Line / Break | Season 4 with Patricia Spears Jones

Interview Transcript

Ryo Yamaguchi (00:05):
Hey, everybody, I’m Ryo Yamaguchi, the publicist at Copper Canyon Press, and you are tuning into season four of our interview series, Line/Break, which goes off the page and into the poems and minds of our beloved poets. We’ve had such fun over these seasons, hearing poems, talking about writing, books, and life. It’s been one of the all-time favorite things we do at the press. So friends, for season four, we have a format change. For this season, we are doing some close reads. Each episode will focus on either a single poem or a single topic, wandering away, returning, and wandering away again, along all the little paths we simply can’t resist. The episodes will probably be a little tighter, a little shorter, but we can’t say for sure. Thanks for joining us.

(00:54):
For this episode, my goodness, the extraordinary Patricia Spears Jones, she’s the new state poet of That Empire State. She’s a pillar in the Brooklyn poetry scene, and someone who seems to be able to write in and out of every type of poem imaginable. What we want to talk about to you today is something a little hard to pin down, magic moments. Read through Patricia’s new book, The Beloved Community, and you’ll encounter countless numbers of them, those moments in our lives we all have at the deli or laundromat or walking down the sidewalk, when we pause, when the light is just right, when someone makes a peculiar gesture, or the memory of a loved one long gone springs to mind, and we feel all of the world behind it. Patricia, welcome, thank you for being here.

Patricia Spears Jones (01:40):
I am so glad to be here on this gloomy November day.

Ryo Yamaguchi (01:46):
Yeah, it is … I know, I know … Are you a winter soul, a fall person? Do you get into it, or are you … It sounded like you weren’t quite ready for snow yet.

Patricia Spears Jones (01:56):
I’m an Aquarius, so we’re all winter born babies, so winter is not … As long as you don’t go out and run around in the snow like a crazy person, winter is okay.

Ryo Yamaguchi (02:10):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Patricia Spears Jones (02:10):
And also, autumn in New York is really beautiful, and this year, it was unbelievably beautiful, so yeah, it was just pretty amazing.

Ryo Yamaguchi (02:23):
What do you think was it? Was it just the certain quality weather and stuff?

Patricia Spears Jones (02:28):
I mean, there had been a lot of rain, and so, the leaves, the … Slowly, but surely, the leaves are going, but the turn was really beautiful. And it has been warmish, but not too warm, and with a few exceptions, just glorious days to be walking around in New York City. Unfortunately, mostly, people are protesting in New York City, but [inaudible 00:03:02] that’s the world that we live in. But it’s been kind of extraordinary.

Ryo Yamaguchi (03:09):
Yeah, I’m so happy to hear it, I do love this kind of time of year and things. Well, you’re kind of bringing up something that was a little bit of the theme of what we want to talk about today, and this magic moments idea, and I think maybe all of our conversation is just going to be getting at what we mean by that when we say that. But I kind of want to start and ask if you’ve had anything that you would call a magic moment in the last week or so, something like that. What’s a scene from New York or something that kind of stands out to you, if you have one?

Patricia Spears Jones (03:37):
I don’t know about a magic moment, but I mean, it’s been really … I mean, last night was my book signing at the local bookstore called The Word Is Change, and all kinds of nifty people showed up, and I did it with Nicole Callahan and Ricardo Maldonado.

Ryo Yamaguchi (03:54):
Oh, awesome, great.

Patricia Spears Jones (03:55):
And I had asked them to do this over a year ago, actually, because they both live in the neighborhood. And I mean, frankly, central Brooklyn is a place of writers. I mean, there are lots and lots of writers. I mean, Greg [inaudible 00:04:15] may well be somewhere in Dubai, but his house is on Quincy Street, and all this kind of stuff. So it’s been really interesting to have a sense of, by living in this neighborhood and walking down the street, and people are saying, well, where are you going?

(04:38):
I’m saying, I’m going to my book signing. And they go like, oh, okay, I can’t go, but I’ll go get the book later. I mean, it’s like that kind of neighborhood. So I’m like, okay, this is where I live. And I have neighbors who are sophisticated enough to go, oh, yeah, she’s a poet and she has something, blah, blah, blah, I’ll go. And also, I mean, one of my real actual neighbors came to the reading, and he said, I’ve been following you on Instagram and I knew you were going to be doing this. And I’m like, oh, I actually have a follower.

