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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT
Poetry Off the Shelf: Attica, Again

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf, I’m Helena de Groot. Today, Attica, Again.

In early September 1971, at the Attica Correctional Facility in the northeast of New York State, a group of the incarcerated men on their way to breakfast overpowered the guards and took over the prison, holding hostage a total of 39 guards and administrators. Their demands were straightforward. They wanted an end to their inhumane living conditions: they were cooped up in cells, sweltering in summer, freezing in winter; they often went to bed hungry; were allowed only one shower and one roll of toilet paper a week; and they were beaten and humiliated by the prison guards, all of whom were white, in contrast to the men they had the power to punish and abuse. After four days of negotiations that went nowhere, then-governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller, gave the order to take back the prison by force. State police and prison officers barged in with tear gas and submachine guns, spraying bullets, and they killed 10 hostages and 29 inmates, and injured 89 others. It was the most violent shutdown of a prison uprising in US history.

Just eight months later, a 30-year-old poet and professor at Buffalo State College, Dr. Celes Tisdale, was recruited to teach a poetry workshop at Attica. For a group of people who had until then not been allowed to read books or even letters their loved ones sent, this was a new experience.

Today, a selection of Tisdale’s students’ poems as well as his own journals from these days have been collected in a book titled, When The Smoke Cleared. But before we got to that book, I wanted to know a bit more about who Celes Tisdale was 50 years ago.

Helena de Groot: And would you say at the time when you were asked to teach this workshop, were you, you know, engaged politically? How would you describe yourself at the time?

Celes Tisdale: I was, I was very much a part of the Black Arts movement, yes, very much so. Connected with many of the poets throughout the United States. Amiri Baraka, Sonya Sanchez, Nicki Giovanni, people like that. And so, yes, I was connected in that way. I was not an outwardly political person because I was rather reserved, actually.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And do you remember, because if you’ve never been inside a prison, I imagine that it’s quite a startling experience. Do you remember at all the first thing that you noticed, or?

Celes Tisdale: Yes, I did. When I first walked in, I went through some eight gates to get into the prison.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Celes Tisdale: I got a little nervous as each gate electronically closed behind me. I was led down this long hall into the classroom, and I noticed that, here we are now, a year later, the walls were charred and you could still smell the smoke.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Celes Tisdale: But the interesting thing was that as I was walking along the hall, a lot of the guys knew me. Because they were from the Buffalo area, I lived in the Buffalo area and my nickname is Tis. “Hey Tis, what’s happening man?” (LAUGHING) You know?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Celes Tisdale: So I said, and there was Fred over there and another guy, I can’t give you their last names of course. And they said, “Hey, what are you doing here?” I went, “I’m here to teach,” and so on. So that was my introduction.

Helena de Groot: And that first class, do you remember, because you obviously had never taught poetry to a group of, you know, men in prison, you were teaching literature at university level, right?

Celes Tisdale: Absolutely, absolutely. So poetry was my game, so to speak. I loved poetry, and I was teaching at Buffalo State and University of Buffalo and Niagara University, and I’ve always loved poetry. My mother introduced me to poetry. And she was a so-called illiterate from a—I was born in South Carolina in my grandmother’s house, my mother’s mother’s house. And my mother, even though she could not read that well, she introduced me to poetry through a Black poet named Paul Laurence Dunbar. Dunbar was born 1872, died pretty young, 1906. But she taught me that, you know, by reciting some of the poems to me. So.

Helena de Groot: So your mother knew them by heart?

Celes Tisdale: She knew, yes, she knew some of the poems by heart.

Helena de Groot: Do you remember what her favorite poem was?

Celes Tisdale: “In the Morning.” That’s what it was called, “In the Morning.” It was a poem she used to use to wake us up. I was the oldest of six kids. And Dunbar wrote in the vernacular, in the Southern dialect vernacular, because that’s what, you know, people wanted from a Black poet. Although he did write other kinds of poems in the standard English. And my mother used the poem “In the Morning,”

(RECITES EXCERPTS FROM MEMORY)

’Lias! Bless de Lawd!

