview. You gotta have a publishin’ deal for that by now?
SE: It ain’t happening bro’.
CF: Those guys are assholes.
SE: Yeah.
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| Submission Date: |
| 01 Mar 2008 |
Category: |
Poetry
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In Podcast and Chap-book
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J-A-C-K
“I would just like an apology of some sort. A little consideration. Just a small recognition by society of the injustice that has been done to me.” (Jack Henry Abbott)
That’s the conundrum; how can a man
so talented be bad? How can a man
who writes so well be allowed to rot in jail?
(I didn’t consider the reverse propositions;
that the dully mediocre can never be virtuous,
mere hackwork is an imprisonable crime.)
He robbed a bank: so what? It wasn’t as if
they couldn’t absorb the loss, they didn’t have insurance.
Did he leave any bodies? Did he leave lives in ruins,
like the guys from the Savings & Loans?
It was prison that made him a killer,
that and his brutal state raised youth.
Take him out of that environment,
nurture his talent, instead of trying
to break his spirit, you’ve got an American
Jean Genet, a white Eldridge Cleaver.
They blame me now, and I can understand that.
In a way, I sprung him. But everyone was doing it.
Len Bernstein had the Panthers round for cocktails
and fried chicken. Was I naïve? I guess I was.
I had no idea of the depth of the scarring
he’d suffered, this son of a Chinese whore
abandoned to the reformatory,
the in loco parentis savagery
of his ‘carers’. But doesn’t the lotus bloom
from the mud, the phoenix rise from the flames?
Dostoevsky served hard time in the slammer.
Ditto Chester Himes, Malcolm X, Eddie Bunk.
There was a time when some of these guys
would’ve shanked you soon as look at you;
see what they became when they picked up the pen.
You can’t tell me there’s no redemption,
that even those we call the worst can’t change.
He tattooed J-A-C-K on his hard left fist,
his first and defining literary work;
asserting himself to himself and then
to the jailhouse world. He carved it
on that waiter’s heart and smashed it in my face.
Re-reading Beast, it seems obvious now
that he wasn’t that good: sure, the sparks fly
off the page, but the energy’s borne of hate;
too much tendentious Marxism, too much militant ego.
Guess I got carried away by the zeitgeist.
Turned out he was bad through and through.
Jack Henry Abbott was a convict who began a correspondence with writer Norman Mailer. Convinced Abbott was a major talent, Mailer helped him gain parole and wrote the introduction for Abbott’s first book, In the Belly of the Beast. Six weeks out of prison, Abbott stabbed and killed waiter Richard Adan because he refused allow him to use a staff toilet at the restaurant in which he was eating.
tookie
“I am guilty of being black.” (Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams)
Right up to the end, you said you didn’t do it.
Sam Coleman said you did:
you said the cops coerced his testimony,
broke his ribs with nightsticks, left him unconscious
in a pool of his own congealing blood.
James and Esther and Alfred and George said you did:
career criminals, you said,
giving perjured testimony to save their own skins.
The jury said you did:
you said they poisoned the jury pool
with armed escape conspiracy lies;
you said all the jurors were white;
you said your white lawyers were incompetent.
The judge said you did:
he sentenced you to die.
You said he was another white man,
dealing a brother a dead man’s hand.
You founded the Crips:
how many black men did you kill?
Death row focused your mind.
You saw the error of your ways
and gave up the gangsta life.
You said you’d changed.
Barbara Becnel believed you.
Winnie and Desmond believed you.
Mike Farrell believed you.
Maybe they believed you were innocent as well,
or maybe that was beside the point:
you were a black man,
sentenced to die by a racist white society;
for some, that wipes the slate.
You wrote a book for black kids,
telling them, stay in school
and keep away from gangs;
I bought it for my son, a white kid
in a suburb, on his PS2 mostly.
He liked it. He thought you looked a bad-ass
with your twenty inch biceps
and Tito Jackson ’fro.
They made a film,
you wrote more books,
you got a campaign and a website.
The Swiss put you up for a Nobel Prize.
The cops thought it was baloney.
They kept busting your ass for gang subversion.
Schwarzenegger had the final say.
He said that you did it, and that you hadn’t changed.
Or maybe you had, but it didn’t matter.
They killed you.
I read your book only after you were dead.
You never described your murders.
I don’t mean the ones you said you didn’t do.
Stanley ‘Tookie’ Williams was co-founder of the notorious L.A. street gang ‘the Crips’. Sentenced to death in 1981 for four murders he insisted he did not commit, he was executed in California’s San Quentin Prison on 13th December, 2005.
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AB Woods's comments
Seen this fella's work on a range of sites - Laura Hird, Lit Chaos, etc - lot of different styles, but whatever the genre, there's no doubt about it - Ely kicks ass!
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30 Apr 2008
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Basil Baron-Bornowy Brown's comments
This guy's interview is better than his poems and this Abu Jabu guy's of his head
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12 Mar 2008
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Abu Mumia Jamal's comments
Peckerwood hate crimes masquerading as social comment.
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03 Mar 2008
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