Author Archive: admin

The world (whirls) are spinning April 2022

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This morning a Black man in some sort of uniform wearing a gas mask pulled out a canister that temporary blinded people and then shot those within a subway car going into the 36th Street Station in Brooklyn.

The sun is bright this day.  The air is crisp.

My neighbors and my landlord are doing repairs on buildings up and down Macon Street.  The planet is spinning–there is so much rage.  War in the West.  War in the East.  War on almost every continent on our globe.  Wars in ourselves.

So how best to remember that like my neighbors hammering, good and useful things happen at the same time as catastrophes.  Here’s a brief riposte.

So it is good to just say that I am grateful for all who celebrated with me this past Friday, April 8 when I was honored by The Poetry Project at its gala celebrating the Project’s 55th year–the other honoree was Rene Ricard who departed in 2014 after an often tumultuous but poetry driven life.   Vincent Katz and Arden Wohl were the Gala’s co-chairs and Kyle Dacuyan, the Project’s ED set a generous and convivial tone to the evening. Here are a few notes from my part as honoree:

Jason Kao Hwang played a beautiful violin solo and it was definitely my part of the program. Lorraine O’Grady was filmed talking about my work in A Lucent Fire, and she read “The Perfect Lipstick”‘ a 3 minute reel about me included Cornelius Eady, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen, Guillermo F. Castro,  and Charlotte Carter; and then Tyehimba Jess basically testified on my behalf and read “Love Come and Go”.
It took just about everything in me to not cry. And then it was me and yes, i was on point.  I found a poem I wrote back in 1974-75 as a way to show just how long I’ve been associated with the Project and then spoke about the importance of the Project and I ended the speech by reading “Seraphim” with the last line “And unto joy” which seems utterly apt.  We see such horror, terror, rage, and we write about them-if there is one thing we can try and do as artists and writers and humans on this planet is remind ourselves that joy abides as well.
I am thankful to have friends and family who encourage me.  I know that readers when they find my books are pleased to have done so.  Over the past 10 years, there has been a growing look at my work and greater interest.  I have lived long enough to gather some applause.  I know that this is not always the case.  Good friends joined me at Table 5: Willie Perdomo, Charlotte Carter and Marie Brown–Black and Brown literati.  We are here and we are working and know the world is spinning, but writers are always about dancing on the whirls.

new season new reason to learn new things. aka AUTUMN in New York

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work

FAWC BROCHURE

Today is the first full day of autumn in New York and I am humming Vernon Duke’s tune with Sarah Vaugh’s lush voice in my mind’s ear.  It is also John Coltrane, Ray Charles, Louise Nevelson’s paradisal birthday.  While I believe that Trane is in heaven, where those delicious sinner, Charles and Nevelson–well who knows?  I have been printing and re–reading poems to start off the first asynchroous workshops I’ve ever offered.  I hope I do it well.  I love teaching poetry workshops, mostly for the dialogue within the classes.  I love working with fellow writers–knowledgeable and passionate and open to trying new things.  And for whatver reason my workshops work for poets–new poems emerge or old ones get refurbished.  And many new books start or morph in my workshops: Renato Rosaldo, Jordan Franklin, Metta Sama, Meghan Dunn are a few of my former “students” with books out or that are coming out.   But the best thing is that poets write new poems.  So I hope I get a good crew for the 9 Living Women Poets workshop.  https://fawc.org/24-pearl-street-program/

********I will also be teaching for the 92nd Street Y. I’ve taken classes and I know how rigorous and vigorous they can be. DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 24.  Guidelines and Info at  https://www.92y.org/class/adv-poetry-with-patricia-spears-jones

Yes it is autumn in new york-and it feels like “home” Havest moon 2021

 

 

Summer zooms along.

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Amina Claudine Meyers

Vision Fest salute to Amina Claudine Myers

I am so pleased to have performed on the night of performances and tributes to the amazing musician and composer, Amina Claudine Myers.  Amina has been making important music for 4 decades–piano works, works for the organ and choral music.  On July 23, her artistry was on full display at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, in Brooklyn.  The Vision Festival 25th year was a powerful and poignant one–it included an elegaic program for the now late Milfred Graves.   But the second night belong to Amina, glorious singers, and yours truly, the poet.  Amina and I grew up in Arkansas–so it felt very homegirl.  Plus Amina’s relatives flew to NYC for this honor. There are many women making music in jazz and improvisational music, but there aren’t as many as there should be, just saying Amina was one of the few women musicians accepted into the AACM back in the day and she’s done much to make the scene more inclusive.  Progress is often too damn slow.  But progress has been made. I was glad to be up in front of the audience and Jason Hwang, with whom I’ve done several programs was there too.  Amina received great applause, many bouquets and the adoration of her fans.

