Poet Patricia Spears Jones published her collection The Beloved Community in 2023. Here she speaks about the book and her path as a writer.
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| Patricia Spears Jones, photo by Marcia E. Wilson |
Zack Rogow: Many of your poems are sparked by chance encounters in an urban area, often New York City. What types of encounters are most likely to generate a poem for you?
Patricia Spears Jones: The encounters could be a phrase overheard on the sidewalk, the weather, a gallery exhibition, a movie scene, another poet’s work, the scent of the subway or a perfume counter, the taste of whiskey, music—especially live performances, a garment’s color and cut. Basically, even with my diva cane! I am a flaneuse, as the poet Scott Hightower once described me.
Q. There are several elegies in The Beloved Community: for Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, for Aretha Franklin, for pianist Geri Allen, and others. How does a poet make the loss of an individual life resonate for readers?
I think that one of the great gifts that poets give is to make the loss of an individual resonate—whether they are historic figures, or celebrities, as listed in your question, or a family member or friend. Thulani Davis said that poets sing people into this world and sing them out. Sometimes it takes very long to do so—I’ve been thinking about the life and very much the death of Fred Hampton since I was in my teens. His death is mentioned in an early poem of mine. “Glad All Over,” but I wasn’t able to write the poem about him in The Beloved Community until 2021. So finding that language took like 50 years. As for the Gerri Allen lyric, that was almost sent—I had recently seen her play in a lovely park in Sugar Hill, Harlem, and a year later she passed and I could still see her playing the piano. Each of these poems can only provide a trace of what I was feeling when I wrote them. The hardest was the one for Aretha because I was out of the U.S. when she passed, but it gave me the opportunity to see her globally.
There are also poems in the collection that are a kind of elegy for persons and the place—the persons are Lee Breuer, Steve Cannon, and Hannah Weiner—and the place, the East Village of the 1970s. Lee and the people at Mabou Mines got me to New York City, Steve Cannon introduced me to the “third whirl” poetics, as he called it from his perch on East Third Street, he lived in an actual house! And Hannah Weiner was sort of the older cool poet who seemed to have the strangest and vibrant life—I am sure she was mad, but mad for poetry. She saw WORDS and, in a way, gave all of us permission to delve ever so intensely into WORDS.
I was inspired by the encounter and the sense of community that the laundromat and indeed any of the laundromats in Brooklyn have. They are places you go to regularly and if you have a routine you see some of the same people maybe twice a month or weekly. People are often talkative or secretive—it’s amazing what some folks don’t want you to see in a laundromat. The workers are often immigrants, English may be their second or third language, sometimes family members join them to clean up. All the while people are washing their clothes. And the workers often post fliers for neighborhood events, so seeing one for a memorial service was a jolt. It is strange I only saw that woman in question just that time, but accidental intimacy happens in neighborhoods where you must go outside your home to do even the most mundane thing, like wash your clothes.
Q. One thing that’s always struck me about your poems is how you can move from what seems almost like a superficial level to such a deep one with just a few words. I’m thinking about the poem “First and last nights in Virginia, January and May 2020,” where you describe shopping in a chain drugstore. Suddenly the last three syllables of the poem turn it into a political manifesto. How do you switch from what seems like an everyday description to something much more significant in only a few words?
It's all in the build-up and I also want to collapse that time in as sharp a way as possible. The year 2020 was just so grim and the sham response from the business community (we need workers to go back to work even as workers were dying) and President Trump worsened the atmosphere. And one of the great things about poetry is when you want to really say it you do it with as few words as possible and each one matters.
Q. You’ve recently received well-deserved recognitions, including being named New York State Poet and the inaugural Lucille Clifton Poetry Chair at the Community of Writers; and winning the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. For many decades, though, you worked without receiving major honors, surprising for an author as accomplished as you. What kept you going all those years when your work was not widely recognized?
I made a serious decision in 1990 to complete my MFA from Vermont College and keep pushing my work because I knew that I had something to say as a poet and I am quite stubborn and proud. For my MFA I was advised by Lynda Hull and Mark Doty, and briefly by the late Belle Waring, and finally David Rivard. I read like 200-300 poetry collections, literary criticism, philosophy, history, etc. And from that I knew that what I was saying and how I was saying it could and should be part of the discourse. As stated, I am quite proud. While my work appeared to be ignored by the various versions of the poetry establishment, I have always had patrons and champions who have found my work to be important and necessary. I am glad they did. It has not been easy and there are days when I wished I had received all this 10 years ago when I was healthier, but better late than never. The Jackson Poetry Prize was a total surprise, but earlier in 1996 when I received an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) I knew that maybe just maybe my poetics was finding readers and a place in what is often called the avant-garde. I do not think of myself as that, but I got to thank Jasper Johns for the FCA funds which allowed me to: a) buy a computer, and b) take a trip to Paris. I don’t usually name drop, but you know what, if I want to I can and that is another way of saying writers, musicians, artists, journalists whom I respect and admire offered me their respect and admiration—that kept me going. And keeps me going.
Patricia Spears Jones’ poetry collection The Beloved Community is published by Copper Canyon Press. Her other books include A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. She has taught creative writing at Hollins University, Adelphi University, Hunter College, and Barnard College. Jones leads poetry workshops for The Workroom, Hugo House, the Community of Writers, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Gemini Ink, and Brooklyn Poets. She organizes the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute.
Zack’s memoir about his father, the writer Lee Rogow: Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
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