Category Archives: Ideas & Thoughts

time to start to look back

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last year of my 50s! at Cafe Loup, photo by Karen Bell

last year of my 50s! at Cafe Loup, photo by Karen Bell

Since 2008 I have been writing about being  a Black Bohemian in the East Village in the 1970s.  I am trying to discover who I was as a way to understand how I’ve been able to be a poet and artist and person in this world.  It has been daunting, but slowly the memoir is coming together.

Thanks to Malaika Adero for presenting my brief look at 1976 the photo by Amos Rice that shows Stanley Crouch, Alice Norris, David Murray, Carlos Figueroa, me, Phillip Wilson Victor Rosa and Charles “Bobo” Shaw.http://homeslicemag.com/outside-tim-palace-photograph-1976/

I hope to publish more pieces over the next several months

 

progress is not a trick

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“We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that bias and discrimination are immutable, that racial division is inherent to America.  If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s.  Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed.  Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago.  To deny this progress, this hard-won progress -– our progress –- would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better”.  President Barack Obama

Progress is not a trick, but assessing it can be tricky.  I am of an age where I see clearly how much this nation has changed since 1965 and yes there is much un-finished business.  Racism and hatred and violence are those societal elements that we must constantly struggle with.  Justice is often denied, but sometimes justice is made.  Ferguson as our President pointed out is not “unique”–the worst corruption there is is small town corruption.  I know because I grew up in a small town.  But as the President, the Representatives and the still living foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement constantly point out, we have destiny in our hands.  To not vote, the pretend that your vote doesn’t matter means to me at least that you give up any right to complain about anything because you have ceded your power and most likely to the very people who will do you the greatest harm.  Black people, progressive people sat out the 2014 elections and see what kind of Congress we got now.

I am tired of people saying well these people are racists and therefore more honest.  I know he’s a thief, so I will vote for him and not complain when he dips his hand in the collective till.  Racists are no more honest than anyone else.  But greed, stupidity, meanness, misogyny and misanthropy reign supreme in the halls of Congress.  But there has been greed, stupidity, violence, et al in the past.  And when it got too bad-the VOTERS through the rascals out.  I have voted in every election but one since I registered to vote right out of college–that means Presidential elections. primaries, school board elections, State and local contests.  All of them in three cities: Atlanta, New York and Boston.  Sometimes my candidates win, sometimes they lose.  But I can complain and praise and put my two cents in with pride.  People died.  Black people died so that I could participate in this democracy, a very far from perfect experiment.

There are terrible things going on in every state in this Union-men and women hell bent on destroying public education; on destroying collective bargaining and unionization not only in the public sector, but the private sector as well–a good way to KEEP WAGES DOWN; on making health care unaffordable and almost inaccessible for poor and working class people;  and policing women’s bodies esp. during childbearing years.  These people hate art and culture and think that anybody or maybe robots should teach.  Of course their children go to expensive private schools.  They will sell of park lands.  Gut the budgets of child welfare offices.  They are there because less than 50% of people show up and vote.  And as long as “progressives” sit on their hands and occupy their grievances these people will do even more harm.  Plenty people talk about revolution and societal transformation, but few are willing to DO THE WORK to make laws; to set policies; to administer them.  And so the right takes more and more control.  The people who were beaten and brutalized by the STATE OF ALABAMA 50 years ago wanted to vote in order to gain power and  make change.  The mayor of Selma is Black.  The mayor of Selma is Black.