Don’ you know de day’s ebroad?

Ef you don’ git up, you scamp,

Dey’ll be trouble in dis camp.

You wash your face and comb your head

Your head looked just like a feather bed,

Boy, don’t you look at me.

’Lias! Bless de Lawd!

(LAUGHS) That’s as much as I can, that I can remember.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Celes Tisdale: But she used that to wake us up.

Helena de Groot: That’s amazing. I love that you still remember it. This must have been a few decades ago now.

Celes Tisdale: A few decades ago. I was what, 12, 12 years old? I don’t know.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Celes Tisdale: Only about 70 years ago. That’s all. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Celes Tisdale: But Dunbar is my favorite poet. Because of all the poets, and all the Shakespeare I’ve done, and all of the whoever I’ve done, Dunbar is really my favorite. You know why? Because Dunbar was able to capture not only the vernacular of his formerly enslaved parents, but Dunbar also was able to really conquer, if you will, the English language in terms of being able to use it as a poet. He was the most well known poet in America in the 19th century. So he would write a poem so, like this,

(RECITES “Dawn” FROM MEMORY)

An angel, robed in spotless white,

Bent down and kissed the sleeping Night.

Night woke to blush; the sprite was gone.

Men saw the blush and called it Dawn.

That was the other side of Dunbar.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, very different kind of poem. I mean, that is almost more like Wordsworth or something.

Celes Tisdale: Very much so. Very much.

Helena de Groot: And is Dunbar someone that you would also bring with you when you went and taught at Attica? Was that someone that you think, you know, people would appreciate?

Celes Tisdale: Sure. There were so many different kinds of things that Dunbar wrote, and so I was able—Dunbar also wrote things that were very strident about, you know, Black people in the 19th century and, you know, talking about their rights and so on. So he, he was really a man for all seasons, I guess.

Helena de Groot: And it’s interesting, I mean like, what you said about Dunbar, that, you know, he captured so well the vernacular. And I’m interested in, in like how that connects to your work at the prison, you know, because I think vernacular and the way people express themselves who haven’t necessarily all gone to university and taken writing classes is probably something that is important there too, to make people listen to their own language and to their own expression. How did you do that? How did you make people who hadn’t taken a writing course, how did you get them to pay attention to the way they were already playing with language?

Celes Tisdale: Well, what I did with men in Attica was that I talked about poetry generally. I went in with William Shakespeare first. I talked about different kinds of things that Shakespeare wrote, and I explained to them the language of the poetry in his plays. Then I dealt with other poems and poets. What I did was introduce them to poetry of the world. African poetry. I talked about the ancient Muslim poetry. So by doing this and reciting the poetry to them, they became very excited and it loosened them up to show me what they had written.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Celes Tisdale: So by their seeing this Black man—see this was, this was very different for them—by seeing this Black man, a scholar, a professor coming in, but who still knew the guys from the neighborhood. So.

Helena de Groot: Right. You were really bridging that gap.

Celes Tisdale: It was, to me, it was easy to do.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: It was a natural because poetry to me is universal. And the whole rhythm and so on. So by teaching them that, then I let them feel a little bit relaxed, so that when they gave me their poetry to evaluate every Wednesday night and bring it back the next day, I would let them know that, “Look, hey, this sounds a little bit like Shakespeare, the way you said this, and this sounds like, this sounds like Wordsworth, you see?”

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: So I was, you know, teachers are always teaching as you, you know? We’re always teaching.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: I got 12 grandkids, four great grandkids, and I’m always teaching. I have six kids of my own, so I’m always teaching.

Helena de Groot: Wow. Yes. Yeah, yeah, of course. I totally get that. But I also like the way that you were like, “I’m gonna bring in Shakespeare on, you know, class one.”

Celes Tisdale: Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And did you bring sonnets? Or what did you bring? Do you remember?

Celes Tisdale: Oh, sonnets, yes.

