2014 LIVING IN THE LOVE ECONOMY/THE FUTURE IS IN OUR HANDS

Posted on January 1, 2015January 1, 2015 by admin

This is a year when airplanes dropped out the sky and just disappeared. Where Russian troops in Crimea pretended to not be Russian troops in Crimea. Where ACA almost died under the weight of lousy internet interface. It is a year with news of horrific rape, murder and abduction and it ends with rape allegations against an aging comedian. It is a year when

a generation of poets, activists and actors in their 70s, 80s and 90s left us and where younger ones died by their own hand or via drugs. It was a year that seem to to be like a over heated dressage-many obstacles to leap over; many traps to gallop through. This is the year I learned to be used to be an orphan, a position I so do not like being.

All of those awful, terrible, scary things were backdrop to what may be one of my most productive and accomplished year:
I have a new chapbook, Living in the Love Economy from Overpass Books, young people who are graduates of Long Island University–they studied with Lewis Warsh, who was on of my first poetry instructors when I came to NYC in 1974! The book launch at Berl’s was well attended and I was able to get Anselm Berrigan and Erica Hunt to share the spotlight. I thank them all.

Chapbook from Overpass Books.

Poems were published in The Cataramaran Literary Reader, The Recluse from The Poetry Project and The Mas Tequila Review.

Serious literary interviews were made with me by Lewis Warsh for The Otter and Rochelle Spencer for Mosaic and The Brooklyn Poets interviewed and featured me for the Brooklyn Poet of the Week (that was fun). The most interesting interview was actually a dialogue with Afaa Michael Weaver for the Furious Flower Poetry Center’s archive. And after harrassing, well gently needling Metta Sama, she pulled together this extraordinary convo that Monica Hand, Tracy Chiles McGhee, Raquel Goodison and Ruth Ellen Kocher on women’s creativity, artistic production and well read it at http://theconversant.org/staging/?cat=782.

Rich Blint of Columbia University asked me to participate in a panel for the The Year of Baldwin portion of The Harlem Bookfair. Aimee Meredith Cox moderated the panel and I have to say again that she may have been the best panel moderator I have ever encountered. It was a lively and fresh conversation between me, Christopher Winks and Kiese Laymon. And earlier in the year I participated in the National Black Writers Conference at Medgar Evers College–that was fascinating esp. seeing Derek Walcott up close.

I blogged for the “Harriet” blog for the National Poetry Foundation in September. What did I know that in September the #Ferguson protests would start up; that I would have some impact on supporting the work of activists or that I’d write up Maya Angelou’s Riverside Church Memorial or that I’d talk about Sonia Sanchez’ 80th birthday or have the chance to report on the Furious Flower Poetry Conference with a focus on what happened after the public events took place! Reading and participating at Furious Flower was important for me as a poet, esp. as a Black poet. I also wrote literary reviews for books by Tony Medina and Yuko Otomo and arts reviews on Dawoud Bey and Carrie Mae Weems.

In August I had the great gift of 10 days at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts where I put together a next to final draft of my New and Selected Poems with the great help of the VCCA staff–thank you again. I got to know Kelle Groom, Nichole Parcher, Joelle Wallach and other poets/composers, visual artists. And in October, I was able to fulfil my duties as a Senior Fellow for the Black Earth Institute and share in the wonderful hospitality of Michael McDermott and Charlotte Taymor in Wisconsin. The BEI gave its first ever award to Joy Harjo who was skyped in for the event–ah technology.

And also at VCCA I completed a commission–a new poem for a literary supplement to the forthcoming re-installment of The Migrations Series, Jacob Lawrence’s groundbreaking work that will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art. I thank Elizabeth Alexander for placing me in this august group. I had written about Lawrence’s work in an earlier poem which Quincy Troupe published in Black Renaissance Noir. It was a great opportunity and pretty scary-like will I pull this off? I did.

And I also worked with Atim Oton who is bringing her CALABAR brand to my hood, Bed-Stuy and so for the popup I developed a reading series, WORDS SUNDAY and it was really successful, But special shoutout to Janice Lowe who was in the first one, I want you back for a larger audience come Spring 2015.