many poets at Wilson Hall/Furious Flower PC, Virginia

many poets at Wilson Hall/Furious Flower PC, Virginia

La vida de la poet

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One of the things about writing poems is to take risk or to use unlikely sources.  On my birthday I share this poem selected by The AshberyHomeSchool organized by Adam Fitzgerald and Emily Skillings.  Many years ago, I took Thulani Davis to see Belle Du Jour for her birthday.  We felt oh so sophisticated.  That seems like a century ago and indeed it was in the last century of the last millennium. Years later I thought about the film, but also more about what is marriage since it has been on everyone’s mind-gay marriage; divorce rates; why get married; why men are happier married, etc. etc. etc.     I am not married, but probably would have made an interesting wife had I been married.  But who knows.  I do not.  But the film gave a look at how marriage represses women.  And the ways in which she “liberates”  or does not “liberate” herself is at the heart of the film.  Of course it’s a film by the great Spanish director Bunel and given his misogyny, the liberation focuses on her use of sex.  Of course women liberate ourselves in a range of ways and that is a good thing.   We need more liberty.  We need to think about what marriage or not marriage is.  We need to find language that allows our full selves to be claimed by our full selves.  As a poet who is living her life as best she can, I know that it is not easy to live one’s full life.  But I urged each of us to do so as best we can.

At MOMA, with Jacob Lawrence catalog, January 2015

At MOMA, with Jacob Lawrence catalog, January 2015

http://ashberyhomeschool.org/gallery/patricia-spears-jones/

the thrill of departure

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I taught a poetry workshop for Poets House using “departure” as a way to allow writers to take a different direction; try new things. Everyone has certain ways of seeing, feeling–I know that I do.  And any time I am asked to try something different, called to create from another vantage, I embrace the process.  But I know it may not work.  There is always risk in not making good or hopefully great work. Of having your writing in the company of others who have been deemed valuable.  I know that my work is well-regarded and for some deeply admirable.  But I am not a prize receiving poet.  The New York Times does not know my name.  My last book, Painkiller, of which I very proud received like 3 reviews.  And yet, I am completing A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems for White Pine Press.  I would love to get prizes and the monies attached.  I would love to get the praise.  But my work as a poet has been to keep going despite neglect or rejection–it is not about giving up hope. It is about thinking that maybe in the language I choose to work with, I bring something new, different, engaged to the discourse.  I am not glib.  I cannot reduce my work to a sound bite–that does not interest me.  What does is that thrill of departure-the step towards something possibility familiar, but often completely unknown.

When Elizabeth Alexander asked me to write a poem in response to Jacob Lawrence Migrations series, I was deeply touched.  This was not expected and I was not sure of what I’d do; how I’d do it.  I had written a poem in response to Lawrence’s “Builders” series-a gorgeous, hopeful group of paintings.  That poem was published in Black Renaissance Noire, thanks Quincy Troupe.  But this was different and when I was at VCCA this past August, I was able to pull together the strands of thinking about Lawrence’s work and a panel in that celebrated series and make a poem.  I will always be grateful to my fellow VCCA residents who heard the poem read aloud for the first time and my good friend Deborah Wood Holton for her insightful first reading.  I will read the final version, May 1 at MOMA with Elizabeth, Yusef Komunyakaa, Rita Dove, Tyehimba Jess, Crystal Williams, Nathasa Tretheway,  Terrence Hayes, and Kevin Young.

A few days ago I stood in the recording studio at MOMA holding the catalog and marveling at the hard work done to bring Lawrence’s work to a new generation; a large audience.  From what I have heard from everyone who worked with him, he was a deeply kind, generous and hard working man.  An artist whose gifts are giving with love and great honor to the ancestors.  I am grateful to him for showing what vision and work whether quickly seen or gained over a lifetime means.  It means that the thrills keep coming year after year after year.  The show opens April 3.  I hope you go see it and see the work of artists living and gone–depart from your own vision. See where the colors, lines, figures take you–the journey may be long or short, but it will be different.

At MOMA, with Jacob Lawrence catalog, January 2015

At MOMA, with Jacob Lawrence catalog, January 2015

 

Year’s ending-horses still galloping

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I know that the Year of the Horse will go into late January, so the galloping is not over.  We have been on a very wild ride.  The news of day has often been mysterious, horrific, terrifying or utterly silly.  Sometimes the same item can be described with all those words.  I know that it has been a wild ride for me and one that I treasure because I am breathing and too many people I love no longer breathe.

