Patricia Spears Jones: Widely Published Award-Winning Poet of “The Beloved Community”
Today we are lucky. As students of the arts, writers — observant informants, we are graced with the presence of Patrica Spears Jones, as she reads from her collection “The Beloved Community.” An acclaimed poet, a widely anthologized writer, editor, cultural activist, and a curator of literature and of poetic education and outreach programs. Jones is a facet in the realm of poetry, a strong voice with a whisper as powerful as a shout, constantly calling out the pain and suffering of humanity while tipping her hat to its musicality.
Patricia Spears Jones was Arkansas born and raised, and has been a New York City resident for the larger portion of her life. One can tell when they read her poetry, for the streets and avenues are vibrant and alive in her lyrics. She attended Rhodes College where she earned her BA, and Vermont College where she earned her MFA. Her artist life has grown to be one of tremendous credibility and a recipient of proper recognition, for her belt of awards and acknowledgements is an anthology in itself.
The greater sum of Jones’s work is exploring urban playgrounds, art, and music. “The Beloved Community,” a philosophical phrase popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1950s and in this case Jones’s collection, structures the subjects of racism, oppression, activism, and cultural justice as a frame. While shining her stunningly harsh yet horrifyingly honest spotlight on a white supremacy diseased America, Jones does so through such a personal mode of conversing within this hard-angled framework. Conversing with her childhood, conversing with her neighborhood and her neighbors, conversing with herself, and conversing with the generous acknowledgement of the intemperate.
Prior to ever reading “The Beloved Community,” I was familiar with Jones’s voice from an essay I read while scrolling The Brooklyn Rail’s online edition. The Essay, “The General is in The House '' (published on the site in October of 2016), works in conversation with Baldwin, discussing a modern day America still gripped by the white-knucled fists of white supremacy. It’s brilliant really, Jones’s more forthright callouts are bouncing off of Baldwin’s notorious rebuttals of peace, while the white elephant still sits heavy in the room. In a final agreement of Baldwin’s preach, Jones writes: “Love and anger are charged by the same electrons…”
This bond between love and hate that she speaks of mirrors the behavior of the trophic cascade she writes about in “The Beloved Community.” A constant circulation of energy running its eternal course through the lives and places we touch as we live. Love and anger age and regress all of the time, but their bonds are rarely broken. It’s these bonds that Patricia Spears Jones writes about with poise, playfulness, and passion — It’s these bonds that form The Beloved Community.
The collection opens with a quote from Lorenzo Thomas: an Afro-Caribbean Panaman New Yorker poet who was a central figure in African-American literature during his lifetime. Like Jones, he lived in New York City. She quotes him regularly throughout the collection which heavily emphasizes her belief (truth) of the crucial community within the arts, especially surrounding activism as art. Jones mentions other artists and voices frequently throughout “The Beloved Community.” While reading, I had a search engine handy, for there were so many names holding great anonymous weight. To name a few: Jacob Lawrence an artist, Cristina Eisenberg a scientist, Lee Breuer a playwright, Betye Saar a visual artist, Anne Boyer an essayist, Hsi Muren a poet/essayist/painter, Lynda Hull a poet, and so many others mentioned as the collection carries into its secondary body.
These mentions were intentional. The weave from name to place to ideology is a lucid one within these poems. One stylistic playful tendency that occurs multiple times throughout the collection is Jones’s acknowledgement of her own pen. She divulges the intentionality of her own diction, and that of other artists, while in the thick of a poem. In the very first poem “Lave,” Jones quotes Jacob Lawrence’s painting panel caption The female worker and emphasizes the way in which he did not use other descriptors for the subject: “(not Negro, not migrant).” She does this again in her later poem “Something’s In The Air,” when she acknowledges the young riding Deli boys’ encounter with a woman on the street: “The boys are yelling—some call her crazy, But not one calls her bitch.” It’s the control of tongue here that sits important with Jones. She touches on this freedom, what to say or not, again in her poem “Lytic, or how not to see The Strawberry Moon.” This brings us, the reader, bare-eyed up to an observant lens of raw empathy. A personal bond between poet and the world and reader. Afterall, this is the beloved community.
In Tom Dent fashion, whom she mentions in her poem “New Orleans BOP,” Jones is painting portraits of the daily life allowed by the neighborhood’s infrastructure poem by poem. With her we bounce from neighborhood to neighborhood, state to state, country to country, and we time jump all while observing from a point of connectivity. Through this travel, we get to know moments so intimately. We are thrown into motion and gripped by the power of civil/social/rights movements across the world and time, we explore the feminine erotic, we are faced with the brutality of poverty ignored by power, and we are forced to reckon with the never ending grief that comes with the human existence, but we are never lost in the massivity of it all.
“The Beloved Community,” is a powerful, emotionally evocative, very personal collection gifted to us by the concise, quick-witted, and clearcut Patricia Spears Jones. While I could sit here and dissect and project each of the poems in this collection, I will just say you all are in for a treat — let us please welcome her, PatriciaSpears Jones everyone!
