OMG 2020 IS ALMOST OVER!

Posted on December 28, 2020December 28, 2020 by admin

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

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.

Revulsion Revolt

Posted on June 4, 2020June 4, 2020 by admin

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 .

Year’s ending-horses still galloping

Posted on December 24, 2014December 24, 2014 by admin

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

Scorpion to Horse–November

Posted on December 8, 2014December 8, 2014 by admin

November was an amazing month. I organized and curated a literary program at Calabar Imports in Bed-Stuy on Tompkins Avenue, which received some local press. http://www.bkmag.com/2014/11/04/crossing-border-in-the-brooklyn-literary-scene-with-poet-patricia-spears-jones/

Q&A w/ poets

What was great to me was that each Sunday different voices brightened an already very colorful space. Janice Lowe and her actor friends performed a variety of pieces that she has written words or music or both for. Uche Nduka showcased how cosmopolitan African writers often are. Michael Broder and Rachel Levitsky called their event the “queer Jewish poets” reading. Cheryl Boyce Taylor and Jason Schneiderman opened up about grief and writing doing the Q&A and on November 30 was simply sublime. Alexis De Veaux and Gregory Pardlo read from their new works which are brilliant and the Q&A gave great insight into their process. I was so pleased to do this. And so grateful for their words.

I also read with Monica De La Torre at Pace University and Charles North’s introductions for both of us was beautifully crafted. and I really loved being a Brooklyn Poet of the Week. http://brooklynpoets.org/poet/patricia-spears-jones/. Thanks to Jason Koo, et al. And I led a great workshop at Poets House–one of my students is a budding rapper.

All of these great things are back drop to the the awful events in the past two weeks of November–Thanksgiving was difficult for people across the U.S. While I did not think Darren Wilson would be indicted since it was clear that the apparatus for organized to get a non-indictment. But the lack of indictment of NYPD officers for the death of Eric Garner was even more enraging. So with that I am so thankful for the PROTESTS that started in Ferguson and have been led by young people. And that close to 200 protests took place after the non-indictment in Missouri and the hundreds of protests around the globe after the Staten Island decision is so powerful #BLACKLIVESMATTER as a hashtag reminds everyone that all lives matter, but when Black lives are so easily destroyed believe you mean everyone’s life is in jeopardy. The militarized police; the corporate character of political leadership; the refusal to legislate immigration reform; the continuing destruction of public education and the recent election of the White Privilege Party aka the Republicans will make the next two years extremely challenging. But poets have been up to the challenge. On Facebook, Artists Against Police Brutality/Cultures of Violence have been really useful stitching together many different policies, programs, events and reportage. In the twittersphere,much is being done.

As a Black Poet, I’ve written about the live of ordinary people for years and every once in a while an ordinary person is killed in ways that should never have happened. Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin and countless other boys, men, girls and women should be breathing. Albert Murray would have something pithy about all of this, but one thing he would most likely agree with me: We have much to do in this nation and “trusting” the police is not one of those things.

Albert Murray projected photo by Patricia S. Jones