On the Inside: Prisons and Paratexts in One Big Self

Continuing in the documentary-poetic tradition established by poets like Muriel Rukeyser and Daphne Marlatt, C.D. Wright collaborated with a photographer and conducted field interviews to gather an archive of material for her poems. Wright and her friend, photographer Deborah Luster, entered three prisons in Louisiana — East Carroll Parish Prison Farm (Transylvania), Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (St. Gabriel), and former plantation and maximum-security prison Louisiana State Penitentiary (Angola) — to hear firsthand from incarcerated men and women. The result was One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), a striking collection of tintype photographs by Luster and experimental poems by Wright that sought to depict the prisoners "as they elect to be seen, in their larger selves."1

Wright's poems, which were also published by Copper Canyon Press as the stand-alone collection One Big Self: An Investigation in 2007, move among the voice of the poet, the words of incarcerated men and women she interviews in Louisiana prisons, government statements, data, found text, and literary sources. Wright's collage-like assemblages layer interviews with prisoners over and around one another until "I" becomes a blurred, composite figure. Jennie Berner observes that the photographs and poems in One Big Self "clearly suggest that their subjects are more than anonymous prisoners; but the viewer's search for particulars leads only to a host of abstractions — of performed 'types.'"2 And yet, there is one part of the text where the "I" is very clearly identified with the poet: the book's prosimetric preface, titled "Stripe for Stripe." This preface equips readers to encounter the fragments that follow by explaining the context of the project and situating Wright in relation to her subjects.

The word paratext was coined by Gérard Genette to describe the elements of a book that are not considered part of the "main text," such as titles, authors' names, prefaces, citations, and blurbs, but are the "means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers."3 Framing a collection of poetry with paratextual materials is not new: T.S. Eliot famously added endnotes to "The Waste Land" (1922), and poets have participated in and parodied the practice ever since. Another early adopter of poetry cum footnotes, who is a more direct predecessor for Wright's fieldwork, is Muriel Rukeyser, who included notes with her documentary poem "The Book of the Dead" in her 1938 collection U.S. 1. However, explanatory prefaces, endnotes, and other paratextual materials have become increasingly common in twenty-first century poetry, especially among documentary poets who often incorporate research in their poems. In "Poetry is Theft," Rachel Galvin observes that "Endnotes are common currency in back margins of poetry books published today in North America. They archive and index their sources in a quasi-scholarly fashion."4 She also points out that this paratextual practice of poets establishing their authority has been parodied by poets like Mónica de la Torre and Terrence Gower, both of whom include a list of "faux sources" at the end of their book.  Paratexts and citational apparatuses are considered to be part of academic writing, and their popularity among documentary poets suggests that contemporary poetry is becoming, in Michael Leong's words, increasingly "monographic" and "analogous to the work of the wider humanities."5 C.D. Wright's investment in doing extensive field research and interviews for many of her books aligns with Leong's theory that poets, many of whom make a living working in universities, are adapting methods from their prose-writing colleagues. However, the playfulness with which many poets approach the features of academic writing also suggests that poets are doing more than just grasping for an answer to the question "What are you working on?" to use at their next department mixer.

I am interested in the distinctly poetic ways that poets are reinventing paratextual practices in the twenty-first century, and C.D. Wright's work is particularly generative for tracking this development. In addition to the self-ironizing humor that characterizes the paratexts of many researched poems, literary "paratextual" forms like the invocation of the muse, the proem, and the epilogue are also influencing the way poets conceive of their paratextual materials. For example, Claudia Rankine includes extensive endnotes in her collection Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004) in a different voice than the poem's speaker. For example, in one section, the poem-speaker discusses the film, The Wild Bunch, with an accompanying image of three cowboys racing towards the camera in a swirl of dust, pistols raised. However, the endnote-speaker informs us that "The image on this page does not depict a scene from the movie The Wild Bunch."6 Rankine's self-ironizing endnotes hinge on surprise, as the main text sets up expectations that the endnotes subvert.

