Spare and Flagrant: The Poetry of Marilyn Buck
Published Women’s Review of Books, November 2012
Inside/Out: Selected Poems, by Marilyn Buck. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012, 128 pp., $13.95, paperback.
The publication of this collection is cause for celebration among hundreds of friends and admirers of Marilyn Buck, who died on August 3, 2010. She was a white woman from Texas who gave her life for the Black liberation struggle, an activist whom several African Americans, including the late Kwame Ture (formerly Stokely Carmichael) have compared to John Brown, the white anti-slavery fanatic who followed his understanding of Christianity to a warrior’s death.
On the website of St. Michael’s Episcopal Church in Austin, the Rev. Ken Clark, recounting key events in parish history, writes: “The most notable was the Rev. Louis Buck’s attempt to integrate St. Andrew’s Episcopal School...which did not sit well with all of the flock.”
In fact, Rev. Buck had a cross burned on his front lawn and lost the parish some members.
His daughter Marilyn, born in 1947, would carry the fight for justice and Christian love, two causes not necessarily always linked in this nation, to multiple federal prisons, where she spent 29 years of her life. As Mariann Wizard, her friend since 1966 has written: “Marilyn was accused of sensational acts of insurrection __ including jail break, bombings, and a robbery attempt in which two police officers were shot and died.”
While some may chafe at my description of Marilyn Buck as a Christian, I submit that she was not the first pastor’s kid to develop a distrust for church, having closely observed its hypocrisies, while at the same time yearning for a brotherhood with the poor as practiced in the Gospel.
Consider“Jasper, TX,” which she wrote in memory of James Byrd, Jr., the African American man dragged three miles behind a pick-up truck until his head snapped off. Jasper liesabout four hours due west of Temple, where Marilyn grew up, and her poem recreates a dreamy memory of a typical weekend:
1958
Saturday bare feet dusted red
on East Texas roads
shrieks slice heavy summer air
white children play
fearless in pine_shadowed lanes
till darkfall
we’re called in
behind screen doors
Sunday sermons spill
out windows
in sticky heat our washed feet
bound in oxfords
& patent leather swing
while ladies in flower_print dresses
bob hats perched on dishwater curls
in prayer to God . . .
some other God?
than the one down the road
in churches where Black families
pray for deliverance
from nights of crossburnings
or lynchings
amen
1998
Pine_drenched night
once barefoot white killer_boys
play Drag_a_Black_Man
tear sleepy red roads awake
with dusty devils of terror
behind their pick_up
James Byrd’s bound feet carve
a bloody ribbon
his screams cut off
by the lynching chain
dancing in the dirt
James Byrd could not
get behind a screen door
in time
This crime began on a Saturday evening, as Mr. Byrd, 49, was returning from his niece’s bridal shower, and the poet refrains from listing the hideous details. Instead, she indicts the white church which, forty years before, had concocted a god for worship that was inexplicably indifferent to the violence that threatened Black families. Mr. Byrd’s feet were chained to the pick-up, and this single detail dominates the poem, in the “bare feet” of the children playing, the “washed feet” of the white congregation, bound in “oxfords and patent leather,” in the “once barefoot white killer-boys” and in the “dancing” of the victim’s “bound feet.”
The driver of the pick-up is today serving a “life sentence” in Texas and eligible for parole in 2038. Which is to say that a hate crime against a Black man gets 40 years, while joining the Black liberation struggle – with never a charge of murder – gets you 80. This is the fine print of the criminal justice system, something Buck had surely figured out long before she spent her freshman year at U.C. Berkeley and became “radicalized.”
Marilyn Buck 1947-2010, Photo courtesy Marilyn Buck
Buck first went to prison at age 26 for having bought two boxes of ammunition using false ID, the extravagant 10-year sentence due to her affiliation (the newspapers said “gunrunner”) with the Black Liberation Army, that is, the militant wing of the Black power movement. The year was 1973 and the government’s war against the Party was in full swing; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had famously described the Black Panther Party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." Buck was one of handful of committed white sympathizers who believed that lip service and cash were not enough; that whites must suffer the same physical risks as Blacks in the movement.
Buck did her time at Alderson FPC, a federal prison for women in West Virginia, where she sympathized with the causes supported by other political prisoners she met there, including Puerto Rican independence fighter Lolita Lebron, New York BLA member Assata Shakur,, and Rita “Bo” Brown, of the George Jackson Brigade. For the rest of her life, she would feel solidarity with political prisoners from all over the world.
