Category Archives: Poetry

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 Poetry Project’s 50th Annual NYE Marathon

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The poet Kay Gabriel adjusted the mic for Patricia Spears Jones at The  Poetry Project’s NYE Marathon.

 

By Alex Vadukul

On the morning of New Year’s Day, along the sleepy streets of the East Village in Manhattan, scarf-bundled crowds trickled into St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery to attend a 12-hour poetry reading that has been a spiritually cleansing downtown tradition since the 1970s. To its devotees, the gathering’s hypnotically lengthy programming of readings and avant-garde performances provides a dependably radical initiation into the new year.

Hosted by the Poetry Project, the nonprofit organization that has operated out of the historic church since the 1960s, the marathon serves as its biggest annual fund-raiser. About 150 writers, artists and dancers take their turns onstage until about midnight. Its performers have included William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Yoko Ono, Amiri Baraka and Patti Smith. Years ago, the poet John Giorno might have provided participants with a bowl of LSD-spiked punch; these days, young attendees head to the church directly after partying at all-night raves.

Sunlight poured through stained-glass windows as guests settled in for the long haul ahead. Beneath the church’s paint-peeling ceiling, many sat cross-legged in nooks and corners, unpacking the blankets and dog-eared paperbacks they had brought with them. A few parents wearing beanies sat in chairs with their babies in tow, and a woman walked her terrier down a crowded aisle.

Read More On The New York Times

Book Launch for Patricia Spears Jones’s The Beloved Community

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Book Launch for Patricia Spears Jones’s The Beloved Community

Patricia Spears Jones works truly toward her title in poems and friendship — in her newest work, The Beloved Community, she imagines a horizon of dignity and care, and writes with clear-eyed candor of the incremental effort required. Change accrues over daily moments of effort and attention, with poems of rich, lyrical regard.

Featuring a reading from Patricia Spears Jones with music performances from Jason Kao Hwang, Janice Lowe, and Luke Stewart.

We hope you can join us for a pre-event reception at 7 pm!

This in-person event will also be livestreamed via The Poetry Project’s YouTube.

NYS Poet aka PSJ

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PSJ: Winner of Jackson Prize and Appointed New York State Poet (2023-2025)

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New York State Author and PoetThe New York State Writers Institute has announced Jacqueline Woodson has been named the new State Author and Patricia Spears Jones the new State Poet.

The citations, established in 1985 by Governor Mario M. Cuomo and the State Legislature to promote fiction and poetry in New York, are awarded biennially under the aegis of the New York State Writers Institute. Awardees serve for two years in their honorary positions and each receives a $10,000 honorarium.

Woodson will receive the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction and Jones will receive the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry at a ceremony hosted by University at Albany President Havidán Rodríguez to take place at 7:30 pm on Friday, September 22, 2023, at the University at Albany’s Campus Center West Auditorium.

The NYS Author and NYS Poet ceremony serves as the official kickoff event for the 6th Annual Albany Book Festival presented by the NYS Writers Institute. That event takes place from 10:30 a.m. through 4:15 p.m. Saturday, September 23, 2023, where Woodson and Jones will appear at an informal conversation at 10:30 am and take questions from the audience in the Campus Center West Auditorium.

These events are free and open to the public and will be held at UAlbany’s Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Avenue. More information can bee found at albanybookfestival.com.

New Yorks Laureates

The awardees are chosen by panels of jurors, including students, convened by the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.

Both laureates came originally from the American South before putting down deep and lasting roots in New York City. Jacqueline Woodson, one of the most beloved children’s authors of her generation, moved to Brooklyn from Greenville, South Carolina at the age of seven. Patricia Spears Jones, born and raised in Arkansas, came to New York in the 1970s and quickly became a key figure in the poetry community.

Jacqueline WoodsonJacqueline Woodson‘s memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the 2014 National Book Award and was a New York Times bestseller. Her novel, Another Brooklyn, was a National Book Award finalist and an Indie Pick in 2016.

Among her many awards, Woodson is a two-time recipient of the Coretta Scott King Award and a four-time recipient of the Newbery Medal. She has also been honored with the Kurt Vonnegut Award, the Langston Hughes Medal, and the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. In 2020, she was named a MacArthur Fellow. She is the author of more than 30 books for young people and adults including Each Kindness, If You Come Softly, Locomotion and I Hadn’t Meant to Tell You This.

She served as Young People’s Poet Laureate (2015-17), and the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature of the Library of Congress (2018-19). She lives with her family in Brooklyn.

Patricia Spears JonesPatricia Spears Jones is a Brooklyn-based poet and the author of five collections, including The Beloved Community (2023) and A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems (2015). Her work has been anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She is also the co-editor of the groundbreaking 1978 anthology, Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women Poets.

Jones is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers and the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

An active literary citizen of New York for more than four decades, Jones served as program coordinator for The Poetry Project of St. Mark’s Church and founded the WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn. She is also a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute and founder of the American Poets Congress, a New York-based organization dedicated to finding “a new way of thinking about poetry and connecting it with politics.”

PSJ Installation Ceremony

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Join us for our Albany Book Festival kickoff event: the installation ceremony for our new NYS Author Ayad Akhtar and NYS Poet Willie Perdomo.
Akhtar will receive the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for Fiction and Perdomo will receive the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry at a special ceremony to be held 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 24, at the University at Albany’s Campus Center West Auditorium.
The NYS Author and NYS Poet ceremony serves as the official kickoff event for the 4th Annual Albany Book Festival hosted by the NYS Writers Institute — 10:30 a.m. through 5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 25.
Both events are free are open to the public and will be held at UAlbany’s Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Avenue.
“These two outstanding writers with New York roots are worthy recipients of these prestigious honors. We celebrate their singular literary excellence and how each embodies the vitality of literary art in New York State.”

More at https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org/

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

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 .

too much is not enough or an American Sunrise

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that was the motto on top of a Texas-themed bar on Fifth Avenue back in the late 70s, early 80s. There was a giant Armadillo on the roof.  sometimes I think we are in the too much is not enough era for real.  Too much lying, not enough truth telling  Too much male preening not enough acknowledgement of women–mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, lovers, friends. Not enough.

But then again there can ever be too much fun and not enough laughter.  So on my birthday, I posted a silly picture of me at end of my first full week in Roanoke, Virginia, far from Brooklyn, even farther from my Delta based home town.  It’s very green here. The highways are very wide.  There are creeks and creeks flood.  Birds are making noise.  Spring comes a little earlier in the South–even so there has been too much rain and not enough infrastructure to handle climate changing.  There are bills in the Assembly to remove RACIST LAWS that have been on Virginia’s books since 1913, but many Republicans refuse to repeal hem –like it would take an hour.  There are people fighting to keep mountains mountains and rivers unpolluted, but greed is more than enough to fight for short term gain forgetting the long term damage.  The lies are killing us.  Greed is killing us.  I for one am not interested in this grabbing of every resource for the profit of a few.   But too many people are like that armadillo on top of a bar: armored, exposed and frankly too scared to listen to their own truth.

It’s my birthday and I want us to grow our moral selves–demand truthtelling; mitigate greed; protect mountains, rivers, streams, land; proffer JUSTICE for all; sing beautiful songs; dance wonderful dances; watch ourselves flourish instead of just survive.  I guess this is a kind of prayer.  But hope is always a kind of prayer.

Sunrise 2-11-2018, Captiva, Fl

sunrise Captiva Island, Florida 2018