[News] Marilyn Buck: Bard, Bound

[News at freedomarchives.org]

 From eastbayexpress.com
Originally published by East Bay Express Oct 06, 2004
©2004 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.

Bard, Bound
Poet and political prisoner Marilyn Buck dreams beyond the walls of her cell.
BY STEFANIE KALEM

Poetry and incarceration make strange cellfellows, but the new CD Wild 
Poppies: A Poetry Jam Across Prison Walls shows that they are sometimes 
very natural partners. The 46-track tribute disc features a wide range of 
poets -- including Amiri Baraka, devorah major, Genny Lim, Aya De León, 
David Meltzer, and Piri Thomas -- reading work written by and for political 
prisoner Marilyn Buck. The New College of SF grad student and 2001 PEN 
Prison Writing Program poetry prizewinner is serving an eighty-year 
sentence in Dublin, California, as a result of her involvement with the 
Black Liberation Movement. She reads her own "Dream Fragments," recorded, 
as all of her tracks were, over a crackly prison phone line, and it speaks 
perhaps most eloquently of what it's like to be a poet in prison, a 
navigator of dreams in a place where reality is a nightmare: The national 
security state keeps files on the imagination/Dreams go underground, seek 
subterranean pass/Water in these iron-streaked cells.

"Every time I talk to her on the phone," says Buck's friend and former 
comrade-behind-bars Donna Willmott, "a voice comes on every few minutes to 
say, 'This call is from a federal prison,' as if you're going to forget." 
This was only one of many technical difficulties involved in putting this 
anthology together, from recording in a tin-roofed room during a rainstorm 
to equipment problems at KPFA. But not a single poet, from NY to Puerto 
Rico, turned them down for the CD, Willmott says. "I know from being inside 
that poetry can really be a lifeline when you are subject to that kind of 
isolation from the States. But to have your words received with such 
appreciation and love by such a wide range of poets and artists is really 
very strengthening."

There's a CD release party this Sunday evening at La Peña from 5 to 7:30 
p.m., featuring many of the poets from the CD. Admission is on a sliding 
scale from $5 to $15 (no one turned away for lack of funds). Call La Peña 
at 510-849-2568 or visit 
<http://FreedomArchives.org/wildpoppies>FreedomArchives.org/wildpoppies for 
further details.

The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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