In fact, the reader may well have been surprised by the very presence of the endnotes, since they are not referenced in the main sequence of poems. This dissonance between Rankine's poem and her endnotes quickly reinscribes readerly assumptions that the paratext is somehow more factual than the body of the text, especially in creative texts, where the paratext typically includes "information" such as an author bio, citations, or publication details. Rankine's note about The Wild Bunch is almost hilariously un-citational: it tells us what the image is not from, rather than where it is from. (At the very end of the book, Rankine includes a list of image copyrights, and the cowboy image is labelled "© Corvis," a now-defunct stock photo company.) The discrepancy between the paratext and the poem also intensifies our sense of the lyric present: the poem-speaker describes her experiences, without fact-checking or researching, while the endnote-speaker has the benefit of hindsight and an aura of authority underwritten by the citational mode. Rankine's subject, which examines how television and advertising have exacerbated a host of societal issues, from loneliness to anti-Black racism, informs her use of paratextual materials: the endnotes counterpoise both the immediacy of the constant stream of media and the immediacy of the lyric mode.

Similarly, Wright's paratextual materials are shaped by both her subject and poetic form. One Big Self dramatizes the boundary between inside and outside both thematically, by considering the societal function of prisons, and formally, by framing the body of her poems with explanatory paratextual materials that are simultaneously inside and outside the text. The paratext explains the poet's motives and methods and provides the reader with a point of entry into Wright's paratactic lyric series. One Big Self also demonstrates how paratextual space becomes a site of performance where documentary poets rehearse ethical concerns about appropriating others' voices and seek to justify their (sometimes problematic) decisions. For Wright, the paratext performs her position as an outsider while also suggesting that she is complicit in the structural violence that decides who belongs "on the inside." Exploring the role of paratexts in a poem about prison elucidates how the paratext and the prison occupy analogically similar spaces, both often ignored but ultimately indispensable to any "reading" of the adjacent space or text.

Inside/outside is a frequent concern in Wright's paratextual materials: in "hills," the autobiographical preface to Further Adventures with You (1986), Wright describes how living in California has enabled her to "recognize" her own Ozarkian dialect "from the outside"; similarly, the biographical note at the end of One Big Self simply reads, "C.D. Wright lives outside of Providence."7 Perhaps most tellingly, she characterizes her work as a kind of paratext to a larger, ongoing conversation. In a note preceding the bibliography in One With Others, she says "The Civil Rights Movement has been not only dutifully but beautifully documented, and I am indebted to the brace of books that helped inform my own footnote in the struggle."8 In One Big Self, she describes her project as hoping "to add one true lonely word to the host of texts that bear upon incarceration."9 When her own subject-position as a free, white woman is in stark contrast with the identities and experiences of the people she is writing about, Wright places herself in the paratext, acknowledging her location as an outsider and minimizing the impact of her contribution.

"Paratext" is a portmanteau formed by combining the prefix "para-" (from the Greek παρα, meaning "beside, alongside of, by, past, beyond," but also "issuing from; against, contrary to") with "text" (from the Latin textus, a "thing woven," or the past participle texere "to weave, to join, fit together, braid, interweave, construct, fabricate, build").10 Although it is located "alongside" the text, the paratext is both inside the book and outside the main text, creating ambiguity about whether paratexts "belong to the text or not." And yet, Genette observes, they "present" the text by "making it present" and assuring "its presence in the world [as] a book."11 One Big Self, which presents an array of fragmented voices without a unifying plot, relies on its paratextual frame to introduce readers to the poet's project.