ZOOMED

Teaching from home

This has been a busy summer of readings, workshops ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM: Gemini Ink, HWVC, Hurston-Wright ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM  so reading before actual human beings in a large, fairly open space–Pioneer Works is huge was a mixed blessing.  And with the Delta variant & whatever other mutating viruses arrive, I see ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM in the near and possibly far future.

Whatever and however we can, we must continue to make ceremony.  We must celebrate the creativity and staying power of artists, elders and younger ones.  We must work hard to be as good as we can be because so much that surrounds us is nasty, violent, evil (see Texas Republicans as an example).   Summer with its heat, rains, hurricanes, tornadoes is almost gone. And I must say I am pleased to be at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts with a fully funded Richard S. and Julia Louise Reynolds Poetry Fellowship. First week here I read with a wonderful prose writer–we really had a blast.

What can we do to keep going to doing bad times, we do our work and with style. Caitlyn Myer and I did at VCCA.

Caitlyn and Patricia post reading

Caitlyn and I read poetry and prose at VCCA

Another chance to sing a Black Girl’s Song

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Mariposa Fernandez and her colleagues at Lehman College reached out to me to join her and Latasha N. Diggs in one more reading from African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song.  The anthology, edited by Kevin Young has become an instant classic(wow).  I am honored to be a contributor and I was honored to perform in this reading.  We were able to get two fabulous ASL interpreters so that the hearing impaired were able to join in.

Here is the link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SH4IThHMIc&list=PLB4i8n78Nlt8zkw-7GlQP47CX2LdWBQ4W&index=3

SPRING and the “normal” is not new

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Bed-Stuy Brooklyn

Macon Street, Brooklyn 2020

My neighbors on Macon Street are laughing and chatting.  Dogs are being walked and dinners are being picked up at nearby restaurants, delis, bistros.  Most of my neighbors wear their masks with a kind of fierce stylishness that I totally admire.  Like, yeah there’s a vaccine and all but Covid is out and about and infecting people.

I was not in New York City last year when everything but “essential services” shut down.  I can’t know how disorienting and frightening that was–I watched endless episodes of CNN and PBS and read notices on Facebook.  I was in Virginia in “faculty housing” on an almost deserted college campus.  I really got to know birds  and a variety of critters, mostly squirrels, but rabbits, even foxes and one day people were riding horses.  Oddly, I did not see deer. And  in its own way, it was also frightening.  Wearing a mask while walking across campus to online teach my class was odd but necessary.  So much of the past year has been about the odd but necessary.  And so much of it gave our planet a chance to sort  of re-calibrate.  Fish returned to rivers and streams.  Cougars showed up.  Shocking how much humans disrupt until you see what happens when we walk lightly on the planet.

Now we have a new President, who does not tweet and is not particularly entertaining.  This is now reflected in ratings loss for cable television.  So glad President Biden stands up, talks directly and then gets back to the actual business of governing.

But the nation he so loves and has wanted to lead for a long time is a wounded nation.  Close to 600,000 people have died from Covid and it is only now that the nation because of Biden is seeing this as a national tragedy.  Many of those deaths were hastened by the poor policies of the Trump administration and Republican governors who yanked away public health requirements and opened up states before the virus could be reduced.  I despair for family and friends in Texas, in Florida, and Tennessee.  These same governors make getting vaccinated a bloodsport.   But let’s be real, this pandemic has shown just how bad many political leaders really are.  When any of them actually do what they are supposed to be doing for the public health, it’s like a miracle.

But everyone wants to get back to normal like my neighbors.  They want to dance like its 1999.  They want barbecue  like it 2005.  It’s 2021 and normal is not new.  And  yet, some things have returned with a vengeance: race hatred and misogyny in the killings of 8 people (7 women, 6 of whom were Asian) in Atlanta and 10 people in Boulder, Colorado, one of whom was a police officer, father of 7 children!  Mass killings are back.  Assaults on BIPOC remain vicious.   Refusal to deal gun regulations are back.

Oh how I hope this not all that new normal does not persist.  Because in many  ways the past year has given many of us a serious lesson in how to handle a sustained crisis; how to grow in spirit; how to truly self-reflect;  how to make community in different ways (zoom anyone);  how to be patient; how to fight (social justice protests) and how to start a serious conversation on a future differently lived. We have this amazing opportunity to go beyond visions into the concrete.  We do not need to return to “normal”.   We need  to recognize that the ways in which most people are governed (brutal and anti-democratic); how we care for this planet (lot of talk, little action) and how difficult it is to end inequities (capitalism is a problem)  must change.  It is that how,  and in that I have not one answer.

Crossing, FC, Arkans

RR Crossing Forrest City, Arkansas

 

OMG 2020 IS ALMOST OVER!