And finally, I did readings for Paul Romero’s Bryant Park Series, most notably a “Lunch Poem” one with Jocelyn Lieu, Lydia Cortes, Jessica Greenbaum and Sharan Strange. And with Mark Statman for Neil Silbrerblatt’s Voices in Poetry series in Katonah. Rowan Ricardo Phillips brought me to SUNY Stony Brook, where June Jordan and Cornelius Eady advanced contemporary poetry. Getting to know Rowan and his work has been a boon. Also read “The Day Lady Died” for the Frank O’Hara Lunch Poem Publication Anniversary event at the Poetry Project. And at the end of the year I read at KBG with Shanna Compton–it was a night rich with verbal fireworks and deep emotions. There was more, but it’s cold. It’s December 31. It’s time to sum stuff up.

I know that much of this year has been about violence, danger, death and protest. I am sad about the danger, death and violence, but I am so pleased that protests are underway and not just here from Mumbai to Santiago Chile to Hong Kong to St. Louis, Missouri young people are awake and demanding their future–not one of fewer economic prospects, more debt; tyrannical police, environmental degradation; expensive consumerism and shoddy services–but one that may be more equitable, caring and creative. The world has always been violent and dangerous, but cynicism simply keeps whoever is in power in power. I thank young people for starting to say nada mas, no more. Yes #blacklivesmatter, Yes #afutureisinourhands. 2015 HERE WE COME.

Harlem is a small town

Posted on August 4, 2014August 4, 2014 by admin

When I first came to New York City, Harlem seems a forbidding place, mostly because I lived downtown and going uptown even for 35 cents was a chore. Most of my community, artistic and otherwise lived below 14^th Street, mostly on the East Side. But Harlem is where Black people lived, worked and in the mythology of NYC, made the Harlem Renaissance. But that was decades ago. And yet, artists friends took me up to the Studio Museum, which was housed in an old studio, upstairs on Fifth Avenue. Down the street was a seriously good Latin restaurant. The pawnshops and nail salons and cheap furniture stores that dotted 125^th street looked like the pawnshops and nail salons and cheap furniture stores on 14^th street. There really is something about cross roads.

James Baldwin grew up in East Harlem. Grew to hate it, left America, but then again, his family stayed near. He stayed near his family. In a very psychic way, he really never left Harlem. Paris, Turkey the world travels were ways to bring his issues to the larger world, but those issues came from a specific place in America. I am not sure of what he would make of 128^th street where he went to school. The well-appointed townhouses and brownstones have been spruced up. The beautiful green house across the street has one of the most perfect paint jobs I’ve ever seen.

by Patricia Spears Jones

On his birthday, August 2 his family and the community that came out on an overcast Saturday afternoon to sing his praises and present a ceremony honoring the placement of a street sign on the street were glad for the cool breezes and the day’s calm. I got there just as Sonia Sanchez was chanting Baldwin’s name. At some point, she said that Baldwin did not receive awards for his work—but he did receive many grants, fellowships. He would not have survived w/out that support and recognition. I often think that we put too much on awards as if the National Book Award or a Pulitzer will assure your place in the culture. Like on the tip of your tongue, could you tell me who won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in say 2000? Or 1995 or 1978? I could look these up, but is it Updike or Bellow or Morrison? I don’t know. I do know the work of these fine writers and I now know much more about Baldwin.

by Patricia Spears Jones

As Rich Blint pointed out the street sign will not be put up for a while the city puts up all new signs on one day. (as if by magic) so they provide mockups that can be shown to the adoring populace. So on Saturday, the mockup was held up for all of us to see. It is green. Baldwin’s name is correctly spelled. His nephew Trevor Baldwin spoke eloquently for the family in accepting this honor. And representatives from the National Black Theater, from the school where this event took place and where Baldwin went to school were happy and proud. Black people mostly who know the family, knew “Jimmy” care about art and culture and Black history and Black people’s lives and this slice of Harlem and its volatile history were there. And then I got it, Harlem really is a small town. One where people do know each other, look out for each other, worry about each other. And who see the town slowly change as newcomers with more money come in; people who may not understand how hard won the beauty of these blocks from 125^th and up was fought for against red lining, racism, neglect and countless deaths from bad drugs, bad decisions, poor diet or a life spent working 2-3 jobs so that children only had to get one. Baldwin understood that. His love is often cited, his ability to not the need for that. And I think like St. Paul who in First Corinthians 13 says “For now we see through a glass darkly”—that darkness must be acknowledged. It seems to me that all of this “transparency” and “illumination” that everyone talks about covers up more than darkness does. There is not light at the end of a tunnel of light, there is blindness.