In its role as a frame for the primary text, the paratext also functions as a parergon (literally meaning "beside the work"). Jacques Derrida, drawing on Immanuel Kant's examples of the parergon as clothing on a statue, columns on a building, or the frame of a painting, argues that the parergon is "called up and gathered together as a supplement from the lack — a certain 'internal' indetermination — in the very thing that it comes to frame;" without the "quasi-detached" presence of the parergon, "the lack on the inside of the work would appear."12 As a result, rather than simply being added on, the parergon is constitutive of the ergon. Forming a threshold between the ergon and its context, the parergon stands out against the ground of the work's context, as well as the ground of the work itself. And yet, when it stands out from one ground, it merges with the other.13 For example, when you look at a painting hanging on a wall, the frame is seen as part of the painting, but if you step closer and examine the painting's canvas, the frame will mark where the painting ends. In documentary poems, the paratext merges with the "outside" of the book by operating on a different diegetic level than the text: the addressee of the paratext is always the actual reader. And yet, it also merges with the main text through its physical location inside (or on) the covers of the book. Connecting the paratext to the parergon shows how the paratext operates as a site of transaction between readers and the text as a text. This function is crucial for documentary poems like One Big Self that draw heavily from archival or found texts: the paratext becomes the parergon that marks the boundary between the poem's sources and the poem itself, between the prisoners' voices and the poet's.

"It is a Summons": Proem and Paratext in One Big Self

One Big Self's paratext includes an epigraph, acknowledgments, a preface, and a recommended reading list presented as an un-lineated paragraph titled "Why not check it out and lock it down:", as well as other standard paratextual features such as the dedication, about the author, copyright pages, and blurbs. The prosimetric introduction, "Stripe for Stripe," which Martin Earl calls "perhaps the most intimate part of the book," explains the background of the project, introduces major themes, and reveals Wright's acute awareness of her position as a voyeur and privileged outsider.14 The introduction attempts to establish Wright's ethos, while also introducing the reader to names, images, and forms that will appear throughout the rest of the poems. She juxtaposes fragments of conversations with inmates in a similar style to the collaged lyrics that follow, but in prose the reader is given more detail and grammatical clarity about who is speaking and why. These contexts enable Wright to excerpt and fragment interviews later on without labelling speakers, while remaining confident that her reader will be able to distinguish the poet from the prisoners (though, crucially, it remains difficult to distinguish individual prisoners from one another).

In addition to these more research-oriented goals in the preface, the prosimetric introduction fulfills the function of a poetic proem. A genre developed within the epic tradition, the proem includes a "brief statement of the poem's subject," indicating both "the poem's major themes" and the tenor of its "revisionary gesture toward previous epics."15 Wright's prosimetric proem also states her revisionary goals and establishes formal features that will continue throughout the poem through its use of anaphora and shifting deictics.

The opening paragraph repeats the phrase "trying to remember" at the beginning of every sentence, before carrying the pattern over into the first lines of the following paragraphs, which are arranged in anaphoric pairs: "Try to remember"/ "Trying to remember;" "Vivid to me is / Vivid to me is;" "I remember" / "Remember;" and "I talked to a man who" / "I talked to a woman who."16 Each of these repeated phrases builds an iterative rhythm, underscoring the repetitive processes of Wright's investigation. It also highlights the similar experience shared by those who have been incarcerated, dropped out of time, and dehumanized: "Behind every anonymous number, a very specific face."17 Each anaphora may begin with a repetition, but the second half of the sentence always contains the experience of a unique individual.

Yet, One Big Self, as its title suggests, repeatedly moves away from individual experience towards collectivity: the first paragraph of the introduction begins, "Driving through this part of Louisiana you can pass four prisons in less than an hour. 'The spirit of every age,' writes Eric Schlosser, 'is manifest in its public works.' So this is who we are, the jailers, the jailed."18 The narrative "you" quickly becomes imbricated in the zeitgeist of incarceration, producing the "we" of the final line. Michael Leong argues that this deictic slippage is a result of the poem's genre hybridity, with a preface that mirrors the conventions of travel writing with "a body moving through space," and the main text, with poems that "unmoor pronouns from their antecedents and deictics from their contexts, evidences a shift from an 'I' to /  'we,' from the individuated author to a collaborative work of testimony."19 The reader cannot be a tourist visiting prison; they must look at it as if it were built by their own hands. The shift from "you" to a complicit "we" also prepares the reader for the "unmoored" deictics and pronouns in the collaged body poems.