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Zoom teaching

Teaching Hollins University, Spring 2020

A sunny Monday morning in Brooklyn.  The air goes from chilly to warmish back to chilly–a good winter day in the metropolis.  Quiet too–that post Christmas quiet when friends and family are satiated, gifts opened and delighted upon.  Or they are returned for that refund.  But this year’s Christmas was already quiet.  Few people traveling and those that do under extreme circumstances as in a neighbor saying he was driving to Florida to wave at his grand children there.  New strain of Covid is keeping him masked up and off airplanes.  That kind of Christmas.  But along with all kinds of caution, my neighbors have gone all out with lights and decorations–with the exception of Our Lady of Victory a RC church, no one has times for creche but oh those lights.  I do miss the blow up Santa and elves, but the family that put them up each year have left.

Indeed, this is a year of departures:  the awful and shameless deaths of people from COVID19.  The predatory and stalking deaths of Black Americans by police officers from the North to the South with the death of George Floyd added an horrible symmetry as it recalled the death of Eric Garner-both claiming their loss of breath:  “I can’t breathe”.  Indeed the loss of breath from the police, from the virus, from a variety of environmental accidents, episodes, intentional destruction.  And BIPOC (not my favorite acronym) bore the brunt because of systematic and sustained structural issues:  racism, sexism, poverty, economic stress.  The loss is huge and how it will be balanced remains an issue.

But, a great fight has been joined this year.  More people voted in the national election for the first time since the 1960s!  Democracy really was on the line and yes, it still is.  But the BidenHarris ticket won and by a solid majority.  That Trump and is supporters continue the fiction of voter fraud show just how much work we will have to continue to do.  The Trump people like to blow up city blocks, kill unarmed protestors and drive cars into people  demonstrating for justice.  Whether you say defund the police abolish the police or reform the police, you are saying that current policing across this nation is poor and THINGS GOTTA CHANGE.

So this year many things changed for me.  I lived in Virginia for 4 months on campus at Hollins University where I was the Louis D. Rubin Writer in Residence.  I was prepped to do amazing things: teach, write, read, socialize, explore Virginia and maybe even East Tennessee.  And well I taught a really great course with a terrific group of graduate and undergraduate students. I went to JMU at Harrisonburg for a Furious Flower book launch.  Before the shutdown I got to eat and drink at interesting restaurants in Roanoke.  And then it stopped.  And while my Brooklyn friends locked down; I was left isolated.  It was challenging but I learned to trust my instincts while living on an almost deserted campus.  I learned to listen to the birds, watch the squirrels, rabbits and on Mother’s Day in May, foxes.  People helped me get through the residency, but all of those glorious plans remained unfulfilled.

Much is riding on the coming year, but despite many things that did not happen; many things did in 2020.   I published important new work both prose and poetry. Two prose works: memoirs–were published, the most recent at https://www.pangyrus.com/category/essay-memoir/.   The New Yorker published two poems:  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/16/nia

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/30/betye-saars-mystic-chart-for-an-unemployed-sorceress

I curated a Radical Poetry Reading for The Brooklyn Rail New Social Environment https://brooklynrail.org/events/2020/09/16/radical-poetry-reading-with-patricia-spears-jones/

and am pleased that CA Conrad asked me to join an experiment as part of The Poetry Project’s Annual New Year’s Day Fundraiser which goes virtual. https://www.poetryproject.org/events/the-47th-annual-new-year-s-day-marathon

Moon over Bed-Stuy

huge moon huge dreams

And finally like many of you I did what I could to keep in touch with family and friends; to support social justice; remove Trump; and stay healthy.  None of this is easy.  But nobody’s bored.  I know I am not.

Keep these words in mind in coming year:  CREATIVITY, GENEROSITY, KINDNESS, INTELLIGENCE, LOVE.  We will need all of these things to keep our minds and bodies whole and prepared to struggle for a just world where human dignity is standard, not neglected.  Where art is exalted not exhausted.  Where we will be able to hold each other again.  Yes Black Lives Matter. Yes, the environment matters.  Yes, disarmament matters.  Yes, the struggle for peace continues.

 

Autumn in New York

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It is Moon Festival Day several Chinese friends tell me.  The Jewish High Holy Days have come and gone.  The toxic president continues to spew is bile. The weather is stunningly beautiful.  Yes, it is Autumn in New York.  Soon everyone will show photos of their walks with brightly colored trees. Or they will show photos of fleeing fires.  Or putting on snow tires.  Oh oh oh the weather in America, in the Northern Hemispheres is now framed, flooded, and flamed by climate change.

As a poet I do what I can to find as many ways as possible to not feel so isolated, anxious, depressed as the weather demands pure love.  On September 11, 2001 the weather was sparkling.  I do not trust sparkling weather anymore.  But it is beautiful.

