The Dinner Party
Shaun T. Griffin shares dinner with formerly incarcerated poets he taught in a Nevada prison for 20 years, and they share fellowship and their poems with us
Shaun and I shared a glorious cross-country ski day in northern Vermont ten years ago followed by one of the tastiest guacamole and margarita combos I’ve ever had. Nothing like a bracing ski to make food taste delicious. Of course, I rarely turn down avocado, lime, salt, and tequila even if already stuffed to the gills.
As memorable and delightful as this après-ski dinner was, it can’t hold a candle to the dinner party Shaun shares with us this week—a dinner on the outside and a poetry group reunion as free men, for the first time. This flavor of liberty, of freedom makes me re-think everything I know of such things. It makes me dive, head-first, into who has it, how we have it, and why many don’t. It makes me dive into histories and politics and global systems.
Thankfully, lest I lose myself in the too-big-to-tackle-alone, Shaun’s piece itself, brimming as it is with audio, painting, and poems—one of his plus two from the prison group poets—makes me dig in, empowering shovel in hand, feet firmly planted in the soil, and heart first, to a specific dinner among friends and poets, beyond the dramatic details and circumstances of the improbable dinner itself.
It warms me with its essential human connection, with the simultaneous complexity and simplicity of dinner in this world, at this time, shared by those who love each other and love what art offers us. It transforms the too-big-to-tackle-alone into the things that people do tackle, even when and as they are too big. It inspires me to love, especially in the face of great challenge. It inspires me to see and find love in the seemingly little things that are so inherently big and true that they transcend the too-big, just like these poems do.
So, dig in, y’all. It’s a feast. Big love, Ashley
The Dinner Party
a radio-essay by Shaun T. Griffin, originally broadcast January 26, 2024 on KWNK’s A Writer’s World, in northern Nevada, and re-recorded specially for FED
Genealogy of Men Who Hear Their Names in the Desert
Copyright Ismael García Santillanes, Indelicate Angels, Black Rock Press, 2014, reprinted with permission
Mine is an insignificant inheritance:
when I walk alone in the desert,
to hear my name…
clear, neutral, unexaggerated…
as if an older me is calling
Ismael. Nothing else…
Like my father, Antonio,
my grandfather, Hilarión,
and all our forefathers,
who walked alone
the Mexican deserts:
walking stick,
sandals,
peasant soul
passed down like a modest curse…
And while other genealogies
branch from kings or tyrants,
the men in my family
hear their names in the desert.Iraqi Fugues
Copyright John Fenton, Iraqi Fugues, 2019 (unpublished chapbook), reprinted with permission
1.
Through screams at night,
I lie still, unsure all's clear,
and I hold my line
with pen or the trigger of other thoughts,
ready to be stained,
ink oozing on the page
from a wound that won't clot.
I open the tourniquet wide,
dear life spilling—
never once thinking this could end.Letter to Shame After the ATM Run
Copyright Shaun T. Griffin, No Charity in the Wilderness, University of Nevada Press, 2024, reprinted with permission
…unlike men with money who have places
to put their shame
these men have none—Jimmy Santiago Baca
There is nothing I can do— blood has worn its way to your door. Last night you were a boy in the coffeehouse, teething on the next tool to pawn. But the tables no longer spin, and you are not free of their wrath. In every moment, you owe someone a bite of your life. I have come to this city of wind and sex and lights and it has emptied you to its streets. You are posted to the rails of small things—how will I eat, whom will I tell—before the shadow cuffs tumble you away. A blister no one can see. My friend, the register has closed. You blink in the feeble light like a strobe in the dying sun. Your time in the broken palm of this day is over. Yesterday, I wrote ten things on a napkin— telegrams to the urge to gamble— and they were swallowed by the wind. Today, you wake to the iodine horizon and clean your hands of loss, but the stain will not leave. The wind shuffles in the door to account for things taken, things borrowed, buttressed by a timorous man who smiles in shame. I used to think you could stop. Now I watch you stumble from the gilded throat of a casino to mean little more than dust.
Dig in for more goodness…
To learn more about Shaun and FED’s entire Spring 2024 all-star line-up of musicians, artists, writers, growers, gleaners, cooks, and craftspeople, check out Special Guests. And, you won’t want to miss this very special pozole recipe from Bill Acosta, of Tortugas Pueblo.
Who’s washing dishes?
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