The opening "we" refers to the reader and the poet, not the prisoners. Likewise, the narrative shape of One Big Self is organized, not around the lives of the prisoners in Louisiana, but around Wright's experience entering — and more importantly, exiting — the prison system: "We left before visiting hours ended. It wasn't our place to be there. It wasn't really in us to be there."20 Wright establishes right away that she is a voyeur, an outsider who can observe but not fully internalize the experience of being incarcerated. Yet, in an attempt to preserve the gap between her and her subject, she also suggests that she does not belong in prison, or maybe even that she does not "have it in her" to commit a crime. Or, perhaps she is simply exiting to reassert her own sense of innocence: "I already feel guilty. / I haven't done anything."21

Wright's account of visiting the prisons resembles the structure of an underworld journey, in which the poet enters another reality and converses with the dead (in Wright's case, the socially dead), but ultimately returns to their life on the surface. The proem that concludes the preface depicts Wright's journey into the prisons, relying on the double-meaning of the first line to play with the arbitrary but life-changing difference between the prison's inmates and its visitors:

With each line as a complete sentence, the poem courts prose; yet its placement after three asterisks on a page by itself and the hanging indents preserving lineation suggest that we read it differently than the preceding paragraphs. The poem sets up the narrative of the poet's journey, as well as the autobiographical contract promising the reader that she will be "wakeful," highlighting the perilous possibility for her project to become appropriative rather than reparative. The proem is punctuated with the poet's name: "C.D. Wright." Even if Wright was just fulfilling the traditional practice of signing a preface, it gives the impression of a signature asserting the signer's responsibility for what will follow.

In addition to setting up a contract with the reader, the proem also introduces a "temporal program" that frames the "temporally polymorphous fragments" in the main text.23 Wright's proem begins the series in the present-tense scene of writing, or perhaps more accurately the scene of her investigation. Because the proem is in the present, it allows the poet to offer commentary on the events within the poems (which presumably happened temporally before the proem). According to Roland Greene, beginning a lyric sequence with a proem that corresponds to the scene of writing establishes a temporal touchstone that determines the relative temporalities — which, importantly, are not necessarily laid out chronologically — of the poems that follow. For example, Wright speaks in the future tense about something that has already occurred: "Over the next year and a half Deborah Luster will photograph upwards of 1,500 inmates. / I will make three trips."24 By giving exact numbers, Wright alerts the reader to the fact that the trips have already happened when she is writing this, while simultaneously creating the illusion that her ethos-ensuring pact with the reader to be "wakeful" preceded her investigation. The shift in tenses in the proem highlights the proem's unique position as the scene of writing, located spatially before, but temporally after the text.

Most importantly for entropically-inclined lyric series, the proem, as a parergon, provides something that the "constituent lyrics lack. It sets going a historical momentum that will sweep along the following poems."25 In other words, the proem is both a threshold and a bridge, suturing the white spaces between poems, and creating an affective and thematic arc even when the content of the series does not provide progress or closure. As Martin Earl observes, Wright establishes repeated forms that "allow for accretion within the collage" and create a "feeling that there is a kind of progress or inevitability."26 The introduction establishes these forms before riffing on them in the poems that follow. In a circular motion that characterizes many documentary project books, Wright returns to the present-tense image of her investigation in the final lines of the final poem:

