Jimmy Santiago Baca has long been public about the fact that poetry saved his life. He just hasn’t stated how literally he means poetry saved his life.

“I’ll tell you something I haven’t ever told any journalist, and that’s because I’m partial to (Oregon) journalists,” the 64-year-old said, taking his time getting to his big reveal.

Like Baca, we’ll build the anticipation and save the never-before-told-story for later. First, here’s a primer for those who don’t know Baca or his poetry: Born in New Mexico in 1952, Baca had a rough childhood that went from one crisis to another. His parents abandoned him, he was raised by his grandmother, he ran away at age 13 and landed in an orphanage.

At 21 and barely literate, he was sentenced to five years in maximum security prison for drug possession. Some of his years there were spent in isolation. There, he gained literacy and discovered poetry, which together turned his life around. Baca sent three poems to Denise Levertov, a poet who was then serving as poetry editor of Mother Jones, and she saw fit to publish them.

Baca was released from prison in 1979. That same year, he published his first book, “Immigrants in Our Own Land,” and then earned his GED.

Baca and BendFilm

Today, Baca is a celebrated, award-winning poet, as well as an educator and advocate for literacy. In 2005, Baca launched a nonprofit, Cedar Tree Inc., to help improve the lives of the dispossessed.

In addition to writing poetry, Baca has written of his youth and prison experiences in prose. His 2001 memoir “A Place to Stand,” inspired a 2015 documentary of the same title. BendFilm will screen the documentary at a special event Thursday, after which Baca will be joined in conversation by Bend poet, rapper and artist Jason Graham. It’s one of several appearances Baca will make while in the area. He’ll also visit Deer Ridge Correctional Institution while in Central Oregon.

BendFilm brings Baca to town for a special midyear fundraising event that replaces the former BendFilm BASH.

“We need a fundraiser every year to meet our growth,” said Todd Looby, BendFilm’s executive director.

“This is the best way to give the community what they fully expect and appreciate from us. We don’t believe in just asking for money. We want to also provide something that’s valuable to the community, so we think it’s a perfect marriage of what we do best, and to meet our needs as well,” he said. “Jimmy was such a big hit when he came in 2010 for … The Nature of Words event, so you bring in the literary crowd that loved Jimmy.”

At the time of Baca’s visit six years ago, he described in vivid terms what finding poetry meant to him as a young man: “It’s one of these things, like, where you lose all hope and you lose everything and you’re walking in s–t, your ankles are weighted in sewage, and poetry is the only thing that rises to the surface and is able to save your soul.”

Back in prison

The story he’d never told a journalist came as a surprise, given all the times and places Baca has discussed his prison years. “All right, here’s what happened,” he said. “I had to fight somebody in the (prison) yard. I really wasn’t that interested in that, surely. I just didn’t know what I was going to do. I was so young, kind of illiterate and kind of angry, and I hated everybody, I mean, and mostly myself. I looked in the mirror and despised myself, and then from there it went on to the world … which was the prison yard, you know?

“But anyway, this guy called me out, so I said, ‘F— it. Let’s do it,’” Baca said.

Before the fight, “I got some books, and I strapped myself around the waist with books. And when I went out to the yard, he runs twice and stabbed me. And I stabbed him. And when I got back to the cell, I looked and I saw where his shank had lunged twice and cut in about 20 pages. I took the … book off, and I looked at it, and it was an anthology of American poets. And I was like, ‘Mother—-er, I’m going to be a poet,” he said, laughing.

“Poets truly saved my life, ’cause if Levertov and Whitman and Rich and William Carlos Williams and Rexroth and all those people hadn’t written those poems and made that book available to me, I probably would have had my intestines cut out, and I’d be dead,” Baca said.

“I don’t know how to explain it, man. I don’t really know how to explain it. It’s a sacred kind of thing, and I’ve never really told anybody that. But that’s what it was. I sat on that cot, and I looked at that book. And I kept it for the longest time, studying those poems, because I thought it was some kind of secret message from God or something. And I kept it until one day the guards came in and tore it up.”

Other prisoners directed him to more reading materials.

“They became my librarians,” Baca said. “A murderer and a gambler became my librarians for the day.”

—Reporter: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com