Florence Tate whom I only met in “real life” recently passed.  I knew her son Greg Tate for what seems like forever.  But his famous Mama I met via social media–she was a great presence on Facebook and intensely encouraging to me and many other writers, artists, singers, organizers, activisits and bon vivants.  The last time I saw her breathing was at the Funeral for Amiri Baraka–the kind of affair that brought his friends, enemies, former lovers, their children and just about anyone who was a who in the downtown/Black Arts Movement/literary scene to Symphony Hall in Newark.  I will also miss Galway Kinnell whose readings at Brooklyn’s Ferry Landings at the end of the Poets House Bridge Walks were so very very special.  His passion for life, for poetry for oatmeal LOL never left him. Like Baraka, Kinnell was a fighter for justice; a great teacher–they were poets who created communities and they both lived long enough to modify earlier excesses and mend some fences.

I can’t breathe #Ican’tbreathe has become a chant; an indictment; a statement of anguish and demand.  Eric Garner’s utterly unnecessary death at the hands of the NYPD and others who are here to serve people galvanized and continues to galvanize young people on top of those marching/organizing/agitating in Ferguson MO.  The parade of dead Black, Brown and occasionally White bodies at the hands of Law Enforcement (LE) has made a significant number of people who had otherwised kept their heads in the sand. look up and see that the police are more soldiers than peace officers and that much of policing has become occupation–the lastest military incursions by the Israel into Gaza serves as a kind of template, it seems to me.  These are ugly times.  Ugly times.

And yet I am writing on a chilly rainy day in Brooklyn, a piano solo-some minor league European composer’s work makes perfect background noise.  Today I went to the Museum of Modern Art to read “Lave” a poem commissioned for the catalog for One Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence Migrations Series which will open in early April at MOMA.  Elizabeth Alexander has done a great job of bringing Black poets with very different poetics together to honor and respond to Lawrence’s seminal work.  I know that this was a great opportunity; a great challenge.  I hope people will respond to our response.  I also saw the Robert Gober Retrospective.  Gober is White.  He’s Gay and he’s Young and very definitely breathing and I am glad.  His sculptures defy standards of beauty; his bodies are never complete; his anguish not extinguished; his fears what should be feared–bullies, killers of the mind as well as body–the title of the exhibition is The Heart Is Not  a Metaphor and you know what it is not  Pulsating, pumping, a muscle whose only job is to keep the body upright and moving, the heart is beyond compare.  And yet even Gober allows the heart, the hearth to become symbols for the ways we attempt to stunt pulsation; to destroy intimacy, charity, erotic impulse.

At the end of this Year of Baldwin; this Year of Losses, public and private; this year of Protests and Counter Protests.  The fighting t-shirts: I can’t breathe/I can breathe  the year when too many White People found themselves in a racial quagmire of their own making with no understanding of how to get out–I for one listen to the young people who started #blacklivesmatter; who demanded to be heard in at unneeded Al Sharpton organized march; who march and chant and tweet and demand to be able to BREATHE and to have a future.  Saludos to you.  May we all get off that horse when the Year of the Horse ends, saddle sore, yes, but ready to walk on this altered/altared earth. May we find a way to breathe together in justice, in peace.

Crech, Bed-Stuy, photo by Patricia Spears Jones

Crech, Bed-Stuy, photo by Patricia Spears Jones

 

November is for shutting down

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Not running around.  Not starting new programs.  Not acting like it is always warm and easy and why isn’t it quiet. Well soon it will be-snow mentioned in the forecast, but all there is is a chilly November rain.  Despite that I went to Harlem for a program on the Life and Times of Albert Murray at the Schomburg Center.  A smallish crowd was there, but what was heartening was a smattering of young people as well as people more of his contemporaries.  Good panel, but the best was watching Mr Murray read about “Taking the A Train” that examines the issue of “home”.  And of course it was a love letter to Harlem, a place he lived for over 50 years.