Here Wright shifts from the present tense — "I am all stirred up" — which has dominated the poems to the past tense — "And so, I took out her tintypes" — signaling the transition out of the prisons and back to the scene of writing. The transition is more legible because in most of the poems, the deictic "I" is spoken by prisoners rather than the poet. The vernacular edge of the phrase "I am all stirred up" suggests that Wright has strategically juxtaposed a prisoner's words beside the final image of the poet embarking on the work of "drawing" the prisoners through her poems. "It gets old" is a slightly altered repetition of a prisoner's words to a judge that began this final poem, "Your Honor": "these are but a few impressions of pain / Now you talk I'm losing my voice / It does get old."28 Wright extends this phrase of individual weariness from testifying to a more general feeling of exhaustion produced by the prison system's bureaucratic burden that continually demands that its inhabitants "explain, over and over again, [their] reason for being."29 Wright also captures the emotional labor of testimony performed by the poet in the process of her investigation, marking a reversal of her previous motions towards collectivity by moving from "we" back to "I." Yet by this point, it is clear that "I am all stirred up" also describes the reader's reaction to One Big Self. "Stirred up" recalls the material process involved in tintype photography, which requires mixing a chemical emulsion in order to fix the image.30 Wright ends her series by fixing upon the image of the poet, alone and shaken, surrounded by photographs rather than people, and mirroring the situation of the reader who is physically removed from the prisons, but now faced with a decision: what to do with the knowledge they have gained by reading One Big Self, how to act as part of one body that encompasses those incarcerated and those who are complicit in and benefit from that incarceration.

Prison as Paratext

The relationships between parts and wholes, inside and outside are also crucial to the discourse around the prison-industrial complex. "Complex" denotes "a whole comprehending in its compass a number of . . . interconnected parts."31 Like the paratext, which is often overlooked in favor of the main text, the interconnected relationship between the prison industrial complex and modern capitalist society is also often ignored or rendered invisible. Genette points out that there is an "unequal sense of obligation associated with the paratext . . . no one is bound to read a preface."32 And yet, the paratext alters our reading of the text: "every context creates a paratext. . . . I do not say that one must know it; I only say that those who know it do not read in the same way as those who do not."33 Wright insists we efface the boundary obscuring poetry and prisons from view: "The popular perception is that art is apart. I insist it is a part of. Something not in dispute is that people in prison are apart from. . . . the ultimate goal should be to reunite the separated with the larger human enterprise."34 The play on "apart" / "a part of" demonstrates the subtle but substantial difference between reading for fragments and reading for continuity; both phrases could just as easily apply to the text/paratext.

As a title, One Big Self indicates a similarly expansive claim. Incarcerated people have identities and beings that extend beyond their definition by the state as criminals, because "the crimes are not the sum of the criminal any more than anyone is entirely separable from their acts."35 In her essay "Hiding in Plain Sight," Marie Gottschalk demonstrates how the prison industrial complex has created "a separate political and legal universe for whole categories of people."36 The act of separation is not primarily spatial, but discursive: elaborate legal language labels, categorizes, and organizes prisoners. This process of categorizing in order to separate, Nicholas Mirzoeff has shown, is crucial to establishing complexes of power. The final phase, Mirzoeff argues, is to "make this separated classification seem right and hence aesthetic."37 One Big Self refuses the schematic neatness of labelling someone innocent or guilty and focuses instead on the life-altering impacts of outsized punishments. By interviewing and quoting the prisoners, Wright offers a different linguistic framework for interpreting the morally fraught lives of prisoners swept up in the carceral machine.

