MARILYN BUCK

The Rag Authors' Page: Marilyn Buck

ragauthorspage.blogspot.com/2007/12/marilyn-buck.html

T H E R A G A U T H O R S ' PA G E

S A T U R D A Y , D E C E M B E R 8 , 2 0 0 7

Marilyn BuckMarilyn Buck 00482-285

Carswell FMCPO Box 27137

Ft. Worth, TX 76127

U.S. political prisoner and poet Marilyn Buck translated and wrote a nuanced introduction to "State of Exile," an essay and poems by Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi, now exiled in Barcelona. It is published by City Lights Books as part of its Pocket Poet

series

State of Exile

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“State of Exile is a haunting work that sat for decades, awaiting, like cicadas, its proper season. That time is now." -- Mumia Abu-Jamal

For more information, see marilynbuck.com.

In the window of City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco – the poet's dream come true!

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Rescue The Word. 2001.

Friends of Marilyn Buck, % LSPC, 1540 Market St., #490; San Francisco, CA 94102.

Noted prison poet Marilyn Buck's first chapbook of her own work. Conscious, poignant, internationalist and consistently revolutionary. Paper, 22 pages.

From the title poem:

"sacred words are in dangerfugitives, they seek coverbury themselves aliveshamed by the profane purposesthey are forced to servedressed in lily-white lies"sing them . . . shout themteach themwear themaround your neckamulets against amnesia"

WILD POPPIES: A poetry jam across prison walls

Wild Poppies: A poetry jam across prison walls. 2004. Freedom Archives, www.freedomarchives.org. Poets and musicians honor political prisoner Marilyn Buck, reading 46 of her poems and their own. Hear South African poet laureate Dennis Brutus and a host of others including Amiri Baraka, Genny Lim, devorah major, Vini Bhansali, Mariann Wizard, Akwasi Evans, Samsara, Carlos Quiles, Piri Thomas, Aya de Leon, Kwame Ture, and Marilyn herself, reading her work over the censored telephone lines of the Federal Correctional Institute at Dublin, CA. Compact disc.

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WILD POPPIES: A poetry jam across prison walls, 2004

Hear a sample cut of Marilyn reading now, see Rag Blog website.

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REMEMBERANCESMarilyn Buck grew up in Austin, attended school at the University of California at Berkeley, and later returned to Austin for a short time, where she hung around The Rag and appeared anonymously in its pages, although she didn't write any articles for it. Later she went to Chicago and edited Students for a Democratic Society's national newsletter, New Left Notes, then back to California, where she became an active member of Newsreel and a trusted supporter of San Francisco's militant Black Liberation forces.

Marilyn had been imprisoned on a variety of charges off and on since the early 70s, except for several years spent as a fugitive, living life "underground". While in prison, she completed two college degrees and maintained a lively correspondence. She taught literacy to other women prisoners, and had participated, while imprisoned, in fund-raising walks for women with AIDS and other solidarity events.

Sadly, Marilyn died on August 3rd, 2010, at the home of her attorney Soffiyah Elija in New York, just nineteen days after being released from prison. For more detail about her passing,and to see her tribute page located at marilynbuckpresente.org

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In addition to her poetry, Marilyn was a gifted ceramic artist

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NOTES and CHRONOLOGIES

Dec 8, 2007 - Marilyn Buck 00482-285. Carswell FMC PO Box 27137. Ft. Worth, TX 76127 U.S. political prisoner and poet Marilyn Buck translated and wrote ...

BreaktheChains.info: Poet/Political Prisoner Marilyn Buck Dies in New ...breakallchains.blogspot.com/2010/08/poetpolitical-prisoner-marilyn-buck.html

1.Aug 6, 2010 - Marilyn Buck was released from prison July 15, 2010. ... CORRECTION: The Rag Blogwas originally informed that Marilyn Buck died in a New ...

Free Marcia Powell!: Marilyn Buck: State of Exile.freemarciapowell.blogspot.com/2010/06/marilyn-buck-state-of-exile.html

Jun 20, 2010 - From the Friends of Marilyn Buck, who is fighting cancer in federal prison. She's an ... The article this links to at the Rag Blog is awesome.

Arizona Prison Watch: Be Strong: Marilyn Buck dies free.www.arizonaprisonwatch.org/2010/08/be-strong-marilyn-buck-dies-free.html

Aug 3, 2010 - Check the Rag Blog first for updates - I'm posting Mariann's note about ... Mariann G. Wizard : Poet/Political Prisoner Marilyn Buck Dies in New ...

