Hi there, I'm Jason Gatz, and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Some experiences change you so completely that you're left with a choice.

Either spend your life running from them or spend your life turning them over in memory,

trying to find new ways in through

and out the other side. The power of the impulse to explain or somehow articulate these experiences

is inversely proportionate to other people's ability to understand them. They're everything all at

once. It seems to me that my guest today has made that second choice,

the harder choice, not to run away, or maybe it's a choice you have to keep making over and over

again. His name is Reginald Dwayne Betts. He's 39 years old, an accomplished poet and essayist,

and a graduate of Yale Law School, but he spent most of his teenage years and young adulthood

in prison, and over a year of that time in solitary confinement, experiences neither a society

nor memory nor his fellow feeling for the more than two million people behind bars in the

United States has let him forget. Duane's beautiful and necessary new book of poems is called Felon,

and I'm honored to have him with me here today to talk about it. Welcome to think again.

It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, thanks. You know, I feel the need to kind of set the stage with my

little essay lit or whatever in the beginning, but these are your poems. This is your life. So I'm

interested to hear anything you want to say in and around what I just said. I mean, I think it rung true. I think the biggest challenge thinking about my own work, thinking about what it means to be a writer. If you think about it as like a vocation, you think about it as a job and this thing that I do, it's interesting because I could have came out of prison and just worked and I could have

just had a job and every day I went to work and it just so happens that as an artist, what you

do do is like examine your obsessions and you get a chance to reflect on things, you know,

constantly and you make the choice about what it is that you reflect on and sometimes the choice

is made for you. So for me, it is that experience reflect on and sometimes the choice is made for you.

So for me, it is that experience I'm returning to constantly, but also it's like my whole

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