De-aestheticizing mechanisms of power, however, cannot simply be substituted with romanticizing its subjects. Wright states her desire "not to aestheticize immeasurable levels of pain."38 In order to resist both of these modes of aestheticization (whiteness as innocent, Blackness as suspect; artistically profiting off someone else's pain), One Big Self has to demonstrate the expansiveness of the prisoners' identities, as well as how the readers' lives are enmeshed in this system of oppression. As the tour-guide tone of the preface underscores, the book's audience is those who are outside. Wright's paratext constitutes a zone of transaction between the poem and the world, and she, like many documentary poets, treats the paratext as "a safeguard against misapprehension" where she can provide readers with vital information for navigating the poem, as well as attempt to justify her decision to "risk representation."39 The portraits do not free the prisoners from the gaze of the panopticon, Claire Grandy argues: "the purpose is not to avoid being seen, but to be seen in a manner neither transparent nor legible."40 Wright clarifies that her interview-based poems are not continuing the tradition of the objet trouvé: rather than taking the words of prisoners out of their context in order to present them as "art." The attenuated goal of One Big Self seems to be to subvert the readers' expectations about what prisoners, and life in prison, is like, rather than to reveal with any specificity the experience of individual prisoners. The aim, in Wright's words, is to capture "the real feel of hard time."41

One Big Self shows how prisons themselves are "a part of" rather than "apart from." Through the additional data that Wright includes alongside the prisoner interviews, she demonstrates how the prisoner's experiences are inextricably entwined with the profit-hunger that has turned prison into big business. Wright includes data that reveals how the privatization and public trade of prison stock has incentivized incarcerating more and more people. In 1999, (at the time Wright was writing), a publicly traded prison realty company managed to increase profits by 19% to $787 million by increasing "inmate mandays" (the per diem per prisoner that a private prison company charges the government).42 This model, which creates profits for the prison companies, the government, and the towns where the prisons are built means that "the proliferation of prisons and prisoners is more clearly linked to larger economic and political structures and ideologies than to individual criminal conduct and efforts to curb 'crime.'"43

And this is where we see how the prison is like the paratext: "The world of the prison system springs up adjacent to the free world. As the towns decline, the prisons grow. . . . The interrelation of poverty, illiteracy, substance and physical abuse, mental illness, race, and gender to the prison population is blaring to the naked eye and born out in the statistics."44 Wright emphasizes the direct correlation, in statistical terms, between the prisons and the economy, culture, and society that produces (and parasitically feeds off of) them. Rural, mostly white towns with declining economies will "compete for prisons the way they once had for industries" and it is "hard to ignore that those getting rich are usually white and those in prison are usually not."45 Prisons have been ignored, invisible, and brushed aside like an optional preface, but you cannot understand the function of the capitalist economy or race in America if you do not take the prisons into account. Wright conceives of One Big Self: An Investigation as shining a floodlight on the connections that already exist between the language and experiences of those inside with those out.

For documentary poets like Wright, the paratext is more than just context; it's a space to declare political allegiances, insist on factuality, or prepare the reader for what follows. In "Stripe for Stripe," Wright explains her methods and data collection process with the authority of an academic but stages the scene of writing in the urgent lyric present. Taking advantage of the paratext's function to directly address the reader, Wright performs anxieties about her own complicity in the prison industrial complex and the risk of aestheticizing the prisoners' pain. Although the poems tend to elide the experiences of individual prisoners into indistinguishable collaged conglomerations, One Big Self also builds a new context where the prisoners' words can breathe. Ultimately, the text/paratext relation both inverts and reinscribes the power relations of the prison industrial complex: Wright maintains creative control over her subjects, and the paratext foregrounds her own actions, worries, and emotions. But she also accomplishes a powerful reversal. The voices of the prisoners are centered in the main text, with Wright's own emotional journey consigned to the paratext. The prisons and their inhabitants are contained within Wright's paratextual frame, but she uses her frame to argue for their centrality, rather than marginality, in relation to larger social structures.

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Olivia Milroy Evans (Instagram: @milroc7) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Samford University in Birmingham, AL. She has an MA from the University of Virginia and a PhD from Cornell University. She teaches and writes about poetry and television, and her book manuscript, Documentary Poetic Form, explores the way research-based poetry adapts methods from academic writing and experiments with traditional poetic forms like ekphrasis, blason, sonnet crowns, and elegy. You can find her writing in Callaloo, Contemporary Literature, Jacket2, Annulet, and Word & Image, and forthcoming at The Velvet Light Trap.

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