locked and blocked

The lines of the poem threatening to rotate over, becoming prison bars.

bars not spines

He began to look upon the spines of the unread books as prison bars.

cruel and unusual

But for the law against cruel and unusual punishment, I’m sure many prison libraries would love to own this book of poems.

prison argot

The critics of that school feared they’d invented a prison argot.

free the poets

I noticed that The Poetry Project’s reading space has prison bars on the windows.

incarcerated

A poem locked in the prison of the canon.

attica, attica

A word that’s stuck in the poem and seems to know it doesn’t belong there. Yet its uneasy fidgetiness gives energy to the whole poem.

prison release

There comes a point always, in painting a picture, when it becomes a prison; I long to get away from it, to be quit of it forever, yet the only release, with a clear conscience, must come from carrying it thru.

—Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield’s Journals, The Poetry of Place, edited by J. Benjamin Townsend (State University of New York Press, 1993)