Randall Horton: From Prison, to Poet, to Professor
By Sally-Ann Hard
A Reoccurring Nightmare In Maximum Security
BY RANDALL HORTON
it begins where moonlight ends
slipping through the horizontal
window, wraps each iron bar
of the prison you have become
a longer extension of the cell
in which all humans are born,
come into screaming. scream
& the high shrill falsetto,
voice you never ever want
echoes, ripples, bangs against
your anvil. awakened night-
mares turn mute, the jangling
keys, the slow drag boot heel,
the black scuff marks. you can’t
see yet the guard & the guard
will not see juvenile johnny
sprawled over the bottom bunk
like an elegant woman he is not.
stop. but no one will. stop
receding scenarios dubbed
over & over & over & over.
Randall Horton’s poems are the work of a knowing, compassionate witness. He lays out reasons why we should care, why we should be moved to action and why our treatment of people who are imprisoned is an indictment against our moral, ethical and societal values. Writing, in part to relieve the guilt of the choices he made in his own past, his poems ask us to question what kind of justice we have.
We need these poems.
Horton can write about imprisonment — the inhumanity, deep loneliness, daily degradations and isolation — because it was his life for five years at the Roxbury Correctional Institution in Maryland and for almost two years at the Fairfax County Detention Center in Virginia. Prior to being imprisoned, Horton had never written. He was thirty-eight years old when he started writing. While behind bars, he attended a writing workshop, which piqued his interest. After reading an interview with the poet E. Ethelbert Miller about his memoir, Fathering Words, Horton wrote to him, beginning a correspondence that led him to delve deeper into the world of poetry.
Since being released in 2001, Horton has earned a Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing, from the University at Albany-SUNY, received notable poetry prizes, and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. His publications include a memoir, Roxbury, and the poetry collections, The Definition of Place, The Lingua Franca of Ninth Street, and his most recent, Pitch Dark Anarchy. And in May, Augry Books will publish Hook: A Memoir. He is now an Assistant Professor of English at the University of New Haven, Connecticut where he often speaks to his students on the impact of imprisonment. It is a most necessary education. Many of them are enrolled in the university’s Criminal Justice Program.
Running throughout Horton’s writing, is an intention to be true to his own story by giving breath and life to experiences many of us cannot understand. In his poem, “When A Man Leaves A Woman Unprotected,” Horton illuminates the consequences imprisonment visits on entire families and communities, particularly poor communities of color.
