10TH ANNUAL (AND FINAL) NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: DAY 26 :: ROBBIE POLLOCK on KENYATTA EMMANUEL

Week four of this year’s Poetry Month series is curated by Caits Meissner, who writes: “all of the writers featured in our final week are either in, or have served time in, jail and/or prison. But I didn’t choose them with the intention to illuminate the experience of incarceration — though many of the essays do, of course — or to advocate for anything other than the poets who spark up their blood. Quite simply, I invited this roster of writers because what I do with my days is think about, commune with and work with writers who share the condition of incarceration. It is part of my commitment to create space for these voices in the wider literary community.” Read the rest of her curatorial statement here. –EM

The world hasn’t heard much of the music and writing of my mentor, friend, and collaborator Kenyatta Emmanuel. In person, Kenyatta can be alternately heady and playful. You have to brace yourself for concepts related in parables. I never knew for sure if his soliloquies were from a capacious memory or miraculously improvised. He’d dive into Greek mythology, Biblical stories, down-home country stories, and experiences from military boot-camp, or entirely fictitious illustrative scenarios which left you wondering if they’d really happened.

Though he’s a remarkably skilled fiction writer (we had lots of fun making maps for his unpublished fantasy novel Sovereign’s Journey and have a long-running inside joke about cartographers that I won’t explain here), he is best known for his incredibly poignant poetry and songs. It’s also fun to share that I sat next to him in an intense economics class as undergraduates in Hudson Link’s higher education program in prison. We took every opportunity to debate the finer points of laissez-faire capitalism with our patient, yet earnestly libertarian professor. This tribute is born out of such camaraderie.

A decade ago Kenyatta wrote “What Are We Fighting For,” a song he sang to our maximum security prison population at Sing Sing. It was also one of the first of many prison-audience concerts where I got to play for my peers. Prisons are rife with violence, but it’s not all nonsensical and random like we imagine. As far as triggers for violence go, there’s debts, respect, the pecking-order, gang-related violence, and a slew of internal codes and rules that dictate responses to slights and misdeeds. Knowing this, Kenyatta stood in front of this audience of peers and sang,

“Can you tell me why I hate you, you hate me, oh, for heaven’s sake, we’ve gotta find a way we can love some more…”

The bravery of saying those words in that environment stuck with me. There are actual stats for the decrease in incidences of violence at Sing Sing over the period Kenyatta shared his music there, but please don’t task me with linking the causality statistically. I can say that in a qualitative sense, we all felt safer and more brotherly after hearing his words that day and for years after.

On one occasion, I sat in the front row of a concert where Kenyatta sang his song “Dreams They Go,” which is laden with powerful imagery and subtle wordplay.

“You can get used to anything/after while it’s all the same color/easy on the eye.”

For those living in institutional contexts, surrounded by Beige #6 and drab brick, this held special meaning. We could all see the colors. Over an ambient soundscape, Kenyatta painted a picture of resilience and loss, and by mid-song there were tears on the faces of men who had hurt and been hurt.

“You can get used to anything/dreams’ such a fragile thing/think I’ll keep ‘em/think they’ll keep me,” he sang.

My breath choked in my throat. I sat, attuned to the present, not caring about what a broken mess I looked like, covered in snot. My mind raced to all the dreams my own choices had made impossible. I felt the pain of this, the knowledge of all I would never be able to do.

And in the rush of this knowledge, a hope began to emerge, that there are new dreams and possibilities even in the depths of incarceration. A few years after this performance, I was free and home, working as a bike messenger and as a part-time admin with PEN America’s Prison and Justice Writing team. I was doing house concerts at night to support and fundraise for arts programming in prisons. Kenyatta had just been denied clemency. He’d written a song called “Holding Out Hope,” which I asked his permission to sing on his behalf.

A feature of Kenyatta’s songwriting is the presence of a moment, usually three-quarters of the way through a song, where a fist tries to emerge from the listener’s esophagus. The moment in “Holding out Hope” comes after the speaker in the song meets a preacher who was sharing a message of hope which no one would receive. The preacher, upon meeting the speaker,

“wept for a heart that was broken in two/and as his tears fell/they watered the roots/of a tree that bore the most beautiful fruit/and he cried out/begging the hungry to try it/but since it was free nobody would buy it.”

I was working, hurtling down 7th Avenue on my bicycle, listening to it on headphones when my tears came. I had to stop, pull over and cry… it was ugly, with elbows braced on my handlebars, and the whole city to witness. I missed him, yes, but I also marvelled at his beauty, mastery, and awful caged humanity.

I sang this song in his stead at an upscale penthouse with his wife present, and asked the audience to sing the chorus, part of my own philosophy of blurring the line between spectator and performer. I had spent months putting together a video parole packet for him with his wife’s help, arranging the many contributions he had made through his art into a cohesive story. He was heavily on my mind as I sang, and listened to these strangers fill the room with the words of the chorus: “holding out hope.” I couldn’t help but imagine that collective energy radiating its way into the hearts of the parole board through some unknown, miraculous mechanism.

Throughout all of Kenyatta’s music runs a seriousness that I don’t think even he can ameliorate. It sits in the belly like a sermon. It has remarkable latent power to evoke lasting feeling. Literally, one of his songs is responsible for why I’m married. It happens to be a song about love. “What Is Left,” asks the question:

“If this was the last time/I ever saw you/what would I say?”

And perhaps it’s the underlying sense of urgency behind his lyrics that propels it forward in the consciousness.

“The truth is/all of this means/less than nothing if/nobody’s touched by it/and all we really have/is what we leave behind.”

He did end up making parole and was released in October of 2019, and did his “First Free Note” concert at Carnegie Hall the same night. I was responsible for co-producing the music for the event, and I think back on it as one of the greatest honors of my life. At this performance were dignitaries of New York Department of Corrections, family members and friends, arts organizations, the Carnegie Hall brass and a coterie of musicians. We performed a slew of songs that I’ve watched him create over the years and hearing them on this side of the wall in his own voice, live, was transcendent. It’s an obvious understatement to say that the moment was surreal.

And yet, for Kenyatta, it’s an experience that’s entirely expected.

Robbie Pollock is a multidisciplinary teaching artist who uses his lived experience to promote creative vulnerability as a tool for personal growth and societal change. He’s the Prison Writing Program Manager at PEN America and he collaborates with educators, arts, and justice organizations to highlight the humanity behind the walls and the transformative power of connection.