Albert Murray projected photo by Patricia S. Jones

Albert Murray projected photo by Patricia S. Jones

Each Sunday now I go to church which has been a great solace–have been missing my Mother a great deal and then I run back home and prepare to host a new series I curate WORDS SUNDAY at Calabar Imports Bed-Stuy Popup.  The shop brings some brightness to a rather drab part of Tompkins although slowly Tompkins Ave. is becoming a “destination” for certain types.  More and more I feel this neighborhood losing its style, its cool as the hipster types have morphed into Eurotrash or corporate go getters.  It makes for odd moments of levity or tension depending.  Last week featured Michael Broder and Rachel Levitsky, who on their own called it the queer Jewish reading.  So be it.  They were great.  I particularly loved Rachel’s prose–crafted, learned, funny at times.  This coming Sunday Jason Schneiderman and Cheryl Boyce-Taylor.  I hope I have enough energy to do them justice.

Rachel Levitsky reading photo by Paticia S. Jones

Rachel Levitsky reading photo by Paticia S. Jones

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other great thing is I got written up in two different places in an article on WORDS SUNDAY at http://www.bkmag.com/2014/11/04/crossing-border-in-the-brooklyn-literary-scene-with-poet-patricia-spears-jones/ and I think it actually brought some people into the store!

And then I got to be BROOKLYN POET OF THE WEEK by Jason Koo and his Brooklyn Poets crew.  I got to pontificate and do some shout outs.  I said nice things about a former neighbor who passed away and I wrote a poem based on Jay Z’s Brooklyn Go Hard–not something I’d usually do.  So check it out http://bit.ly/1zGTOQI.

Did I mention teaching and a great reading at Pace University with Monica De La Torre?  No, well did that too. That I am teaching at Poets House? That I wrote a few mini-essays and even did some volunteer fundraising work?  Oh November, aren’t I supposed be prepping for hibernation?

 

Halloween weather

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This is the year that I have been in places where Halloween is not about spectacle, but about the end of harvest and the beginning of winter. In Celtic Lore, All Hallows Eve is really New Year’s Eve–the old world goes/the new year comes and yes the living and the dead may speak.  Which is why Dios de los Muertos makes sense too.  There needs to be an understanding of the many worlds we move through.  Poets of course know this.  We do.  We may not always acknowledge that, but we do.   Without that intuited understanding of the many worlds we move through we would be bereft of word play.  We would not recognize the need for myths.  We would be diminished in our words and in our play.   One of my favorite uses of the mythic is Ishmael Reed’s masterful “I am a Cowboy in the Boat of Ra” http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/i-am-cowboy-boat-ra

My favorite Halloween time was in the late 1970s’early 80s before AIDS and celebrity overtook the Village Halloween Parade.  In the early iteration, the parade was home made, artist organized-goofy, sexy and a true conversation between the living and the dead. When the Bread & Puppet Theater people met up in Washington Square around midnight and the hag became the maiden or was it the other way around; when drag queens wearing nurses uniforms tottered by on 5 inch heels across W. 4th St.; seeing The Royal Wedding at the corner of W. 10th & W. 4th–loved the guy as Princess Diana; when one group’s costumes were Victorian lamp shades just walking across 7th avenue South on the way to Christopher Street which post 10 pm. became a loud disco party.  Everyone was dancing, everyone was conversing with the living and the dead.   I guess the AIDS epidemic increased that conversation.  I miss many people who were stricken with the disease-smart, talented pleasure seeking men and women.  I am thankful for having known David Warrilow, Max Navarre, many others.

Now Halloween is a business, like everything else in America.  The business of costumes and how to videos and sugared and sugar free candies and fake spider webs and decorations.  I grew up with the hand made costume, the kind that make scenes in Meet me St. Louis and To Kill a Mockingbird so memorable.  Things change, not always for the better. But every year Halloween comes round. Every year a circle of the living and dead meet, dance and begin to survive winter.