Ryo Yamaguchi (05:22):
Bet you have more than one, yeah, yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (05:26):
And it was really interesting, because the range of people, I mean, on just my little slice of Macon Street, are so interesting. Not everybody stays here, but there are people on the street who are serious practitioners of Yoruba, and so, every once in a while, all of a sudden, you’ll see all these people in white going into one place, [inaudible 00:05:52], okay. And every year, the same beautiful roses, these incredible roses, come back. And down the street, I think was one of those places where early hip hop videos were taped. So it’s like an amazing place. I lucked out when I moved there.

Ryo Yamaguchi (06:19):
No, it’s incredible. And it’s rare, I think it’s important to remember that, I mean, that there is … There’s no place like Bed-Stuy or Central Brooklyn as your [inaudible 00:06:27].

Patricia Spears Jones (06:26):
No, Central Brooklyn is really special. I used to live in Prospect Heights, which is on the other side of Crown Heights. It’s the highest point in Brooklyn, from Prospect Lefferts Gardens, on to here. So when all the hurricane stuff happened, people were like, well, okay, but people … And [inaudible 00:07:01], not the same thing, because they’re right on the water. But let me read one poem that is very much a [inaudible 00:07:10] poem, because it is a funny poem, and it wound up in Steve Cannon’s anthology, where he asked poets to do something, and then collaborate with an artist.

(07:28):
And so, this poem, Morning Song, also is a little bit about the people who literally pick up all the bottles on the street. Morning Song. You wake up to the phrase, salt lick. You realize you know not one thing about salt licks. You know salt and lick, but together, how does the salt lick lick salt? You know you are moving to the land of word games, where musical instruments, unstrung, battered, too much play. Each day, the gleaners walk sidewalks in search of bottles. They separate already separated bags to find precious glass that is plastic. They hate the cans. They know the places where beer overwhelms soda, where huge milk cartons say children, many children live here. They do not whistle when they work. They do not lick sweat off tired arms. They go about the business of poverty with grace and noise, early morning, dragging the weight of others’ waste.

Ryo Yamaguchi (09:04):
That’s wonderful. It’s such a great poem, and I love it as a portrait of the community, of this beloved community, and of a critical person in it, the gleaners. And I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time in New York, and I think of gleaners as a crucial role, or of a very ubiquitous kind of person there. It kind of brings to mind this question I have a little bit about … And I’ll think of this like a craft question. Our [inaudible 00:09:36] has helped a lot with these questions and has a lot of questions around craft. And one thing about it that I kind of was curious when I’m looking through these poems, because this is one snapshot, and I’m wondering what you start with when you write a poem. Did you set down to write a poem about gleaners, or was it the salt lick thing that began it?

Patricia Spears Jones (09:52):
No, it was literally the salt lick. It was literally the idea … I mean, the line, you know you’re moving to the land of word games? That’s what it was. It was like, what? But I know that I had been rereading some art history that was exploring Millet? Is that how you say his name? The painting of The Gleaners. And then, I realized, I’ve been looking at these people for years. They’re walking up and down the street, they’re always bagging stuff that’s been bagged, they undo all these things. And I’ve been watching them and watching them, and I realized, they’re the gleaners, they’re the people who pick up after everybody’s thrown their stuff out, and found some way to make money from it. And because this is New York, there’s competition of who gets there first, blah, blah, blah, and all of this. But they’re all so incredibly poor.

(11:10):
So it’s really fascinating to see the different kinds of people who make up any community, and what they do, and what they show. There are places where there’s more beer than milk, where there’s more glass than plastic. I mean, and those are some real things, and they really do hate cans. But sometimes, it’s just about when you get into word play, and … I had a conversation with one of my students the other day who had written a poem where she used a squall in her title. And I’ve been in a squall, and she was trying to describe it, and I said, when were you in … She says, I was never in a squall. I really wanted to write this other poem, but this is what came up. And I said, well, maybe this is the poem that you’re supposed to write. Sometimes, you have to follow the poem, the poem tells you what it wants to be.

Ryo Yamaguchi (12:24):
Yeah, no, I love that, and I think you’re echoing things that other guests we’ve had on the show have said about that, where it’s, the poem begins, and I don’t know where it’s going to go. What I love often in this and in this book is that the result is something that I think tries to make whole. And I think recognizing the duress of folks like gleaners and their poverty, and where you get to this point in the poem, that’s a point of grace itself in the poem, when you talk about the grace of that poverty. And in many ways, I feel that the poem is what takes us there, the poem is what unveils that truth. And we don’t know it at the start, and I hear you saying, you don’t know, you don’t sit down and know you’re going to get to that line.