In 1977, four years into her sentence, Buck failed to return from a furlough and went underground. When she was finally captured, eight years later, she faced trial on four separate issues: her own escape; the 1979 escape of Assata Shakur, in which she was alleged to have been an accomplice; participation in a 1981 attempt, botched, to rob a Brinks armored truck of $1.6 million, in which a guard was killed; and the so-called Resistance Conspiracy Case, in which a number of government sites in New York and Washington were bombed. The group gave advance warning by phone to avoid human injury.
Re-jailed at age 37, Buck was sentenced to 80 years. These dates are important for an understanding of her poem, “Imperatives,” which speaks frankly about the poet’s fear, not of rape, but of the end of sexuality. The poet begins by describing herself at 17,
wrapped around a young man’s back
on a BMW that wound up mountains
to a naked lunch
on ice_planted crags
pounded by the Pacific
and, then at age 30, when she first went underground and was “entrancing” as “a subversive siren in a sea / of easily parted waves of dark_eyed lovers.”
The poem ends in direct address to an unmet lover who might yet rescue her:
awaken passion one more time
I am in danger!
the zodiac abandons me
to land_locked shadows
they smother me flat
I cannot breathe without
the vivid rainbow edge
find me
free me from pale dry days
of drab restraint
In prison, Buck discovered ceramics and writing, two avenues of escape from this drab restraint, though she quickly figured out that the writing best be poetry: “I could not write a diary or a journal; I was a political prisoner. Everything I had was subject to investigation, invasion and confiscation. I was a censored person. In defiance, I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly."
She took some workshops in prison where she discovered a serious gift. She took a number of prizes through the PEN American Center’s Prison Writing Program, including first place, in the 2000-01 competition. Later, she earned a master’s degree in the Poetics Program that Robert Duncan had founded at the New College of California. Her correspondence with David Meltzer, the San Francisco Beat poet who was herteacher, developed into a friendship, and Meltzer edited and wrote the introduction for this book.
That gift is heard in her poem “Woman’s Jazz Band Performs at Women’s Prison” where saxophone and trombone play old favorites like “Green Dolphin Street” and “Route 66,” the song titles woven into the text as witty double entendres, at which Buck was skilled, and the poem’s rhythm approximating the music itself, as in the final stanzas:
momma bass breaks from behind
grey_laced shadows
shrugs ‘cause drum’s detained
scats
wake up women
take down the drab
keyboard skitters yeah
walks her bass between
cracks kicking down doors
keys reign supreme
prisoners stir
from catacombs of muzak misery
That same ear for music enables her to capture voice, as in “Prison Chant,” where she captures the frantic litany of a mother trying to calm her adult children over the telephone. It’s a household gone into meltdown, an absent parent’s worst nightmare:
PRISON CHANT
Cassandra is on the phone
her screams bounce off walls
staccato chant
jesusfathergod
jesusfathergod
Maurice listen to me
Stop listen to me
listen
listen
you must be responsible
I’m not there
take care of your sister
help her
I don’t care
she’s young
you’re grown
20 is grown
I’m sorry you must
be responsible
I’m not there
Let me talk to her
LISA LISA
jesusfathergod
Stop
listen to me
listen to your brother
TIME OUT
what’s going on
Stop STOP STOP
jesusfathergod
I’m sorry
no the phone has cut me off
I need more time
please let me call again
I know you’re next
please
please jesusfathergod
I must call back
I’m going to call again
I know it’s your turn
you have to wait
Maurice I’m sorry
I’m not there
what can I do
I know your brother’s dead
yes I told
I had to
to come home
yes I’m still here
you’re there
you’re alive
Cassandra, the poet calls her, an inmate both insane and prophetic. When this modern day Cassandra emphatically demands a second turn on the telephone, braving the anger of the women in line behind her, the poet takes the situation to the edge of comedy. But, instead, the second phone call delivers tragedy; the voice has turned repentant, broken as the reason for the hysterical scene at home is revealed:
I know your brother’s dead / yes I told / I had to / to come home
Cassandra has betrayed her family in an attempt to get out of prison and has, in turn, been betrayed by the system:
yes I’m still here / you’re there / you’re alive
One can read in this poem not only the poet’s impeccable ear, but a deep compassion for her sisters in jail, including those whose circumstances were so different from her own. There are many testaments on the Internet to Buck’s ministry to inmates, including translation from the Spanish and tutoring.