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‘Inside/Out’: The Poetry of Marilyn BuckPosted on May 10, 2012 by Thorne Dreyer

‘Inside/Out’:The poetry of Marilyn Buck   By Mariann G. Wizard | The Rag Blog | May 10, 2012 The Rag Blog‘s Mariann Wizard will join fellow poets Czarina Aggabao Thelen, Lilia Rosas, Jorge Renaud, Michelle Mejia, and Jane Madrigal (San … finish   reading   BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : ‘Inside/Out’: The Poetry of Marilyn Buck

SEE Rag Blog archives. BOOK Review / Mariann G. Wizard :

‘Inside/Out’: The poetry of Marilyn Buck

[Inside/Out: Selected Poems by Marilyn Buck;  Foreword by David Meltzer (2012: City Lights Books, San Francisco); Paperback; 128 pp.; $13.95.]Marilyn Buck’s fellow poet and mentor David Meltzer writes that once when he was visiting her in Dublin Federal Correctional Center (prison), she expressed a desire to be known “not as a political prisoner poet, but simply as a poet.”

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”Inside Out”

For this collection, racing against uterine cancer until her death, Marilyn and a small group of still-surviving artistic and political friends (Meltzer, Felix Shafer, and Miranda Bergman, with poet Jack Hirschman and City Lights publisher Elaine Katzenberger) selected 63 poems that will give general poetry lovers their first real opportunity to savor her body of work.

Marilyn Buck was a Ragstaffer in Austin and Newsreel activist in San Francisco before becoming active in the Black Liberation movement. She died in August, 2010, in her 63rd year, after 25 years in federal prison and 19 days of freedom.She began writing poetry in prison as one of the few means of self-expression open to her. As she wrote in her Master’s thesis, On Becoming a Poet and Artist: Beyond Censorship to Re-Imagination(New College of California, Fall 1999, author’s copy), “I was a censored person by virtue of being a political prisoner. Ironically, defiance of State censorship reduced me to self-censorship. Nevertheless, I needed to affirm myself… I turned to poetry, an art of speaking sparely, but flagrantly.”

Buck’s earlier collections (a chapbook, Rescue the Word [San Francisco and New York: Friends of Marilyn Buck, 2001], and a CD,Wild Poppies [San Francisco: Freedom Archives, 2004]), and other published works, while including poems that didn’t spring from political or criminal convictions or fugitive experience, leaned heavily in that direction and by her choice.

While Inside/Out certainly doesn’t slight her political and prison-related work, we may also see several other facets of a woman who was much more than a one-dimensional icon. In almost all, she preserves her hallmark “spare… but flagrant” style.

Some selections will be familiar to Buck’s readers, and already beloved. “Clandestine Kisses” celebrates love against the rules with defiant elán. Like many of her poems, it summons a vision of irrepressible life finding a foothold in a world of steel and concrete.

“Woman with Cat and Iris” is another understated, sleight-of-hand creation: a tranquil Sunday morning illusion of normalcy dissolves in clanging steel doors and the shouts of guards, but the cat and flower linger, Cheshire-like, in the mind.

Marilyn wrote often about how the human mind can escape the sterility of prison, even for a moment; road maps, perhaps, for other prisoners, of whatever barred crucible, with “Gone” the most direct. “Night Showers,” celebrating washing off the pain and grief of each day along with its grit and grime, and “Woman’s Jazz Band Performs at Women’s Theater” also mine this theme.

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Incarceration is in large part a punishment because of its sensory deprivation. Deprivation from color, movement, textures, tastes, rain, the moon, etc., loom large in Buck’s work, but as Meltzer notes, it also bursts with music.

The jazz cadences of her longer poems beg for a saxophone’s honk and moan, a conga’s quick counterpoint. The centrality of music and poetry in liberation struggles past and present, personal and political, is never lost on her. Here are a few lines from the previously unpublished “Reading Poetry”: 

Chao Ut reads Vietnamese poetryI tell her she reads wellshe smiles…

she reads another poem . . . it sounds like music, I say . . . yes I’ll read it again . . . the way we everyday talkshe reads . . . do you hear? . . . yes, I say…

Or this, from “Boston Post Road Blues”: 

…I wait in the car’s darkness I countminutes and coins. . . 11:00 I step through blinking neon. . . into the vacant booth drop coins. . . and hear a click

the plum-colored voice. . . Baby I’m heretrumpet notes tap along my spinemy delight a waterfall. . . blues turn bold. . . intimate in the dark…

Buck had a dry, playful wit, well-known to friends but seldom given rein in her published work. It’s nice to find it here in a few poems such as “Definition”: 

when I was much youngerthan I am nowmy mom told me

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look out for tall dark strangersI thought she meantlook for one

Many poems seen for the first time in this collection are intensely personal. “Our Giant” recalls the darker side of Marilyn’s father. Louis Buck was defrocked as an Episcopal priest for opposing segregation. Crosses were burned on the family’s lawn during Marilyn’s childhood.