Patricia Spears Jones (13:08):
No, but I also know that behind all those things, behind the … I mean, I know what a gleaner is because I have read those [inaudible 00:13:19]-

Ryo Yamaguchi (13:18):
You live with it, yeah, yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (13:21):
… Right, so there’s this real sense of … There’s a lot of intellectual work going on, but there’s also this sort of the lived observations, the ways in which we see each other, hear each other. I mean, I like the idea of thinking about something dragging on the street, because that’s something that’s real, you hear it in the morning sometimes. So that kind of sensibility shows up. And I think poems come from a lot of different places, I mean, we were talking about ones that I was going to read today, but they’re not obviously going to change my mind.

(14:13):
So one of the poems, which is a very strange poem, is called Poet. And I rarely write about other … I mean, I do write about poets, but many years ago, I was asked to do … I don’t know quite what I was asked to do, but all of a sudden … Oh, I was looking at translations, because I was the translation judge for Pan-American Syndrome a few years ago. And I chose the translation of Maria Negroni’s book. I was so proud of myself, an actual living person, as opposed to all the dead poets that everybody was writing about. Anyway, I tend to do that.

Ryo Yamaguchi (15:01):
That’s wonderful, yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (15:02):
And so, one of the books is by a Mongolian writer who lives in Taiwan. Her name is [inaudible 00:15:12], and her whole book is all about the lover that got away, and she’s still moaning over him, literally. And I read this just about the time that I broke up with my ex, ex, ex. But one of the things about it that I like is that, although a lot of the poems in this book are about my local, New York-based community, this one has some of that, but it takes a while to get there. So it’s called Poet, there’s an epigraph from her poem, [inaudible 00:16:02], and it’s, please do not believe my beauty, do not trust my love. The poet is Mongol. A translator follows her heart, once broken, and yet, she sings in a way that makes her broken heart my broken heart. She is an exile. The mountains are now ruled by China, and her culture is assaulted daily. Buildings blasted, children made to learn Mandarin. This is all too familiar. The ways of empire, very old ones, very new ones.

(16:42):
But these are forms of love and forms of loss. The lovers and constancy is all too familiar. Her laments are tender, then angry. There are many storms in her poems. They rise from the mountains, from the sea, from the rivers inside her veins. They rise up. And oceans far from her, a woman reads her words and quickly says, sister, I have been there. His hands holding mine, gone. His lips no longer touch mine. And yet, the yellow roses, the birthday kisses, our shared embrace of deep down Chicago blues, those conversations knee-deep in a dream of dark loving, tremble my heart. And so, you stand in the shadows at a train station looking for the moment your love steps off his train. He is not alone, and you will not be happy. The storms throb the streets of Taipei and scatter rose petals across the sidewalks and streets of Brooklyn.

Ryo Yamaguchi (18:09):
I’m so happy that you chose to read that poem just now, because this poem really sticks with me a lot, and I think it’s because of this dramatic thing that happens at the end, and how rapidly we’re transported from Taipei to Brooklyn. And it’s such a testament to the transportive power of literature, really, and for reading the book of her words. And I love that [inaudible 00:18:33] where you embody the reader of her words in this poem, in this communion of her strife. Yeah, and I think it’s really beautiful. And again, it’s kind of centered around this kind of moment, the moment where she’s waiting at the train station, and the moment … Well, as you were beautifully describing earlier, of the rain sort of taking apart the autumn leaves of New York, and how beautiful it is. And I love all of it kind of gelled in the crystal of that, as I’m mixing metaphors there. But this kind of brings to mind another question that also, [inaudible 00:19:08] had, that helped me with, which is, who do you write for? Maybe I’ll just ask you that, straight up.

Patricia Spears Jones (19:14):
I guess I probably write for myself.

Ryo Yamaguchi (19:17):
Yeah, perfect. Yeah, yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (19:21):
People ask about audience, and literally, I mean, I think when I was younger, I probably thought I was writing for all the other baby poets, as we were running around trying to impress each other with our work. And now, I just think I write for whoever is willing to read poetry, and who cares about language, and who wants to explore the values and generosity that poets, including me, I hope, provide in language. Because so much of the language that we listen to or hear or read is so dismissive, disrespectful, horrifying, dehumanizing, we can go on. And I mean, we’re in a deep moral crisis, and so, one of the things that I hope that I and other poets do is just remind people that language is not always about corruption and arrogance and horror, that it also is about interrogating our existence in a way that says, can we not look towards justice, can we not look towards mercy, can we not look towards a divine, can we not look towards love?

Ryo Yamaguchi (21:18):
Yeah, [inaudible 00:21:20].

Patricia Spears Jones (21:19):
Or everything from the sense of aeros to … What is the one that’s supposed to be beyond aeros? I always forget the … The Greek word.

