Article about Spoon

I have a friend. A friend i´ve never met in real life, but we´ve met in our handwritten letters. Handwritten cause my friend don´t have access to computers, internet, or freedom. But, he´s got asset to something that is worth far moore. He´s got asset to himself. My friend´s a poet. A black imprisoned poet.

I was born in 1977. The same year my friend Spoon Jackon was put in prison. 19 years old he got involved in an argument which resulted in a deadly outcome. After a questionable trial he got his verdict. Lifetime in prison without parole. He has been in jail for as long as I have been alive: TWENTY SIX years. In one of his last letters he wrote me and said he had reached a painfull point. He has now been in prison for longer time than he has been free. I wanted to understand but it´s difficult to put oneself in that situation.

We write and exchange thoughts and he tells me about his view of life that reaches far beyond the walls he´s locked up behind. As said we´ve never meet in real life, but we´ve meet on another level that no walls, no matter how high can exclude. He writes me and tells me how he often through collective punishments gets locked up for weeks without leaving his cell in the Californian heat. It´s no surprise if you get crazy or can´t see any hope for the future in that situation. It´s just to be expected. You have to be strong. Strong in an environment that mostly contains steel, violence and hatred. Spoon is strong. Strong through his poetry. I don´t know how he keeps up hope and don´t bow down for the hate and violence and i don´t know where he finds the strenght to finish his letters to me with; “Stay cool and b real, keep spreading love and peace in the world brother” but i belive he finds it in his art.
He’s writing, thinking and developing in an environment where there really are no conditions to do so at all. He is surviving trough his art. People don’t need much to have their dreams, hopes and belief in the future coming alive. And it isn’t expensive either.
A good example is Jan Jönssons work with Spoon and other inmates at San Quentin in the early 80´s. An enthusiast, a play ” Waiting for Godot”, sweat, and tears was all that was needed to wake a few human beeings faith in the future and dreams to wakened and a poet to be born. Not expensive but so much worth. Human beeings that are reborn instead of beeing killed or killing.
Theatre, music, poetry developes people, awekends minds, hope and faith. That´s the purpose of art in my opinion and that what it´s good at. But art gets less and less room in a world where everything revolves around making money, gaining power and only looking after yourself. Art gives us alternative thoughts and images of ourselves and our society in the one diemensional time that we are living in. We must care for art because it can help us care for eachother. Stay cool keep glowing and growing and spread peace and realness. It dosen´t cost a thing.

by Krister Kern,
Published in FAKTUM #4 2004

Copyright © 2004 Krister Kern