Reginald Dwayne Betts has wanted to be a lawyer for almost as long as he has wanted to be a poet. “Poetry and law have always been intertwined in my mind,” he said recently, “in part because poetry gives me the language to pretend that I can answer questions, even if I can’t.” We were in New Haven, Connecticut, and Betts was three days from his Yale Law School graduation. The bar exam was two months away. He was focussed on his final paper for an empirical-research class: twenty pages on critiques, in the media, of “broken windows” policing. He’d just begun examining about a hundred articles on the death of Eric Garner. As we searched for a parking space amid the commencement-weekend snarl, Betts described his growing interest in getting outside his own head and testing his ideas about the world—an interest that is changing his poetry as well. “I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of horrific experiences that have given me something to say,” he told me later. “I want to say other things, though.”
Betts, who is thirty-five, is the author of two acclaimed books of poetry, “Shahid Reads His Own Palm” and “Bastards of the Reagan Era,” and a memoir, “A Question of Freedom,” about his arrest, at age sixteen, for carjacking, and the eight years and three months he spent in prison. He was, in a way, lucky: he faced a possible life sentence for the crime. During one of Betts’s stints in solitary confinement, someone—he never learned who—slipped the 1971 anthology “The Black Poets” under his cell door. The book turned him on to Nikki Giovanni, Robert Hayden, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, and others. Soon, he was surreptitiously typing up poems in the prison’s law library, while also teaching himself the basics of the law. He learned to type fast, because library rules forbade personal use of the typewriters; being discovered would have landed him back in the hole.
Since his release, in 2005, he has graduated from the University of Maryland and Warren Wilson College’s low-residency M.F.A. program, been a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, received an N.A.A.C.P. Image Award, got married, and had two sons. “I’ve added some fancy stars,” Betts joked, over black coffee and an Old-Fashioned at Tarry Lodge, an upscale pizza place. “So now I’m like Felon Plus.” Betts, who was wearing jeans, a denim shirt, and tangerine-splashed sneakers, has heavy-lidded eyes and a full beard. He smiles often. When I asked if becoming a father had frightened him, he deadpanned, “It’s hard to be scared of things after prison.”
As we talked, outlasting the other diners, he bounced from subject to subject, discoursing on everything from strategies for post-conviction relief to his first kiss and bell hooks’s critique of Beyoncé’s “Lemonade.” Betts often revised himself mid-sentence, complicating what came before. His writing reveals the same distrust of smooth conclusions. “A Question of Freedom,” his memoir, could have told a straightforward story: a boy without a father grows up confronting racism and poverty; he commits a crime and lands in prison; he endures and is redeemed. But, while Betts was writing the book, he kept thinking of something that the poet and scholar Elizabeth Alexander once wrote: “Certain kinds of black men’s stories are ever in vogue, stories that offer the easy paradigm of criminality and putative redemption.” So he inserted the question that he was asking himself into the text: What kind of story is this? Fundamentally, he decided, it is one of absence: prisoners disappear from ordinary life. It’s difficult, Betts told me, to portray a “life driven by removal,” to explain what it’s like to be away from all of your loved ones, to miss out on “going to 7-Eleven or getting a driver’s license for the first time.” In the poem “Juvenile’s Letter,” from his first collection, “Shahid Reads His Own Palm,” he declares, “if you want / the logic of birthdays / and anniversaries, turn / your face away / from what I write.”
In his second collection, “Bastards of the Reagan Era,” Betts emulates Etheridge Knight, who also began writing poetry in prison, by situating an individual narrative within a larger, cultural one. The book delves into the devastation wrought by drugs and by Ronald Reagan’s drug war. By 1990, the number of people in federal prison for drug offenses in the United States was about six times higher than it was at the start of the decade. Betts grew up outside Washington, D.C., and he invokes it as both a place and a symbol: “There is more than a dead black / man in the center, there is a city still.” In this city, “the blucka / blucka blucka of a hammer’s siren” sounds, and a boy walks the streets wearing a keffiyeh “with its useless hands clopping / against the wind in protest.” The poems are frequently allusive; the city’s blood-soaked asphalt is “wine-dark,” like Homer’s sea. Betts laments, and he rages: “I tell my God / If you have ears for this one, know I want / No part of it, no icepicks and no fears. / I don’t say shit. I sing my dirge.”
Betts recently visited a prison in Trinidad, which left him with a profound feeling of good fortune. The prison gates, he’d noticed, were secured with Yale locks. There is no direct connection between the lock-making company and the university—the namesakes of each were distant relatives—but the “symbolism behind it” still “fucked me up,” he said. He has felt at home at Yale, but he remains conscious of his outsider origins. “A lot of luck, chance, and random shit had to occur for me to get into a place that, thirteen years ago, people would have thought I didn’t belong,” he said toward the end of our meal, as the waiters hurried the china off the table. As we prepared to leave, he brightened, rhapsodizing about his wife, and enthusing over the first installment of Marvel’s new “Black Panther” series, which is scripted by Ta-Nehisi Coates. He insisted that we walk to a comic-book store a block away, where he teased me about buying what he guessed, correctly, was my first comic book.
After he takes the bar exam, Betts will work as a public defender in New Haven and conduct research, thanks to a prestigious fellowship for Yale Law graduates who undertake public-interest projects. He had thought that he didn’t want to be a public defender, because, as he wrote recently on Facebook, he “couldn’t stomach standing beside someone as they get sent to prison.” But sometimes, he added there, “you don’t pick your fights. As a kid, I never expected to go to prison. As a prisoner, I never expected to go to law school. As a freeman, I never expected to return to prison. As a poet, I fucking hated lawyers and their Latin and esquires and lack of methods.” He hopes, eventually, to become an academic, and would love to split his course load between poetry and the notoriously boring subject of administrative law, which covers the procedures of government agencies. Administrative law, he said, is like poetry: it isn’t just one thing, but encompasses many.
At a recent charity auction held by the law school, Betts sold his poetic services: the winning bidder won a poem written just for him. Betts did some research first, by interviewing the buyer, and he found it revelatory. “It goes back to the whole idea of empirics in law,” he said. “This guy was telling a story, and it was really fascinating, and he didn’t appreciate how fascinating it was.” Betts said that he was working on other poems as well, and he continues to think about how he can address the things he sees around him. “What does a poet know?” he asked. “How do you become a poet in the world?”