(RECITES PARTS OF Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare FROM MEMORY)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of Ma,

And summer’s lease has all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion and dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor shall death brag our wonder’st in his shade,

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

Sp long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

And I told them that, “Hey, you learn this poem and you tell a woman this poem, and you got the girl man, I’m telling you.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Celes Tisdale: “You can’t miss, this is sonnet 18. Don’t forget this. He wrote about 150 of them. But remember this one.”

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Celes Tisdale: “And try it on Valentine’s Day. You know, whatever. I guarantee you, you’ll get the girl.” (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Did anyone that you know take you up on it?

Celes Tisdale: Well, it worked for me!

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Celes Tisdale: I have a woman I’ve been with for 42 years, but no, let’s see, we met, yeah, 46 years.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Celes Tisdale: Yeah, it worked, it worked. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: That’s amazing.

Celes Tisdale: On our first night together I read, I read poetry to her.

Helena de Groot: That’s beautiful, that’s just beautiful. I’m also interested, you know, when you’re talking, when you’re reciting this again from memory, right? It’s all from memory. When you’re reciting this Shakespeare sonnet, just imagining it in a prison context, it gives it a whole new shade of meaning to me. Like the longing and the poignancy and the, you know, the fact that everything changes and everything disappears and, you know, it takes on a whole new meaning, I feel like, in the context of a prison.

Celes Tisdale: Yes, I, the thing that I, that I really found out about these men was that poetry, and it sounds a little corny, but poetry is universal, you see?

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: And poetry also has the lilting aspect of it, the rhythmic aspect, as you well know, the musicality of it. And these men like jazz, you see. So I go back to Paul Laurence, Dunbar. And Dunbar was doing what we call jazz. “Me and my baby got two more ways to do the Charleston, Charleston,”—no, that’s Langston Hughes.

(RECITES EXCERPTS FROM “Negro Dancers” by Langston Hughes FROM MEMORY)

“Me an’ ma baby’s
Got two mo’ ways,
Two mo’ ways to do de Charleston!”

“Me an' ma baby’s
Got two mo’ ways,
Two mo’ ways to do de Charleston!”

Folks say, stand folks, folks pray folks, folks stand in a cabaret.

“Me an’ ma baby’s
Got two mo’ ways,
Two mo’ ways to do de Charleston!”

Helena de Groot: And how did they react?

Celes Tisdale: They start moving and moving their head and tapping their feet,

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: and some of ’em would get up and dance and, you know, and I just loved doing it.

Helena de Groot: I’m wondering if we can get to a poem. Let me see, maybe the one on page 130. It’s called “Applause to Archie Shepp and Co.” And it’s by a man, Christopher Sutherland. Do you, do you remember him at all? Do you wanna say something about him?

Celes Tisdale: Yes. Christopher Sutherland was one of my better poets. He was a person that was a deep thinking poet person, a very caring person, a man who loved poetry quite a bit, and he didn’t talk much, but he wrote very well. Oh, here it is. I got it, I found it. He says,

Helena de Groot: Wait, and so, wait, can you introduce it somehow, because Archie Shepp came to the prison, right?

Celes Tisdale: Yes, he did come to the prison and I was there that—was I there was day? I think I was, and we were there for something.

Helena de Groot: I think you, in the book, it seemed as if you were there the next day and that the people who, you know, in your class were saying like, “Oh, yesterday Archie Shepp came and there was this great concert.”

Celes Tisdale: You’re right.

Helena de Groot: Didn’t—yeah.

Celes Tisdale: You’re right. The memory steps a little bit at this point. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Of course.

Celes Tisdale: Shepp was there that day. You’re right. And, uh, let me read the poem.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Yes, please!

Celes Tisdale:

(READS “Applause to Archie Shepp & Co.)

We listened

To your

rhythmic hope message

That quickly dissolved

Suffocating despair

With fresh air

For all

Your music

Won our hearts

And our souls’ applause.

Helena de Groot: Thank you.

Celes Tisdale: Wonderful guy.

Helena de Groot: Can you tell me about this poem? What strikes you as you read it now?

