At age 21, Jimmy Santiago Baca entered prison illiterate. Five years later, he came out a poet. He has transcended the odds - and survived to tell about it - through writing that is praised internationally for its style, cultural richness and honesty.
Baca came to Charlottesville this past Friday as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book. He has published many works, including the poetry collections Healing Earthquakes, Black Mesa Poetry and a memoir, A Place To Stand.
A few hours before he is scheduled to give a poetry reading in Wilson Hall, Baca is wearing a black sweatshirt and a blue and green scarf as he sits for an interview at the International Residential College. He's already had a hectic day: he arrived in Charlottesville at 4 a.m., hosted a poetry workshop at 9 a.m. and visited the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail at 3 p.m.
When asked about his youth, he pleads not to talk about what he calls his "childhood trauma." However, those years he grew up in New Mexico, tossed between family members and orphanages, are well known.
"Being a homeless kid was not a bad thing," Baca said.
His early involvement with drugs also has been publicized, and it's for selling drugs that he was sentenced to prison. But street life was his education, he said, and the gangsters were his teachers.
"I was a street kid," Baca began. "I really loved being a street kid because I was able to have a thousand moms and a thousand fathers."
Through meeting so many people, Baca said he was able to observe the extremes of human emotion and action, extremes that he evokes in his poetry.
"I got to see drug addicts do the most horrendous things out of deep pain, and I got to see people perform extraordinary miracles out of deep compassion," Baca said. "I was sort of a witness kid."
Baca quickly sweeps through the entirety of his accomplishments: earning a college degree, teaching at Yale, then Berkley, writing four books of poetry, one memoir and producing several films.
He doesn't mention that critics have praised him as the "heir to Pablo Neruda," or that he has garnered prestigious honors, such as the 1989 American Book Award and the Pushcart Prize in 1988.
"And I'm here," Baca concluded, a modest appraisal of his literary status.
It is the fact that Baca was here, at the University, that also is astounding. And it is due to the tireless work of third-year College student Vivek Jain, and second-year College student Edmund Etheridge, who undertook the massive goal of bringing such a renowned writer to Charlottesville.
It started last summer when Jain was listening to a series of MP3s of poets reading their own work. He came across a poem entitled I am Offering You This Poem, by a man named Jimmy Santiago Baca.
"I had never heard of him," Jain admitted. "But I was blown away by the way he read the poem ... there was such a passion for the spoken word and the written word." Before long Jain had resolved to bring Baca to the University. Baca finally returned Jain's calls and agreed to come to the University, moreover, for a cut rate. "I gave you a cut rate because I loved your voice," Baca said to Jain.
Only hours after getting in to town, Baca convened with 11 chosen students for a four-hour poetry workshop Friday. The students read their selected poems, re-read them and Baca spent about 20 minutes critiquing each one.
"It was intense to have a master of the lyric and the narrative style of form of poems and to have him interacting with students," Jain said.
Later that day, Baca visited the prison. Because of the five years he spent incarcerated himself, whenever he does a reading, Baca makes a pointed effort to visit the nearby jail to interact and talk with the inmates.
Ashley Hatcher, an adult education instructor at the Albemarle-Charlottesville RegionalJail, heard of the planned reading at the University and got in touch with Jain to arrange Baca's visit. For the last few weeks Hatcher familiarized the prisoners with Baca's poetry, life and personal philosophy. She had them write down reactions and comparisons between Baca's experiences and their own.
"So they did a lot of work and had a lot of time to reflect about this, which they usually don't do," Hatcher said. The materials budget for the prison is extremely restricted, and inmates rarely have pencils or paper. The few copies of Baca's work had to be passed around the prison.
"When they were reading and they saw their own experience in poetry for the first time they were so excited," Hatcher said of the prisoners. "A lot of them who don't read much at all read that overnight ... they just stayed up all night to read it."
Baca himself was very affected by visiting the prison.
"When I looked in their eyes, I felt rage that their crimes come nowhere near the crimes of citizens and their indifference," Baca said. "And what I saw in their eyes today were people who were scapegoated with every conceivable crime."
Baca feels very passionately about the insanity of the prison "industry," whose survival, he said, rests completely on the number of human beings in jail.
Baca began his poetry reading later that night with one of the first poems he wrote while he was in jail. The reading in Wilson drew in over 500 people, Jain estimated. Many latecomers were relegated to an overflow room were they watched Baca's reading on a television.
Baca read with an authority, warmth and vigor that enthralled the audience. Despite telling the captive listeners they didn't have to clap after every poem, he still received resounding applause after each reading of his prose and poetry. Baca touched on the topics of family and the hard working people of the world. He also mixed in humor, interspersing jokes on common misconceptions of Mexican-Americans, with a serious message about the conditions inside today's prisons.
Baca's impetus for writing poetry is simple.
"I write because it makes me really happy," Baca said.
For Baca it is not about fame.
"In other countries there's no payoff for being famous because they stay poor or they die. And in America people normally write to be famous or to get tenure positions or to be rich. But go to Latin America," Baca said. "Go to South America, go to India, go to the Caribbean and pick up poets that live their poetry and die laughing."
Baca said his inspiration lies in people and the way in which they handle their lives as well as the way in which people remain loyal to their souls and hearts.
"I write because of that beautiful common sense attitude of people who have kept their honor by being true to the heart and loyal to their soul," Baca explained.
He said he believes that losing your innocence, or what he calls selling one's heart, is unfortunately considered natural and inevitable in this society.
"Poetry continually fights against that," Baca said. "That you don't need pills or sedatives or anything to endure the pain ... the people who write poetry say I'd rather feel the pain."
Baca also said he considers poetry to be an equalizing force - that poems have the ability to transcend skin color, sex, ethnicity or background. That in the combination of words, stanzas and feelings, "something works that is so close to how the universe works."
Ultimately, Baca said he finds the most beautiful things in life through pain.
"That's what poetry does, it invites pain," Baca said bluntly during the interview. "Then it scatters it around, and out of that we see the yellow sunflowers spring up in the fields in spring"
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