Black Earth

Black Earth

Patricia Spears Jones Reading at Bryant Park

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John Keene blog post about the reading.

 

Word for Word Lunch Poems at Bryant Park + Jeffery Renard Allen at Powerhouse

Among the many treasures New York City offers year-round is the weekly Word for Word series at the outdoor Bryant Park Reading Room, right behind the New York Public Library‘s Schwarzman Research Branch. Organized by Paul Romero, the poetry readings occur on Tuesdays (and some Wednesdays) in the evening and Thursdays at lunch time from January through the late fall, , except on major holidays, and feature a diverse range of readers. This year’s lunchtime readings have been organized around specific presses and poetry organizations and groups, so poets published by Coffee House Press, Song Cave Press, WordTech Communications, and affiliated with CUNY and Blue Flower Arts have read so far.

can’t sleep too much on my mind

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The Furious Flower Poetry Center is housed in a little house in Harrisonburg –part of James Madison University.  Never has so small a space held such a large role.  I just got back from the third Furious Flower conference that brought poets and scholars of the African diaspora (majority American) to this well-to do city in the midst of the mountains of Virginia.  A place where most of the people are Republicans.  Where people talk football, hunting and yes education, law and order and too much money in politics.  You can see that money in the terrible political ads.  I got there on the Amtrak to Charlottesville which was on time as if to mock the lateness of the same train a month earlier when I went to VCCA.

halfway to the conference

halfway to the conference

I am so pleased to have been invited.  I’ve been writing and publishing for four decades.  I write because I want to try and make large work on intimate issues–at least I try.  I don’t quite fit an of the critical stance and maybe my work never will.  I just don’t know.  But I was asked and I am happy to have read with truly fine and important poets: Jericho Brown, Camille Dungy, Mendi Obadike, Remica L. Bingham-Risher, Tyehimba Jess, Samantha Thornhill and A. Van Jordan.  Our group brought a diverse range of poetics and strategies, but we were all well versed in how to present words.   But it would have been great if we had been presented at Wilson Hall as were the other major readings.  It would have been great if we had been introduced.  But by Saturday everyone was close to exhausted–much to consider by some super considerable people.   Despite these small issues, I am so glad I was there.  And I was happy to sign the conference booklet–there are people who get all of the names.

And so there we were many of my bestest friends-there were we were chatting and gossiping and sharing of work old and new.  But so much so much it makes sleeping almost impossible as words and phrases and images reel about my mind:  Rita Dove telling us “this is not my hair.”; hearing Nikki Giovanni go on and on about space travel and champagne; watching Marilyn Nelson walk across the ballroom floor to get her award using an elegant walking stick; watching my main men: Tony Medina, Major Jackson, Thomas Sayers Ellis who were festive, pensive, observant depending.  Medina’s performance of the poem/tribute for Amiri Baraka, which I first heard at Barka’s funeral was well done.  Thomas Sayers Ellis performed with Luke Stewart (bassist) and James Brandon Lewis (saxophone) including his piece in honor of Chuck Brown, the founder of Gogo.Ekere Taille read well w/ her elders and Jessica Care Moore let her song King join her when she read in the Baraka tribute.  Kwame Dawes gave a great talk as did Brenda Marie Osbey.  The intelligence quotient was quite high. The focus on the Black Arts Movement impressive, but other Black cultural trends were also considered

I could go on and on, but I have to stop and figure out what does any of this mean.  I think for me it means I am part of the discourse. That I have entered the charmed circle of poest and writers who are read, taught, discussed on a regular basis that makes me feel very good.  We read. We talked to each other.  We exchanged email addresses.  We drank and ate and danced and felt so much gratitude to have the chance to be together.  Dr. Joanne Gabbin has created a powerful entity, may it continue.

many poets at Wilson Hall

many poets at Wilson Hall