Celes Tisdale: I see Chris’s face. A lot of the guys, I don’t see their faces anymore, because it’s a long time ago, 50 years. But I see Chris’s face.

Helena de Groot: Huh. What did he look like?

Celes Tisdale: Yeah, he, he was a kind of a light-skinned guy. He was kind of stocky. Was paroled and he wrote me a letter and said, “I got me a girl and a Cadillac.”

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) Not bad!

Celes Tisdale: (LAUGHS) How do you like that? “I got me a girl and a Cadillac.” I said, “Oh, you’re doing all right.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You seem on your way.

Celes Tisdale: Yes, indeed.

Helena de Groot: Well, you know, what I’m so interested in, like hearing you read this poem and reading the stories about these men in your book, I was just so struck by their creative spirit squandered. Like, not in the poems obviously, but like in the remainder of their days, right? Like, this is my personal opinion, but just the thought that we’re spending all this money and investing in all these buildings and having all this bureaucracy and, and hiring people to then basically make a setting in which people are almost forbidden from thriving. You know? It’s like they make it so that it’s almost impossible to be, you know, a full human being. Creative, curious, loving, you know, all of that is like banished it seems like in prison. And so I’m wondering when you were, you know, introduced to these men and you got to know them and you got to know their creativity, how did you deal with the fact that they were in an environment that made creativity so hard?

Celes Tisdale: Well, here’s what I thought. First of all, they were men just like me. No different. They just made the wrong choice somewhere. I could have been in there myself as an inmate. What I became was a catalyst. You know, catalysts can either go, you know, things go up or go down. And the catalyst in terms of making, you see, I don’t think of them, I didn’t think of them as inmates. And they tried to tell me why they were in prison and I don’t want to hear that. I do not want to hear why you’re here. I’m here,

Helena de Groot: Oh, seriously? You would stop them basically when they wanted to tell you like, “I robbed a store” or whatever. You were like, “Don’t tell me.”

Celes Tisdale: Absolutely. I don’t want to know that. “I’m here for one thing. I’m here to make you understand that you are creative or you can become creative and I’m gonna teach you how to write poetry. That’s it. I don’t want know anything else.”

Helena de Groot: But, you know, it’s interesting to me, I’m gonna just press on that point a little bit, because you said, you know, “They’re just men, it could have been me in there, and it was them,” you know, I understand that. But it was them, and you went on for, you know, the 50, like, it’s been 50 years, so all of those 50 years that you’ve been out living your life, you know, loving your wife and having kids, and, you know, doing your research and teaching, you’ve been living your life. You’ve been allowed to be creative, right? And I wonder what it has—have you ever had a parallel track in your mind, let’s say, about, “Oh, what are they up to now?” You know, like, “Oh, are they still inside? What does that mean then for them? What have they missed out on?” Is that something that you ever thought about?

Celes Tisdale: I’ve thought about them, but not to the point that I, it becomes all-consuming.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: I understand what happened to them and why it happened. But I understand that I was there for that moment.

Helena de Groot: Sure.

Celes Tisdale: Now, if for that moment it goes beyond that, it’s, it makes it even better.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: There were some men who were not in the workshop who saw me in the hall leaving class, and they came to me and said, “I would like to have you take a note for me or arrange for women to call me” and so on. No. The men wrote me letters. They didn’t telephone me, I never gave them my phone number. But some of them wrote me letters. One person wanted me to go by his wife’s house and say something to her about what he was doing.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: I did that only once, and I thought that was not a good idea. Not a good idea. So I never did that again.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, no, that makes sense.

Celes Tisdale: And of course I have a journal in this new book that goes into deep detail about my relationship with the men outside of the workshop itself.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Well, I was wondering if we can get to a little excerpt from your journal. It’s on page 96. I’m gonna open it with you. So this is an entry from January 2, 1974.

Celes Tisdale: Okay. (TURNING PAGES) 1974. The pages are out order because I was looking at, looking through this stuff this morning, and let’s see if we can go this way. Go ahead and read it. Read it for me and I can, I can comment on it because I’ll remember it.