Baldwin understand like St. Paul that “the greatest of these is charity”, but he could also say that you can only love after you recognize the rage resulting from injustice, brutality, hatred. He aspired to and achieved greatness as a writer, thinker, human being. We can only hope that generations hence seeing the street sign will think, I need to find out who this James Baldwin is. I hope that there will be many books, articles, oral histories, etc. along with his essential work available to those future readers.

by Patricia Spears Jones

Baldwin and me? July 11, 2014

Posted on July 12, 2014July 12, 2014 by admin

book table HBF Fiction Festival, Columbia U.

This morning I participated in a roundtable organized by Rich Blint for the Harlem Book Fair Fiction Festival, The Year of James Baldwin and I think because Rich really wanted this discussion of Baldwin. It was the first of three programs. It had the lofty title, Inheritance: James Baldwin and His Literary Progeny. Along with Kiese Laymon, the novelist and writer; Christopher Winks, the well-known academic and moderated by Aimee Meredith Cox, we delved into what Baldwin’s work and example has left us and how we are trying in our own ways to carry on work that deals with the human heart, the American psyche and the American empire. We did not even touch on sexuality or gender issues too much. Baldwin looms large for Black writers because in the 1960s and early 1970s he was the face of Black intellectualism. He wrote beautifully, powerfully and yet he was in the streets too. He talked to everyone and people listened. He was hated and haunted too. That’s the way it goes for a man who thought of himself as ugly and identified with Bette Davis because she has pop eyes and so must be ugly too.

Aimee Cox started the conversation by mentioning the idea of Baldwin’s life as representing a “probable impossibility” (I hope I am saying this correctly). Given Baldwin’s background, poverty, etc. how did he grow up the eldest of nine children to become the man and the writer that he became. Probable impossibility seems apt. But he did. Over the past two weeks I have read two Baldwin novels and re-read several of his essays. It was not a total immersion by any measure, but these works remind me of why his voice-sensual, intellectual, cajoling, angry, loving, hinting at redemption, but not necessarily forgiveness remains vivid,loud and powerfully present. American literature would have been so much poorer if he had not had the career that he did.

This morning we talked about courage and cowardice; what is at stake in our lives as writers; as educators; as American citizens while our nation sinks into an even greater morass of mistakes inside and outside our borders and indeed on our border–the humanitarian crisis with thousands of children fleeing possible murder. The appalling situation in the Middle East. And the nihilistic GOP aka just say no to governance party. We can only guess what Baldwin would say, but frankly, it is up to us to have our say on these and other issues. Art is political because it involves communication with people; with setting up dynamics of dialogue started by the poet, the artist, Will these dialogues lead to insights, new ways to thinking, some form of transformation or will we refine what is already there. Today, other members of the panel explained to me what neoliberalism is because I see this word used all the time as a kind catchall for bad public (private partnership) policy. I thank them.

Later, Pam Sneed, Mendi Obadike and Rashida Ismaili discussed The Artist Struggle for Integrity. It was a very important discussion and some of the same issues: Baldwin’s “preaching”; the uses of African American religious music-those hymns come up over and over in his work; the fact that “Baldwin identified as a gay man” as Pam pointed out were all important. Right now artists/poets are struggle to being seen and heard in an era where many of potential artist are texting; have the same songs on heavy rotation; or just don’t read; don’t go to events, even free one. Where many young people do not have the habit of having an opinion because nobody asks them what they think. They should be asked and we need to start asking and sooner than later. Forces are arrayed to make the lives of most people more difficult as salaries stagnate; wages rarely go up; collective bargaining is underminded; and those with wealth and power further consolidate their wealth and power. I know this is a long piece, but well Baldwin makes you think about what we have had to face; what so many desired; what has happened and what still needs to get done. I am honored to have been asked to participate in such an amazing program.