The FBI’s Most Wanted Poet
In my early 20s, I read a lot of writing by ex-cons, from poetry, to crime fiction, to plays. I think it started with Jack Henry Abbott’s In the Belly of the Beast, a great prison memoir. Then came the poetry and drama of Miguel Pinero, the crime fiction of Eddie Bunker and Donald Goines, and the poetry of Etheridge Knight and Jimmy Santiago Baca. There were a few one-offs like I Cried, You Didn’t Listen, and later on, Monster: Autobiography of an LA Gang Member. But the work of Pancho Aguila has always stuck with me.
Pancho Aguila, aka Roberto Solis, is still at large, for stealing 3 million dollars back in 1993. He stole an entire armored car without firing a shot, with the help of his girlfriend, Heather Tallchief. About once a year, I search on the Internet to see if he’s been caught.
I came across his poetry in an anthology of prison writing called Captive Voices. I later found (and lost) a copy of Dark Smoke. His writing, like most prison writers, is brutal and to the point. While there is a lot of great wordplay, there’s no real fucking around.
Most poetry, I don’t get it. I don’t like most of what’s out there. In four years of undergrad work, I saw very little from my classmates that I even understood. There are entire schools of poetics, like language poetry, that I will never understand. Then there’s the other poetry that swings too far…