Helena de Groot: Oh, great. Okay, so, this is a part that I was interested in. You write,

(READS EXCERPT)

The men have been asking me to bring pictures of my family for the past year. Tonite, I brought some, and they were quite delighted. What an affinity they have for family life! I was surprised at their reaction to my children in the photos. It was quite unlike what I am accustomed to seeing as men’s reaction to children.

Celes Tisdale: That’s true. I was very surprised at how much they were really family oriented, really. And they loved to see, you’re right, they kept asking about pictures of my children and so on, and they loved it.

Helena de Groot: Do you ever feel like they were, because, you said, “They’re just men. It could have been me in there,” you know? And so I’m wondering if they actually had the same thought, like, “Oh, you know, this professor of ours, he’s just a man, could have been me out there, you know, living my life, having children.”

Celes Tisdale: Well, it was just, it was the reverse with me in terms of that. Even though I’m not in there, I’m in there, you see? One of my brothers-in-law was in there, and I knew other guys who had gone to prison.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: And there were a couple other guys who were in there that I grew up with in the, I grew up in the projects, you see. When we, when we moved to Buffalo in the winter of 1941, we moved into a housing project called the Willert Park Projects. It was built especially in 1937 for Black people on the east side of Buffalo.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Celes Tisdale: That’s all my dad could afford. We moved in there and many of the guys that I grew with, played with, went to school with, and so on, they were men at Attica. And so they saw something in me that I didn’t lord over them. You see, my attitude was not, “Hey, see what you could have become. You could’ve become a professor like me.” No, I’m here because I believe in the humanity of man. Because I care for you. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t really care. The little money that they gave me for travel, that was nowhere near enough to do what I was doing. Come on.

Helena de Groot: Yes.

Celes Tisdale: It wasn’t for the money! (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Yes, yes, yes. Few things of what we do in the field of poetry are for the money, right.

Celes Tisdale: No. Right. They’re not for the money, that’s all.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: So I wanted them to understand that I’m here just, just for you and let’s keep our mind on what we want to do. Although we did talk about other things. We didn’t just talk about poetry. And sometimes they criticized the poets who were well known. I’d bring in like a recording of Nikki Giovanni reading or LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka reading,

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh.

Celes Tisdale: and they would criticize and say, “Oh man, he’s not that great a poet.”

(LAUGHS)

And they thought that Nick Giovanni was really kind of pompous and so on.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: More so, I wanted them to understand, let’s evaluate their work, nevermind the person.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And did the conversation ever turn, because, you know, you were there explicitly in the wake of the uprising,

Celes Tisdale: Absolutely. One year, yeah, one year later.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And also I think it, it seemed to be like a program that was, that was almost started because they were like, well, you know, let’s provide something for these men to do so that maybe this doesn’t happen again. And so can you tell me, did they ever talk about it? Were they, I mean, the men that you taught, were they there for it? And did they ever talk about what they remembered of those days of the uprising and then especially of the violent last day when, you know, people they knew were killed?

Celes Tisdale: Absolutely. They talked quite a bit about it sometime, but I, I sort of steered away from that, because I wasn’t, I already was aware of it. Tom Wicker, who was a writer for the New York Times, I believe it was, had already written the book that I read. So I already knew these things, so I, I didn’t really get into it too much and too much of the criticism. And I wanted them to learn how to write poetry well. I was very, I’m an, I’m an extremely critical professor, you know.

Helena de Groot: Uh-huh. Yes.

Celes Tisdale: Extremely critical. Not to the point that I’m gonna slam you, but I’m gonna say, “Hey, why don’t we try it this way?” So that’s what I was more concerned with the men in terms of what they were learning and how they were learning. And was I a good, was I a good role model for them?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I’m also, I mean, like, you know, when you, when you teach people poetry, of course you can be like a strict professor when it comes to the quality of the poem and, you know, sort of the quality of the images or, you know, whatever else. But of course, they still have to write about something. And a lot of the men, of course, were writing about these traumatic experiences.