A courageous, outspoken crusader to the world, he was a controlling tyrant to his wife and children, demanding perfection, as he defined it, from each of them: 

brooding Irish Atlasprops long-legged babyin the window of a ’47 car(a car I remember betterthan my father’s sweet attentions)the only clue left of kindness. . . a bled-orange Kodacolor

a handsome rundown football playerlike a thundering gianthe dangled our lives from his fingertips. . . four morselswe hovered over the chasm of his rageour tears seasoned his woundsswallowed whole. . . we were regurgitated. . . each daybreak…

When Marilyn’s increasing radicalism led to her involvement in Black Liberation groups embracing armed self-defense, their estrangement increased. After she became a fugitive from the law, she and her father had no contact for many years.

Yes Louis’ uncompromising ideals and stubborn courage clearly informed much of her own conduct, including, some might say, the self-destructive parts. Their reconciliation before his death was extremely important to Marilyn. Here she expresses the terror, admiration, and eventual compassion he inspired:

…he was our giant, defrockedhe stomped in “jesus sandals”stained the silken robes. . . of rich men’s hypocrisy

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a jeremiah in farmboy overalls. . . and starched Mexican wedding shirt

titanic storms flayed his fleshtoo angry to leave this too-small world…

Her mother, Virginia Buck, to whom the volume is dedicated, is also recalled in “Loss.” Her death from the same type of cancer that would claim Marilyn was not only a grievous loss in itself, but a blow to the hope that Marilyn might survive to a healthy old age in freedom.

Hand-rubbed woodcut print of Marilyn Buck by Chicana artist Jane Madrigal, from her forthcoming collaborative project/exhibition: “Revolutionary Women Woodcuts.”

Virginia Buck defied (and eventually divorced) Louis, visiting as often as possible the daughter she “could not save… from vengeful-suited men nor from myself.” Marilyn was not allowed to attend either parent’s funeral, another deprivation that took a deep emotional toll.

Besides her poetry, much still uncollected, Marilyn Buck over time developed her ability to express herself “sparely yet flagrantly,” making significant contributions to radical and liberation theory and discussion, contributing to numerous journals and publications.

She taught herself Spanish, and in 2008 City Lights published her translation of exiled Uruguayan poet Cristina Peri Rossi’s collection,State of Exile, in a bilingual volume.In prison, Marilyn became a certified literacy instructor and taught hundreds of women to read. She learned and taught yoga, became an advocate for women’s healthcare, and organized AIDS education and prisoner fundraising activities. She mentored uncountable prisoners, prisoners’ family members, and poets around the world. She was a voracious reader who maintained a vast and varied correspondence, including with my grateful self.

One fault with Inside/Out is that is doesn’t tell when the poems were written, except those with dates in their titles. This would have been useful not only to academic

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readers but to friends and fellow poets who will long to know when such epic works as “Blake’s Milton: Poetic Apocalypse” and “Revelation” were composed. Much longer than most of her other poems, these works blaze with intense visions wherein prison walls have neither substance nor meaning, such as these lines from “Revelation”:

…Do you see demons and desolation, hear soundsof screams, wailing? Or smell sulfur burnbehind your tongue – a taste of wormwoodand aloes? Or encounter the touch as a torch upon the skin?. . . You imagine fire but it might be ice…

There are no apologies here, no appeals for special consideration. As she rejected white-skin privilege in life, binding herself to oppressed people in words and deeds, Marilyn Buck sought no deathbed, deus ex machina salvation from prison, cancer, or the condemnation of the self-righteous.For those who loved and miss her, Inside/Out is a special gift, long dreamed-of. For those who don’t know her, or who’ve had limited knowledge of her as person or poet, here she is at last free to speak outside State restraints. No more bars, shackles, solitary confinements, or super-max jails.The last poem included is “The First Year You Learn to Wear the Robes”:

his teacher told him on stepping into the Zen priesthood

to wrap one robe and then another, is not as simple as it looksrather this is not a simple matter of getting dressed, not a coveringa process of finding oneself inside one’s situation,revelation

a prisoner must learn to wear robes of absenceprepared to live this day

In my heart, I see Buck’s eager spirit wearing new robes now, a rebel angel inspiring poets and activists around the world to work compassionately yet relentlessly for justice, peace, and freedom. She lives this day, and tomorrow, in the words left behind.