Ryo Yamaguchi (21:29):
I can’t remember it, yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (21:33):
But the one that’s supposed to be for everybody. And that’s hard, it is extremely hard to talk about these things in a world that is so cynical. And so, I mean, and I have plenty of sarcasm in my poem, and I have plenty of … I mean, last night, when I was at the bookstore, I read The Look Back in Hatred poem, which basically is about looking back in hatred.

Ryo Yamaguchi (22:10):
And that that’s all right.

Patricia Spears Jones (22:12):
And that’s perfectly fine, there are some people and things that need to be hated. I have no problems with that. But we want to live as well as possible, we want to give a sense of that. And we also want to … I mean, I grew up in the South, and I grew up in the last days of legalized segregation. I always say that, because people were like, [inaudible 00:22:48] … It was legal, people. And so, there were actual laws on the books and stuff.

Ryo Yamaguchi (22:55):
[inaudible 00:22:56].

Patricia Spears Jones (22:55):
And so, I’m very mindful of how the state controls our lives, and what is needed to resist that kind of control. And so, to the extent that I am a beneficiary of the Civil Rights Movement, I certainly am. Do I think that there are many things about this nation and the world that need radical change like, yesterday? Of course I do. Do I think that’s going to happen? No. Because as much as I am a poet, and in some ways, that means I’m also kind of a dreamer, I’m also very much a realist, and I know how much pain and suffering there is. But I also know that there’s always been pain and suffering, and we need to just work towards, if not healing, then at least understanding that we need to come together as community, in different kinds of ways, to alleviate pain and suffering, to bring about justice, to make sure that there’s not another generation of gleaners.

Ryo Yamaguchi (24:33):
Yeah, yeah, really beautiful, Patricia, and I feel all this, and I feel this in the poems. There’s so many works in here that have, if not even official dedications, the titles are to artists, singer … There’s so much music in these poems, folks who’ve gone, who’ve left the world, they’ve passed away. And so, I was asking myself if these were elegies or obituaries or memorials, and trying to … I couldn’t really quite find the right sense of how this … Yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (25:05):
Some of them are elegies, but I guess when I think of elegies, I think of elegies in the Frank O’Hara sense of elegies. Because my favorite-

Ryo Yamaguchi (25:14):
Could you explain that a little? Yeah, yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (25:18):
… Because when he was walking down the street, and all of a sudden, he remembers all of his friends who have died. I mean, it’s not like I’m writing a poem about so-and-so, it’s not like [inaudible 00:25:30] or Tennyson going on for like, 50 pages about his best bud. And it’s an amazing poem …

Ryo Yamaguchi (25:37):
His own thing, yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (25:41):
… but you’re walking down the street, and all of a sudden, you remember someone who was very dear, who’s no longer with you, in the same way that you hear a song and you remember your first boyfriend or girlfriend. And so, Hannah’s Cigar Box and the Lee Brewer poem and The Walking Avenue, all of those are sort of about East Village people, like Steve Cannon and Hannah Weiner, [inaudible 00:26:16], who were very important in my life, as a young person trying to figure out how to be a poet and how to be a person in the world. I mean, I came to New York just about a year after I graduated from college, and so, in some ways, they’re not only sort of elegies for those specific people, or kind of ways, tributes for them, but they are also a way of talking about a world that doesn’t exist anymore. I mean, that particular East Village world has been long gone.

Ryo Yamaguchi (26:59):
Well, and I’ll say, I think what I’m hearing you describe here, too, is a kind of ultimate beauty about what these kinds of memorials or remembrances in the poems can do, that it can keep alive not only these folks who’ve passed, but also, that time of the world, that time of the East Village, and that the poems can keep alive, in memory and in the language of the work, these places. And part of that, also, is the kind of contradictory nature, and there was something I was thinking about earlier when you were saying, too, where it’s like, something that’s both a memorial and a celebration, a lamentation and a celebration, a call for justice, and also, a recognition of power that we do have, and that both of those modalities can work at the same time when you’re in the space of art.

Patricia Spears Jones (27:52):
Yeah. Well, it’s also, too, that I also think of myself as always being in conversation with a variety of other human beings, obviously, other poets and writers and stuff, but also, just the way in which our lives are lived. I mean, when I wrote Green Ribbons, which I just can’t read because it’s too long, it took me a while. Because I lived in Atlanta briefly after I graduated from college, and I hated Atlanta.

Ryo Yamaguchi (28:33):
[inaudible 00:28:34].

Patricia Spears Jones (28:33):
I’m sorry for all people who love Atlanta. Sorry, people, I’m sorry, but I really don’t like it, although there’s some wonderful things about it. But when I started to hear about all those children being killed, black children being killed, and I just remember the topography, this landscape, and I thought, oh, this is the world’s easiest place to have a serial killer. I mean, it really is. And that the target were these young black children, and then there’s all this … And then, they realized that Toni Cade Bambara, who lived in Atlanta several years until she left there and went to Philadelphia, her last book was about that.