Celes Tisdale: Mm-hmm. They talked, they talked a lot about it, about what happened.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: And some of the things that happened to L.D. Barkley and some of the other guys I already knew. A lot of these guys who were killed, I knew them. So,

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow. Really?

Celes Tisdale: they talked about what happened.

Helena de Groot: You knew them personally?

Celes Tisdale: They talked about the aftermath of it, and they talked about the number of people who were killed. But it was horrendous, because what they told me was a lot more than what we saw in the news or heard in the news, or in Tom Wicker’s book, these men told me some stuff that just wasn’t in the news.

Helena de Groot: Can you give me an example?

Celes Tisdale: Well, the example, they would say that after the, the riot, they were lined up and asked to walk through a gauntlet. And not only were they were hit on their behind, that they were hit in their private parts as well. They were shot. Many men who were shot—of course, keep in mind, there were 43 men that were, that were killed, I believe, but a number of them were their own people.

Helena de Groot: Prison guards.

Celes Tisdale: There were 30 guards, and yes, 13 inmates.

Helena de Groot: Right.

Celes Tisdale: So what the men told me was that as they watch their own fellow inmates being shot, they were shot, that person, even when he was lying on the ground dead already, they were still being shot.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Celes Tisdale: And all the men wanted, see, the main thing we had to realize why did this Atticus thing take place? The men wanted just plain, ordinary things. We don’t—we want to have a shower more than twice a week. We want to be able to, you know, practice our religion if we’re Muslim, if we’re Christian, if we’re Jewish. We want to have better food.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: We want to, we want to be human! Stop treating us like as though we’re not human beings. They were asking for ordinary stuff.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Celes Tisdale: So, when I think about it, I almost tear up even now. Nothing unusual they were asking for, nothing.

Helena de Groot: Do you wanna read a poem or two, that is sort of more closely linked to the uprising? I was thinking of maybe the first one on page 49 by a man whose name is Mshaka.

Celes Tisdale: Yeah. Here’s a poem called “Formula for Attica Repeats.”

Helena de Groot: Exactly.

Celes Tisdale: This is the poem from which we got the title, When the Smoke Cleared.

(READS POEM)

Formula for Attica Repeats

..... and when

the smoke cleared

they came aluminum paid

lovers

from Rock/The/Terrible,

refuser

of S.O.S Collect Calls,

Executioner.

They came tearless

tremblers,

apologetic grin factories

that breathed Kool

smoke-rings

and state-prepared speeches.

They came

like so many unfeeling fingers

groping without touching

the 43 dead men

who listened …

threatening to rise

again....

Helena de Groot: It’s incredible.

Celes Tisdale: Mm-hmm.

Helena de Groot: What hits you about it now, when you read it now?

Celes Tisdale: When I read it now, when they talk about Rock/The/Terrible, they’re talking about Rockefeller.

Helena de Groot: Ah ha. The Governor of New York.

Celes Tisdale: The governor of New York. See, Rockefeller at the time was not going to intervene in any way because he had aspiration to become president. I found out that later on, you see.

Helena de Groot: I wanna ask you one more question about sort of the, the painful stuff about the uprising. I think it’s important that we talk about it a little more. I was wondering if we can do it by reading a little bit from your journal again. So, on page 80 of When the Smoke Cleared,

Celes Tisdale: Yeah, go ahead and read it.

Helena de Groot: You want me to read it?

Celes Tisdale: Yeah, you go ahead and read it. I can’t find it. Take me too long to find it. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Okay, great. Right.

(READS EXCERPT)

Hersey Boyer, one of my best, missing tonite—in lock up—I was told he was “bitten by a dog,” meaning the guards beat him up, I suppose. No one wanted to discuss it with the guard present in the room. How interesting—the guard sat in the room with us tonite—most unusual.

Helena de Groot: Can you tell me about that? Like, what was the mood in the room?