As a poet, I am organizes workshops, writing post cards to get out the vote, organizing fundraisers for Democrats and curating programs.  Here’s one that helped me with my anxiety depression and isolation.  I thank The Brooklyn Rail for the opportunity to curate and present these amazing poets. oh and VOTE

 

Revulsion Revolt

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Bed-Stuy Brooklyn

Macon Street, Brooklyn 2020

When I returned to Brooklyn, the sun was bright, my apartment cleaned but utterly re-arranged. It was jarring, disturbing, it felt like a violation.  The kind person who stayed in my space for a couple of months had tried to make the space her own and that makes sense but she failed to put things back.  And all of this was while dealing with the extreme lock down in New York City.

The virus took a huge toll on the city and esp. Central Brooklyn.  At least two people in the neighborhood that I know (knew) were taken by the virus. Others buried many more.  All that grief, sadness during lockdown with few ways to physically connect have left people prepared to greet this extraordinary spring after a winter when the president and his advisors sent conflicting and often useless messages, but the main one was WE WILL NOT TAKE CARE OF YOU.  This to the now 100,000 plus citizens who have buried their loved ones.  People were prepared to walk into the sunlight,greet the spring. Little did we know what this spring would bring.

Six years ago, Eric Garner was killed by the police who were using an illegal choke hold in broad daylight.  A week or so ago, George Floyd was killed by the police who were using an unsanctioned choke hold.  Both men said as they were dying “I can’t breathe”.  That is an awful symmetry.

Helicopters are in the air over my neighborhood on this hot June Day. At 2 p.m. the Memorial for George Floyd will take place. Floyd’s murder on top of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor are what can only be seen as the last straw.  Thousands upon thousands of American citizens are taken to the streets from tiny towns to Minneapolis where Floyd’s last breath was taken.  Thousands upon thousands of citizens are expressing intense REVULSION towards the president and his henchmen; towards the widespread militarization of policing from small towns to major urban centers; thousands upon thousands of Americans of all shapes, sizes, abilities, sexualities,  gender identities, ethnicities, and races have expressed solidarity with Black Americans who have daily met with contempt and bias from police and who have born the deadly brunt of COVID-19.  This righteous revolt show that Americans are ready to change the narrative.

What is next is going to ask of us extraordinary work.  America has 400 years of creating systems of policing and oppressing people of African descent.  From enslavement; the Black Codes;  Jim Crow; discrimination and violence (night riders, lynching, etc,) Black Americans have fought to break down and demolish institutionalized racism, but we can’t do it alone.  Institutionalized racism serves White people and their allies with social, economic and cultural privilege(s).  The refutation of those privileges so that a more just , generous and caring society may truly develop is going to be hard for many to deal with.  It will take generations.  But it has started.

My dear friend, Soraya Shalforoosh,  a terrific poet from posted a poem by her son Dylan who is 11.  Dylan is Persian, Algerian, and Polish-American is still in elementary school and he is part of a generation who is anti-racist.   The children truly are beginning to perform that new world I and so many others have fought for and still seek.   Revulsion towards those who oppress, withhold justice and murder is so deeply felt.   This revolt may lead a place of societal transformation., at least we can continue to push push push for that change.  As Charlie Parker played when I was a child:    NOW IS THE TIME.

George Floyd 

When I first saw the video on tktok

I was scared but

I watched it again

I knew the video was real

But I felt so sad and also at the same time

I wanted to punch that cop

I sat with that feeling

Why is he racist?

Why did it happen?

Did George do something wrong?

Or no?

I skipped videos and saw people being peppersprayed

“ I can’t breathe”

That night i figured out how to change my profile to the Black Lives Matter fist

I was also thinking to myself if I was black, I could be next.

That made me worried for other people, especially my friends. who are black

I was worried for my cousin who is black .

a few moments at Hollins

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Zoom–online  teaching is  not my  forte,  but  as  with  my  colleagues  worldwide,  online  instruction  took  place. Since  I was  isolated  on  campus,  I decided  to  use  my  office  on  the  3rd  floor  of  the  hall  that  housed  the Creative  Writing  Department  offices.  Even  when  I had  to  walk  up  three flights  with  a cane,  I  am  glad  I used  the  office.   I  had  7 students–5   grad  students  &  2 undergrads–they  are  talented  and  they  worked  hard,  created  new  poems  and  presented  on  a wide  range  of  historical  and  contemporary  American  poets.  I am   glad to  have  work  by  them.

The grounds at  Hollins are lovely- hilly, green,  huge canopy of trees and on the grounds tiny and wondrous flowers.  It was great to see the redbud, dogwoods and lilacs.  Now the peonies are rose scenting the campus.

I will miss this place. But I am glad that I will be going home.

Zoom teaching