(29:23):
And I am convinced to this day that writing that book helped to exacerbate her illness. She had cancer. And there’s more than one consciousness in the world. I mean, there’s things beyond us or around us, and poets and musicians and visual … We all tap into that. You don’t have to have any additional materials in your body to do this, you don’t have to imbibe anything, whatever, it’s just there. You hear voices, you see things, they’re there, and you can bring them out and deal with them, or you can suppress them. And depending on your own capacity to remain centered, this will be okay, but sometimes, it throws you off. And I think are some things that are very scary in this world, and one of the things that I realized when I read through all of the poems for this book … And this is a smaller … I mean, the original manuscript was about 20 pages longer, and it got wheedled down. Thank you, Peter [inaudible 00:31:02], who [inaudible 00:31:07]-

Ryo Yamaguchi (31:07):
Wonderful, yeah, yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (31:07):
… met my [inaudible 00:31:07] about three times. One of the things I realized was that I was really … There’s a lot of violence in these poems. So the magic there of these moments of great joy and all kinds of stuff, but there’s a lot of violence, because this is a violent world. And I don’t focus focus on it in the way that I think a lot of poets do. I mean, I don’t particularly kind of train myself to look at trauma, trauma, trauma, all that kind of stuff, it just makes me kind of crazy. Other people can do that, I can’t. But I can tap into what that means to the culture, and also, in terms of history.

(32:07):
I mean, I was thinking about … I mean, people are protesting today, and you asked me to read Adornment, so I’m going to read that. Because this was written, gosh, what, 10 years ago, maybe? Because I think it was after Michael Brown’s … The murder of him. Certainly, it was not a police action, it was a police murder. Adornment. Red cap, red scarf, red balloon, a phalanx of protestors, a quarrel, a militia, off camera, geared up, prepared to muster the musk of daily incivility, a roar of past coincidences, blood smell, men’s bodies, the red cap of their hearts salutes on October day. Plush beauty, can you smell the apples, this fact of harvest? On the round globe, claiming our heart’s desire to live more than 18 years, or whatever year it was the bullets took St. Louis, Hong Kong, Mexico City, whatever the young demand their future, a boy stands wearing a red cap in the rain, in the heat, observing the phalanxes coming down from the high rises, up from the basements, out of the dormitories, into the streets.

Ryo Yamaguchi (34:00):
That’s so terrific, I’m so glad you did read that poem.

Patricia Spears Jones (34:02):
[inaudible 00:34:06] wanted me to read, I said, okay, I would.

Ryo Yamaguchi (34:07):
Yeah, I wanted to hear it. Well, and I’ll say, I think it’s … Well, it’s a good place, I think, to bring us to rest here for this conversation, and one that I’d like to be in because it leaves us at a point of a power, of taking power, of speaking truth, of not … And I think it fits also in sort of the theme that we’ve touched on today of this idea of magic moments. And this is something that I was really [inaudible 00:34:33] in this is, I felt there in the streets with these folks in the protest there because of the way that you’ve written this, and that that is a magic moment, that quiet before the protest begins. And that’s so well-captured here. And I think it’s just an important thing to carry with us that the poem delivers, and I’m grateful for that, yeah.

Patricia Spears Jones (34:55):
You’re welcome. Thank you.

Ryo Yamaguchi (34:56):
Yeah, yeah. Well, so good. Well, I mean, there’s so much more we could talk about, of course, but I think this is a good place to bring to a close. Yeah, this has been really great, Patricia, I’m so happy to have this conversation with you, and to talk about these poems, and to talk about your community and how much this work lives among all the other artists in Bed-Stuy, in Brooklyn, and … Oh, well, I’m jealous, I’m jealous, I think, [inaudible 00:35:21].

Patricia Spears Jones (35:22):
Well, because of Copper Canyon, it lives in the whole world.

Ryo Yamaguchi (35:25):
Absolutely, we will be, we’ll be citizens of that world, and so will these poems. Well, thank you, thanks again so much, Patricia, for being here.

Patricia Spears Jones (35:32):
Okay, I’m glad I got to do this. Thank you.

Ryo Yamaguchi (35:35):
It was really fun, it was really fun. And thanks to all you out there watching and listening, this has been just a really wonderful opportunity to have these conversations with our beautiful poets. I don’t need to tell you, go out, get the book, read the poems, and have them in your lives. So thank you all for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time.

[End Transcript]