Celes Tisdale: It was very strange, when the guard was in the room, yeah, they were a little bit stilted, but, then the guard stopped staying in the room for, because, and I mentioned it to, I can’t remember when the person, I said, “Why did the guard sit outside? These guys aren’t going anywhere.” You know? And they sat outside the door. So what they did, they put a Black guard in the room.

Helena de Groot: Oh. Interesting.

Celes Tisdale: A guy that I, that I knew, I knew him in Buffalo. So, so, and that was nice, I already knew the guy. (LAUGHS) So the guys felt a little more comfortable and a little bit more forthcoming.

Helena de Groot: Totally. Of course. I see. Yeah, because that seems so hard to me, too. I tried to imagine like, how do you on the one hand, encourage these men to be creative and express themselves and on the other, you know, they still have to go back to their cells being guarded by these same guards, so they probably don’t wanna provoke them either. Like, how do you, how did you navigate that line?

Celes Tisdale: Well, here’s how I did it. I looked, I compared Attica to apartheid in Africa. Before Nelson Mandela became president.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Celes Tisdale: I also compared Attica to my great, great grandfather. My great grandfather who was an enslaved person having come from Africa, from Ghana. So when I made those kinds of comparisons, I let them know that even in the midst of all of this, the enslaved people who still became creative people, right? The people under apartheid regime who still became free and had one of the greatest men I have ever respected, Nelson Mandela. He came out of that having been in prison some what? Some 27 years.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: So the thing I was trying to teach them was that you can succeed. Okay? I used to tell guys, “Hey, if Tisdale can come out of the projects, if Tisdale can come out of South Carolina with his parents through the projects,” okay, going to a vocational school, because they didn’t want me to go into an academic school. So I learned in a vocational school. I became an electronics major.

Helena de Groot: Oh, wow. Wow!

Celes Tisdale: In high school at Seneca Vocational High School, because I wanted to be—well, I was told to be—an electrical engineer. So, as I was graduating, in May of that year I was gonna graduate from high school, my guidance counselor came to me, [name inaudible], I’ll never forget him. He said, “Tisdale, I’m looking at your grades here. You have an average for four years of 96. That’s your average over four years. What you gonna do?” I said, “Well, I’m going to the Air Force, you know?” He said, “No, you need to go to college.”

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: Now in a vocational school, you’re not prepared to go to college. I don’t know how Mr. [inaudible name] did it, but within a month he had me enrolled as a student at Buffalo State College in the English department.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Celes Tisdale: I don’t know how he did that. And I went back after I graduated from Buffalo State College, and those same people who taught me were now my colleagues.

Helena de Groot: So you basically wanted to encourage them to not lose hope.

Celes Tisdale: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: And, and I also encouraged them to not only read poetry, because I’m not here to teach just poetry, I’m here to teach you about yourself. Marcus Garvey. Okay. What did he say? “Up, you mighty race, you may accomplish what you will.” This is Marcus Garvey coming from Jamaica to America in 1914, somewhere thereabouts, to encourage Black people to get up, come on. Malcolm X, my hero is Malcolm X! I got a picture of him. He’s right here. That’s my man.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: Malcolm X.

Helena de Groot: And do you like, you know, would you ever, because Malcolm X especially at the time, was also not someone that you can mention without, I mean now too, I think, without polarizing people, right?

Celes Tisdale: Absolutely.

Helena de Groot: So, did, was he someone that, you know, you talked to the students about? Or did you try and not bring up those kinds of names?

Celes Tisdale: I didn’t do it too often. Because I didn’t get into the too much, as they say, revolutionary stuff.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Celes Tisdale: Because they would’ve canceled the whole workshop.

Helena de Groot: Yep. Yep.

Celes Tisdale: So I had to be kind of careful. And in certain things that they brought up, I steered them away from it.

Helena de Groot: Sure.

Celes Tisdale: But what I wanted,

Helena de Groot: For their own protection, in a way.

Celes Tisdale: Absolutely. But what I wanted them to understand, you can accomplish anything you want.

Helena de Groot: Do you feel like your encouragements—can you remember any men that really heard it?

