Disguised As A Poem: My Years Teaching Poetry at San Quentin
In the spring of 1985, Tannenbaum was invited to recite her poems at San Quentin, California's infamous maximum-security prison. Afterward, she was invited to teach a creative writing course in poetry. Tannenbaum taught for one year on a once-a-week basis and was a poet-in-residence for the following three years. This book is designed to tell readers what the author learned in her four years of teaching inmates. She spent her first years working to earn their trust, occasionally stepping into minefields and overstepping boundaries imposed by the prison to protect her. Through her experience, she learned to protect the inmates' privacy at all costs, and therein lies the problem with this book. Tannenbaum tells the reader that one inmate stalked her and another became a soulmate, yet the details are unconvincing. The problem is that she seems to care too much about her students to reveal their stories, and without revealing their stories she remains unable to tell her own.APam Kingsbury, Alabama Humanities Foundation, FlorenceCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.