Usually reserved and keeping to himself, Tomar became intrigued when volunteers brought a keyboard into the D.C. jail on the first Tuesday afternoon of April.
He excitedly toyed around with each key, learning the corresponding sounds as a nearby volunteer started singing to the beat he was creating in a small room tucked away in the corner of the cell block.
He’s not the type of person who likes talking to people, he said, so the weekly after-school sessions have provided him an outlet to use words to express himself. He’s been working on several poems, looking to find the right words to capture his feelings.
“Being able to write on a piece of paper and just write out thoughts or just write creative things helped me release a lot of inside anger that I have, anxiety also,” Tomar said.
Since February, he and several other incarcerated young people at the D.C. jail have been spending weekly two-hour sessions working with volunteers to craft poems and learn about music.
The initiative, called Project Poetic Justice, offers 18 to 24-year-olds taking academic classes an escape from the usual routine of their incarceration. It’s voluntary and happens after their school day, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m., on Tuesdays.
The program will culminate Friday with an on-site concert. Their poems have been turned into music, and they’ll get to watch them be performed.
“This is a stressful place,” Mark Anthony Fletcher III said. “Dealing with instruments and doing the right things, it releases you. It takes you out of your element, takes you to another place, takes you out of this world, because we’re locked up in the cage.”
An idea into reality
The idea for the project came from Ryan Alexander, who used to teach on the same unit at the D.C. jail. He became a college administrator at the jail, but then realized how much he missed music.
He was admitted to the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and pursued a master’s degree in voice. While working toward that, though, he missed his time at the D.C. jail. He performed his final recital in the jail’s law library, and afterward, someone approached him with a question.
“How does that poem that you have written on the program turn into the song that you just sang?” Alexander recalls being asked. “I had already been working on a curriculum, a bit of a program, kind of like this, but that really solidified it. I was like, why not work with residents here, speak with them, figure out what they want to share.”
That’s exactly what he did.
He connected with poets at John’s Hopkins University, and brought them in for the first three weeks of the program. Then, he focused on bringing in composers from Peabody to explain how to turn the writing into music.
“I’d love to work with the students and help them find something that feels like a tool for them to express themselves, and then also through that, recognizing that there is not just like an end point to that, but actual meaningful connections that they have established with other people, kind of their age, doing something like this,” Alexander said.
The project is partially funded through grants, and Alexander also launched a GoFundMe campaign to cover remaining costs.
“It’s once a week, 10 weeks,” Alexander said. “It’s not going to have some massive, profound, immediate impact. It’s more about what does this look like a couple of years from now, when someone reflects on that time I sat at the piano, I really missed that.”
That goal, Alexander said, reflects his own experiences with music.
“I used to sing a lot,” he said. “I took six years away from it, and I was like, ‘I missed this. I wonder what it would be like to go explore it again.’”
Alexander now lives in Chicago, where he moved before he knew Project Poetic Justice was going to become a reality. Now, he flies into Reagan Airport each week, just to be able to see it through.
‘I get to express myself’
During the April 1 session, Damari sat on a green chair next to volunteer Ahmed Karam. He held a printed copy of an old New York Times article from 1938.
As he worked on his song, he flipped the page over whenever he got stuck. He circled words he thought he may want to include.
“It’s a great program,” Damari said. “It helped me find my creativity with everything. It just opened my mind a lot.”
Karam said he was drawn to Damari’s writing because, “He’s got these strong images. We’re thinking of Tyler The Creator, Eminem and how there’s always these jokes in there. We’re having fun with that.”
Tomar, meanwhile, sat quietly in the distance holding a Manila folder and sheet of notebook paper, reviewing his progress and revising his poem accordingly.
“It makes me feel a little bit more calm, because I get to express myself,” he said. “I don’t got to keep it bottled up, and I’m really expressing something that I have been through, and that I’m going through.”
Nearby, Fletcher practiced reading his poem called, “Don’t Play My Game.”
“This is a game, I’m locked up, not washed up,” he said. “Sitting in my cell thinking. Thinking about life.”
Dallas listened intently.
“You never know what a person’s going through,” he said. “Someone might be in the cell stressing, and they come in every week. Knowing they come betters your day, betters your week.”
‘No music more honest’
Three weeks later, Tomar sat in the same quiet room as American University Professor Aram Sinnreich discussed his previous work taking poems by incarcerated people and having musicians turn them into songs.
“There’s no music more honest, I think, than music that’s written under circumstances where people are in pain or where they’re suffering or where their lives are being constrained or they’re being oppressed,” Sinnreich said.
While he played various examples on Spotify, Tomar held a white sheet of printer paper with lyrics and musical notes. It was his work in a different form.
“Walk out the house, the smell of fresh air reminds me every day of learning how to better myself as a man,” he said.
With Sinnreich and Alexander listening, people trickled in and out of the room, taking turns describing their favorite artists and thoughts on the possibility of their work being performed.
Then, they reflected on the opportunity to describe their feelings in a creative way.
“It’s like a big therapy session,” Jordan Grice said.
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