Dwayne Betts (Photo Credit: macfound.org).
As the story goes, Dwayne Betts didn’t discover poetry in the usual way.
After getting arrested at 16 years old for carjacking, he was sentenced to nine years in prison, charged as an adult despite his age.
While in solitary confinement, someone slid a copy of “The Black Poets” under his cell door. Yes, the anthology edited by the great Dudley Randall opened his world, but what it really did was catalyze a young man who was already writing. More than that, it may have sharpened his resolve and provided Betts with foresight not many in his situation would have, facing hard years behind bars.
“When I got sentenced to nine years in prison, I was in a holding cell,” Betts told The Chicago Defender in a recent interview, “And I immediately started thinking about what I was going to be when I went home and I said, ‘I’m going to be a writer.’”
Poetry, Freedom and ‘Then Some’
Betts became that and then some—emphasis on “then some.” Add lawyer, educator, prison reform advocate, executive director of a nonprofit, MacArthur Fellow, literary activist, poet, playwright and performer to his bio.
This Friday and Saturday, Chicago audiences will get to experience those last two descriptors keenly thanks to his stirring one-man show about his life, “Felon: An American Washi Tale.” The show opens Friday, Oct. 25, and Saturday, Oct. 26, at Northwestern University’s Abbott Hall on the downtown Chicago campus.
‘Felon: An American Washi Tale’ Comes to Life
The play is based on his poetry book, “Felon: Poems,” which won an NAACP Image Award and was hailed by the New York Times as “a powerful work of lyric art” and “a tour de force indictment of the carceral industrial state.”
It’s a production Betts spent four years writing with the assistance of director Elise Thoron.
“I decided to do the solo show to be like, ‘What does it mean if I didn’t have a medium in between me and my audience? What does it mean if I could bring it to somebody wherever they are?” he said. “So the challenge of it was like, how do you craft it? What is it? What is it to tell the story of a life?”
Literary Lifelines
Central to this portrait of a poet as a young man is Dudley’s “The Black Poets,” which he would study vigorously, not just reading those poems but writing them out in longhand.
Several of those works from that book became his North Star, like Lucille Clifton’s “cutting greens.”
“…the pot is black.
the cutting board is black…the greens roll black under the knife…
and i taste in my natural appetite
the bond of live things everywhere.”
Betts said the poem struck him, and the book introduced him to others.
“It’s introducing me to Robert Hayden. It’s introducing me to Amiri Baraka. It’s introducing me to Nikki Giovanni. It’s introducing me to Sonia Sanchez. And so I’m reading all of these poets, and Etheridge Knight hit me hard.”
Knight, he said, was his go-to.
A Journey Through Words, Movement and Emotion
Betts shares his poetry and stories in “Felon,” but he’s also sharing himself in the barest, most unadulterated way artists can—via the one-person show, no buffers or filters, just him.
“The hard part about this show is it makes me talk about myself even when I’m saying the same thing in ways that are so f-cking surprising, you know, because it happens on the stage,” he said.
“And part of the telling is not just the words, but the emoting. And it’s the body movement and, man, it’s the fucking journey, man.”
Advice for Writers
Since building this life as a poet, Betts has found himself as someone’s go-to poet as well. When asked what advice he would have for anyone striving to be a writer or artist, he said, “Read more than you write, but really read and get out into the world and think about what it means to be a poet in public.”
“So, don’t just do it in your home. No matter, short stories, whatever it is, find open mics, find ways to be a poet in your community. And then I would also say, remember that teaching is a great way of being. To teach is a great way of learning too.”
Betts added, “Just teach beneath whatever level you think you are. There are some people that I would love to take a workshop with now, and so I think you remember that, and then you can always find your audience.”
“I think one of the great things that literature does for us is it creates a pathway to the thing that we need,” Betts said. “And so, whatever the thing is that we need to meditate on if it’s good and it’s right and it’s just, my life has taught me that you can find a reflection of it in a good book.”
And a good play.
For More Information
Who and What: “Felon: An American Washi Tale” by Reginald “Dwayne” Betts”
When: Friday, Oct. 25 at 7:30 p.m. and Saturday, Oct. 26 at 2 p.m.
Where: Abbott Hall, Northwestern’s Chicago campus, 710 N. Lake Shore Drive
What Else: For ticket information, visit this link.
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