The last federal prison in which Marilyn served, the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, is where the medically or mentally ill women end up in the federal system. Buck was sent there when she was diagnosed with an aggressive uterine cancer, and granted early release from there in July 2010 at the request of her attorneys, which permitted her to die, twenty days later, in Brooklyn, New York, surrounded by friends.
Later, in December of that same year, New York attorney Lynne Stewart was sent to Carswell for having "helped terrorists" by way of violating a gag order in her defense of her client, "the blind sheik." Stewart, whom I know from our shared concern – hers obviously more costly than my own – for the scapegoating of Muslims in America, is my only direct link with Buck, and the only person to whom I wrote asking for a quote. Lynne writes back:
“I never actually did time with Marilyn but from the time of her capture, until her release I was in touch with her and the wonderful lawyers who never gave up her fight. I refer, of course, to Susan Jordan and Soffiyah [Elijah]...
“I can only relate her tremendous influence on the women in this mostly hopeless place. She was an inspiration to everyone when as she got sicker and sicker she became more and more indomitable...and it is this image that the women of Carswell remember and revere. When I received photos and the brochure from her Memorial Service, women here were weeping anew at the loss and begging for a picture of her. Marilyn was truly loved.”
Reading Buck’s poem “Continuum,” I’m reminded of T. S. Eliot’s contention that “...the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates...” I’d have to agree that it is “less perfect” as art, but it is unique among the 88 poems in this collection, in that it might well stand as her credo:
CONTINUUM
stocks and bonds tied tight
public dunkings and drownings
massacres and land grabs
Indian scalps Vietnamese
ears on belts posed in
front of tiger cages
shackles and manacles
whips across African backs
chained in darkness below decks
boiled in oil tendons cut
for fleeing from the terror
genitals ripped lynchings
rape sanctioned under law
children sold further South
collective punishment
solitary confinement
food mixed with piss
pushed through metal door slots
four_pointed bodies on steel slabs
paraded naked, testicles twisted
only urine to drink are you
thirsty yet
electrified cattle prods
alligator clips on eyelids
on vaginal lips
restraint chairs strung up by arms
isolated
in the dark in the light
no sleep deprived of diurnal rhythm
humiliated, beaten bloodied
accidental death
forced to tell a story constructed
by the captors
the secrets behind the American dream
democracy behind steel_bolted
doors. Inquisition never sleeps
its eyes probe with laser
beams of national security
and manifest destiny
If “Continuum” represents her beliefs, “Wild Poppies,” also included in the selectionrepresents her spirit. It is the title poem of a CD made in 2004, where two dozen poets, including Sonia Sanchez and Devorah Major, whom Marilyn so admired, read her works aloud. One could love this writer on the strength of this poem alone:
WILD POPPIES
I remember red poppies, wild behind the school house
I didn’t want to be there, but I loved to watch the poppies
I used to sit in the window of my room, sketching charcoal trees
what happened to those magnolia trees, to that girl?
I went off to college, escaped my father’s thunderstorms
Berkeley. Rebellion. Exhilaration!
the Vietnam war, Black Power, Che took me to Chicago
midnight lights under Wacker Drive. Uptown. South Side. slapped
by self_determination for taking Freedom Wall photos without asking
on to California, driving at 3:00 in the morning in the mountains
I got it: what self_determination means
a daunting task for a young white woman, I was humbled
practice is concrete . . . harder than crystal_dream concepts
San Francisco, on the front steps at Fulton Street
smoking reefer, drinking “bitterdog” with Black Panthers and white
hippie radicals, talking about when the revolution comes
the revolution did not come. Fred Bennett was missing
we learned he’d been found: ashes, bones, a wedding ring
but later there was Assata’s freedom smile
then I was captured, locked into a cell of sewer water
spirit deflated. I survived, carried on, glad to be
like a weed, a wild red poppy
rooted in life
In his introduction to this volume, Meltzer writes that once when he was visiting Buck at FCI Dublin, she mentioned that she “wanted to be judged not as a political prisoner poet, but simply as a poet.”
I feel that there are writers – Karen Blixen, Flannery O’Connor, Zora Neale Hurston – whose lives were so unique that an appreciation of their work deepens with an acquaintance with the life, and that Buck’s work can best be appreciated in terms of her commitment to anti-imperialist activism and her internment in federal prisons for nearly three decades.
Buck somehow managed to find, in that harsh confinement so unfamiliar to most of us, not only meaning and friendship, but to impart to the world through her work, moments of insight, consolation and joy.