Celes Tisdale: Oh, yeah. Harold Packwood comes to mind right away. Harold Packwood was an extremely gifted poet. He was the person who, who understood himself, who he was, and so on. Christopher Sutherland was an extremely gifted poet.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: And a couple of these guys, I got them—Alexander Brooks.

Helena de Groot: Oh, I love that poem! “Dialing.”

Celes Tisdale: So Brooks, he decided to become an English major, so he got out. The last letter he wrote me, he was now an English major, wanting to become an English teacher.

Helena de Groot: Wow. I love that poem that you included by him. Could I ask you to read that one last poem? It’s a poem called “Dialing.”

Celes Tisdale: (TURNING PAGES) Let’s see where it is. Okay. Yeah, there it is. There it is. He had a great sense of humor too.

Helena de Groot: Right, exactly. I thought this was such a fun poem.

Celes Tisdale: And he was a good poet too.

(READS POEM)

Dialing

Dialed a number: Got the time.

(Hey, that’s neat!)

Got the weather for a dime.

(Well, can you beat … !)

They’ve got a number you can dial

for the latest quotes

on Quaker Oats

(preferred or common,

convertibles, warrants,

and ex-dividends);

And inning-by-inning Series scores,

And the speed at which traffic is moving,

So you can tell if the flow is improving

Well enough so that cars on the Expressway

Won’t get ticketed for overtime parking;

And a number where a canned hostess announces

That at Kennedy, Newark, and LaGuardia,

Things have congested so in the last hour,

That after three hours’ circling and bounces,

Flight 706—already delayed seven hours

By bomb-threats and skyjacking rumors (not yet confirmed) —

Is being diverted by Providence to Providence

Where the field will shortly be completed.

Finally, there is a number—not listed—

Where the devout can dial God direct,

And tell him their troubles: ten cents for three minutes.

But the line is always busy,

Or the phone just keeps ringing and ringing,

And nobody ever answers, not even Nobody;

And then, when, disgruntled, I hang up,

I never seemed to get my dime back,

All of which makes me wonder,

IS SOMEBODY TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING?

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Celes Tisdale: Yeah. When I first saw that, I laughed for a long time. (LAUGHS) Yes indeed. Yeah, Brooks is a good one.

Helena de Groot: It’s incredible. So, you know, Alexander Brooks, he became an English major? And he went on to be a teacher?

Celes Tisdale: Yeah. I don’t know if he became a teacher, but he became an English major. He wanted to become a teacher. That’s the last I heard from him.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Celes Tisdale: Maybe he’s a professor somewhere, I don’t know. Yeah, I hope he is. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: I’ll go ahead and Google him.

Celes Tisdale: Maybe I should. That’s, I never, I forget to do that.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Celes Tisdale: I’m not too adept at these, you know, the computers and stuff. My wife does all that stuff. I got this new phone just two days ago and (LAUGHS) I’m still learning how to, how to do this thing.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Celes Tisdale: But, I’m a fairly intelligent, I’m a fairly intelligent guy, I think I can do it.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: I spent a few hours on Google trying to find Alexander Brooks, but I couldn’t find one who fit the bill. If you want to read his poem and others incarcerated in Attica during and right after the 1971 uprising, you’ll find a selection, as well as Dr. Tisdale’s journals, in a new book titled, When the Smoke Cleared. This books is out almost 50 years after these poems were first published, in two collections titled, Betcha Ain’t: Poems from Attica and We Be Poetin’, both edited by Dr. Celes Tisdale. Today, Tisdale is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

To find out more, I highly recommend the foreword in When the Smoke Cleared, which was written by the poet Mark Nowak, as well as a feature about the book by Lizzy LeRud on the Poetry Foundation website. And if you want to know even more, there’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning book out about the Attica uprising. It’s titled, Blood in the Water, by historian and professor Heather Ann Thompson. And the book was initially banned from the prison, but after a First Amendment lawsuit by the author, in August, that ban was lifted.

The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

(MUSIC PLAYS AND FADES OUT)