—

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin’s underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

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REMEMBERANCES

Marilyn Buck at Dublin FCI, 1994. Photo by Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog

Keywords: Midlife, art and cutting through

By the end of the 1980’s, while many of Marilyn’s contemporaries were going through midlife crises, occasioned by our fortieth birthdays, she faced the ugly, cramped, totalitarian, arbitrary, cruel, violent, life-sucking, and repetitive regime of prison life. After all the court trials, she would be sentenced to 80 years.

What she had hoped was the bright glow of a revolutionary dawn would turn out to be the brief, fiery sunset of the passing era which had launched her.

Marilyn Buck was becoming a member of that extraordinary global minority: people who are imprisoned by the state for their political actions and beliefs. She sustained and was, in turn, sustained by this community of comrades and their strong webs of outside supporters and friends.

In the Bay Area her diverse circle grew wide, warm, and deep. The group Friends of Marilyn Buck was formed over a decade ago and is going strong today. Members of her family reconnected with her. While her physical range was totally restricted, the world came to her through amazing visitors from many continents and people’s movements.

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She loved and mentored the children of activists, some of whom grew up visiting her. She helped raise her godchildren, Salim, Tanya, and Gemma. Day in day out, Marilyn participated with, learned from, mentored, and hung out, suffered, and stood with women — social prisoners and politicals — in every prison where she lived for the past quarter century. And she is being mourned behind those walls by people who knew her and those who knew of her.(3)

When she was captured and imprisoned in 1985, I was a member of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and spent time in Washington, DC, working as a paralegal on the Resistance Conspiracy case. Around this time, I began to bring my three year old daughter Gemma on social visits with Marilyn. Over the next 25 years, the tender alchemy of love between them grew into a strong family relation of their own.

I imagine that many people spoke with Marilyn about what, along with political solidarity, might help sustain her over the long haul. Prisons are soul-murdering places and it is a testament to human creativity and spirit that many, many prisoners refuse to give in.

From early on we shared poetry and she sent me this poem, beloved by political prisoners the world over. Written in 1949, it’s by the Turkish revolutionary poet Nazim Hikmet. In its entirety:

Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison

If instead of being hanged by the neckyou’re thrown insidefor not giving up hopein the world, your country, your people,if you do ten or fifteen yearsapart from the time you have left,you won’t say,“Better I had swung from the end of a ropelike a flag” —You’ll put your foot down and live.It may not be a pleasure exactly,but it’s your solemn dutyto live one more dayto spite the enemy.Part of you may live alone inside,like a tone at the bottom of a well.But the other partmust be so caught upin the flurry of the worldthat you shiver there inside

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when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moves.To wait for letters inside,to sing sad songs,or to lie awake all night staring at the ceilingis sweet but dangerous.Look at your face from shave to shave,forget your age,watch out for liceand for spring nights,and always rememberto eat every last piece of bread–also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.And who knows,the woman you love may stop loving you.Don’t say it’s no big thing:it’s like the snapping of a green branchto the man inside.To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,to think of seas and mountains is good.Read and write without rest,and I also advise weavingand making mirrors.

I mean, it’s not that you can’t passten or fifteen years insideand more —you can,as long as the jewelon the left side of your chest doesn’t lose it’s luster!

Marilyn Buck read poetry and wrote hundreds of poems in her lifetime. She’s beloved by poets both within and beyond the borders of this country.

Keywords: transformation is her talent for living

The high tide movements in this country and worldwide, which so moved Marilyn to transform herself, had definitively ebbed. Not only had the political maps changed but also the rate of change accelerated. She kept abreast by reading voraciously, talking with visitors, and conducting a far ranging correspondence.

While by no means a traditional Soviet-style leftist, she watched the Berlin Wall fall in 1989 and then the consequences of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The Reagan-Daddy Bush era death squads and counterrevolutionary wars, from Central America to Angola,

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had bathed regions in blood to blunt popular revolutionary initiatives and, with the Chinese government and party’s embrace of greed, the “socialist alternative” all but disappeared. Revolutionary forces laid down their arms. Marilyn loved Cuba and followed events on this brave, unrepentant island closely. The bombs of the first Iraq war rained down.

Even from behind the wire there were bright moments. On February 11, 1990, Nelson Mandela walked out of a South African prison and shortly thereafter was resoundingly elected president of his country. I remember visiting Marilyn in 1990 at the Marianna, Florida, maximum-security prison with my young daughters, Ona and Gemma, and cheering his release.(4) As we slowly walked from the visiting room that day, they said, as they had many times before and would into the future, “We want her to come home with us.”

