For years now, when I grow weary of driving on U.S. 64, I take a quieter but slower route that passes through Bailey and Middlesex, Spring Hope, Momeyer, and Nashville.

That route goes by the Nash Correctional Institution, where one of the inmates has recently published a remarkable book of poetry called Life: Learning Instructions for Everyone … in prison and out.

The author of Life is Phillip Vance Smith II. He is a 40-something year old African American male, and he is serving the 21^st year of a life sentence without parole.

His book shows us his life inside prison, how he got there, and how he tries to find meaning in his life when he knows that he might never come out.

It is a primer in survival without hope. Or perhaps in how to find hope, and how to make a life with meaning, in a hopeless world.

Most of Life is a hard read: Smith is fearless, and there is not much of prison life that he does not work into his poetry.

during saturday cartoons in a polk youth center dayroom,

billy got his wig split with a broken-off broom.

 Other inmates laughed and ran off to the spread the news

while billy lay dead, on the floor, until noon.

too old to be tamed, yet too young to be ashamed,

too stubborn for change, we were just children in chains.

Some of Smith’s poems move to a rap beat. A few of his poems seem as if he’s trying on other poets for size, a little Langston Hughes here, an echo of Charles Bukowski there.

Like all of us, he is at his best when he finds his own voice. And when Smith does, his words make me feel as if I am inside his chest and can feel the pounding of his heart.

One of the poems that touched me most in Life is “an insufficient apology,” where Smith writes about what he learned about the man for whose murder he was convicted.

I hated myself for living life,

When you could not.

During his trial, Smith’s attorney shared the DA’s file on his victim with him. Smith was only 23 years old at the time, and he had only known the man as a drug dealer who had tried to rob him. The file showed him the rest of the man’s life.

the state’s evidence told me that

you had serenaded your high school in

a quartet, sang like an angel, yet…

you became homeless, couch surfing,

wandering the world,

for a stage

Reading the poem, I felt as if I could almost hear Smith’s insides being crushed when he discovered that his victim had a little daughter that was born just a few days before he killed him.

i heard my mother’s voice, “son there

will come a day when sorry

isn’t good

enough.”

So much of Life is about Smith’s struggle to find meaning and purpose in his life inside the prison.

In the book’s title poem, he writes,

life tortures the weak, pains the forsaken,

the strong fight on by learning to embrace it.

life is a steel mind, a weather-resistant will,

the audacity to succeed in a man-made landfill.

life is finding a way to love yourself

despite the pain and anguish you caused everyone else.

life is learning to scale towering walls,

to influence the world without leaving here at all.

He is so desperate to keep his chin up that you feel his fragileness, as well as his strength, and an aching kind of beauty, in every poem.

By all accounts, Phillip Smith has at least held on, and has done much to influence the world without leaving here at all.

He has apparently been a model prisoner. He is finishing up an associate degree that he began in prison. He edits the state’s oldest prison newspaper, The Nash News, and he co-edits a newsletter called Compassion that reaches the incarcerated far and wide.

He has also published articles in a wide variety of other journals and magazines.

Smith is also the co-author of an important legislative proposal that, if it could ever be passed, could give him and thousands of other prisoners in North Carolina at least a ray of hope for a future.

In his hard and forlorn world, the love with which Smith suffuses so many of his poems has left a deep impression on me. A poem called “rich,” for one, is, among much else, an ode to his mother.

I wore blue jeans until mouths

gaped at the knees

screaming poverty.

She ironed on mismatched

denim patches

to silence them.

 

but I never went naked.

 

we ate grits for dinner when

we couldn’t afford rice, like slaves

sopping with their fingertips.

 

but I never went hungry.

And there are poems that melted my heart. This is from Smith’s poem “picture man,” which is about his job at the Nash Correctional Institution. During visiting hours, he takes portraits of the inmates and their loved ones for those who want them.

“ready for your picture? I ask a

couple—pen pals—meeting for

the first time. They pose miles

apart. her afraid to touch him. him

afraid to test the bond built by

the anonymity of letters.

“squeeze in,” i say. “i ain’t got all day.”

Inane rules ricochet in my head:

Hands above waist. no shots

with his crotch against her buttocks,

no kissing, no fondling—makes for an

awkward photo—but somehow,

i coach them closer to love.

Later in the poem, Smith recalls photographing a second couple, the prisoner down on one knee, and how the proposal surprised her as much as it did me.

In that poem, he recalls the woman’s tears of joy, and the couple’s giddy happiness, even though they knew their time was brief and would end with him going back to his cell and her going home alone.

Smith writes that the couple’s happiness bolstered him the rest of that day. He even kept a smile on his face when he was submitted, as he always is, to a strip search at the end of his shift.

He writes that at that point, at least on that day, he was immune to the inhumane, words that can be taken many different ways, but meant, I feel sure, for all of us, in prison and out.

* * *

You can order Phillip Vance’s Life: Living Instructions for Everyone . . . in prison and out at Amazon and at independent bookstores around the country. It is published by BleakHouse Publishing, a nonprofit publisher founded by American University criminology professor Robert Johnson in 2006.

You can also find a splendid interview about Phillip Vance’s work with The Nash News in JSTOR Daily– it’s called “What’s It Like to be an Editor of a Prison Newspaper.”

You can learn more about the “Prison Resources Repurposing Act”– the legislative reform that Smith co-authored and that I mentioned above– here.

And for a special treat, I strongly encourage you to check out the extraordinary historian/activist Nick Courman reading one of Phillip Vance’s poems at Emancipate NC’s Poetic Justice 2023 here.