By 1993, she was transferred to FCI Dublin in Pleasanton, California — in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area — where she would live until the last months of her life. Over the years in Dublin she was incarcerated with many political prisoners.(5) As the 21st century got under her skin, Marilyn grew increasingly into a woman of many voices, passions, and fundamental, lifelong commitments. She somehow bore bitter setbacks and crushing disappointments to the limit, with deliberation.

Tendencies towards dogmatism and rigidity softened and this, I believe, made her stronger. She had the capacity to actively turn from spells of frank despair — which could go on for a period of time — towards renewal, creative experimentation, and her practical stance of being of use to others. This capacity to make a small and decisive inner turn away from the soul-murdering, isolating regime of prison towards a freedom of mutuality and care was, I believe, one of her great talents..

At her New York memorial tribute former political prisoner Linda Evans spoke about Marilyn’s AIDS educational work among women inside. She also told us about how Marilyn organized a benefit in the prison chapel to raise funds for black churches in the South which were being burned to the ground. This was her practice many times over.

Linked to this was her breadth of interest and penetration of thought. She read widely in natural sciences and literature. People who visited and corresponded with her know how engaged she was in thinking through the decline of revolutionary ideologies and movements over the past quarter-century and how well she knew answers for the future would not come easy.

Fluent in Spanish, she followed with great enthusiasm the new heterogeneous radicalism that has emerged in Latin America — Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay — over the past decade or so. When I sent her some photos taken

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by a friend who documented the FMLN electoral victory in March 2009, she wrote back expressing her joy. In recent times as part of her ongoing effort to grasp how the world was changing beyond prison walls, she studied political economy with a group of women on the outside who were close supporters.

Earlier, somewhere around the late 1990’s, I helped Marilyn reenter college. Returning to school in midlife had been good for me and I hoped it could assist her growth in unforeseeable and surprising ways. She enrolled in New College of California where she went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Poetics with an emphasis on translation.

One of her teachers, Tom Parsons — who coordinated her distance learning process, which involved sending tapes of classes to her so she could hear and do course work — told me she was the most gifted student he’d seen. Two of her other teachers — the poet David Meltzer and Latin American literature professor Graciela Trevisan — spoke at her Bay Memorial Celebration and have played important roles in the publication of her work.

Marilyn’s interest in women and feminism, poetics, literature, science, psychology, and cultural studies began to flourish, allowing new bridges to unfold across the last 10 years of her life. Those of us fortunate enough to visit and correspond with her found ourselves growing along with her in surprising ways. Marilyn, locked down in the totally controlled penitentiary space was, paradoxically, our breath of fresh air.

More to come

[Felix Shafer became an anti-imperialist/human rights activist while in high school during the late 1960’s and has worked around prisons and political prisoners for over 30 years. He is a psychotherapist in San Francisco and can be reached at felixir999@gmail.com] See “Felix Shafer: Mourning for Marilyn Buck, Part I” / The Rag Blog /

January 13, 2011 Read earlier articles about Marilyn Buck on   The Rag Blog .

Footnotes:(1) Lolita Lebron, Andres Figueroa Cordero, Irvin Flores and Rafael Cancel Miranda assaulted the U.S. Congress in 1954 to bring attention to the colonial plight and harsh repression of Puerto Rico. Along with Oscar Collazo, imprisoned for an earlier attack on the residence of president Truman in 1950, they were released after serving more than 25 years in prison. Lolita Lebron died at 90 years of age on August 1, 2010 — two days before Marilyn.

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(2) Assata Shakur was freed from prison by an armed clandestine action in which no one was harmed. Granted political refugee status, she lives in Cuba. Her autobiography, Assata, is available for people who want to learn about her life in the time prior to her liberation from prison. The website assatashakur.org contains valuable information. On the day before she died, Marilyn received a tender, personal audio message from Assata deeply thanking her for her life and contributions.

(3) In the soon-to-be published (March 1, 2011) book, An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country, Susan Rosenberg, Marilyn’s co-defendant, writes about daily life in the remarkable communities created by women in prison.

(4) Marilyn was imprisoned in Marianna FL with North American anti-imperialist political prisoners Laura Whitehorn, Susan Rosenberg, and Silvia Baraldini.

(5) Some of the women political prisoners she did time with in Dublin: Ida Luz Rodríguez and Alicia Rodríguez, Carmen Valentín, Dylcia Pagán, Ida Robinson McCray, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, Donna Willmott, and women from the Ploughshares and environmental movements.

The Rag BlogEND

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