LitNYS Talks to Poet Patricia Spears Jones
"The thing about New York City, and I think New York State, is that people actually collaborate on a continuous basis. I think it's because there are so many people who are writing, publishing and teaching and this is a solitary pursuit. You need to find a community. But the thing about being in New York is that you can be in a range of communities and have some sense of a larger literary world."
This month former LitNYS Communications Fellow, Sabrina Alli, and LitNYS Founding Director Debora Ott spoke with New York State's Poet Laureate Patricia Spears Jones. Jones shared the vivid landscape and stories of a past and present New York that made her the poet she is today.
Patricia Spears Jones (Photo credit: Marcia Wilson)
LitNYS: How has the literary arts community in New York had an impact on your work throughout the years?
SJ: Most of my career as a poet happened in New York City, however, when Michael Kelleher was at Just Buffalo Literary Center, he brought me upstate a couple of times, which is when I met Dennis Maloney who publishes White Pine Press. It's always interesting to do a reading outside of New York City. It’s always good to get on the plane or train to go somewhere else and see who’s there.
In Connecticut, they have a circuit reading series with the colleges because I did that, and I wish that there was something similar to that in New York State, even if it was just the SUNY campuses. It probably would be really helpful because it would bridge the divide between upstate and downstate.
LitNYS: What New York City institutions helped you get your work out there?
SJ: With no doubt it was the Poetry Project at St. Marks Church primarily. Also, Poets House did a great deal. Same at the Bowery Poetry Club. I was at the Nuyorican before the slam years. The New York Public Library branches often hired me and other poets to lead workshops and do readings. I got a chance to do things like lead a memoir writing workshop in Harlem. Those were great.
David Earl Jackson, program coordinator at the Studio Museum in Harlem back in the day, really brought all kinds of people uptown for readings and events. I mean I got a chance. The reason why I got to write for the Village Voice is because he invited Robert Christgau, the Music Editor of the Voice, up to Harlem to talk about rhythm and blues and rock and roll. And I was like, “What about this?” And what about that? Next thing I knew I was getting a chance to write for the Voice.
You know those kinds of spontaneous things happen.
A few years ago, I got a chance to read for the Bright Hill Press & Literary Center Word Thursdays series. Just getting there was truly a trick. I felt like the pioneers when they were going through all these mountains. But it was just so delightful to wind up someplace where there’s this great independent literary center. They are like the light bulbs of culture in a lot of communities, and there I was in this lovely house with galleries, a library, and a press.
I wish every community had that level of support for literary activities, for reading and thinking, and writing and events. [A place that lets] people enjoy being with words. Libraries do most of that, but literary centers take it up another step. New York State has some really wonderful literary centers that I have never been to.
I’ve seen the rise of book fairs over the years. I was around for the early iterations back in the early eighties. They were on only one block, and now there’s the Brooklyn Book Fair. Those are interesting. They really are the ways in which a variety of communities can connect.
In my early days, when I was working for CLMP/Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, I got to know a lot of literary presses on the West Coast. I remember going to visit San Francisco. I stayed at August Kleinzahler’s apartment. The thing I remember the most about that area was that there was all this contention. None of them collaborated. It’s like the people in Oakland only talked to the people in Oakland. People in San Francisco only talked to people in this part of San Francisco. It was ten times smaller than New York City where everybody was always checking in on each other.
The thing about New York City, and I think New York State, is that people actually collaborate on a continuous basis. I think it’s because there are so many people who are writing, publishing, and teaching and this is a solitary pursuit. You need to find a community. But the thing about being in New York, is that you can be in a range of communities and have some sense of a larger literary world.
I wish things were much more racially, ethnically, and economically diverse here and in the rest of the United States. The one sad thing I’ve seen over the last several years is that economic status defines a lot of things. If you could come to New York in the seventies — like me, as a poor person — and if you hustled enough and got it together, you could stay here. You can’t do that now as an artist; it’s impossible. That is really troubling, and I think it also winds up influencing the kinds of work that people do. The ways and language used to talk about community are troubling too. It’s an interesting phenomenon. Too much wealth is not good for any society. Too much poverty is not good either.
LitNYS: At the Facing Pages Statewide Literary Arts Convening this year, one of the conversations was about people from all over the state talking to each other about how to share ideas in a way that is consistent and not time consuming. How can we increase opportunities for people to come together across the state?
SJ: It’s time consuming to organize events and programs. The generational difference between my generation and now is that all those kinds of things were not formal. They were utterly informal. They were totally like hanging at the bar. You’re walking down the street. You go to somebody’s party and all of a sudden you’re chit chatting. The next thing you know, you’re doing something. Get out your book and say, “I’m available on Friday. Let’s do this.”
Now people send you Google forms that ask what date you will be available. It is that kind of qualification that makes it so different. Look, if there’s somebody who comes up with a great idea for some formal ways to do it, then that’s fabulous. When I was organizing stuff, I realized that, with the exception of me and a couple of other people, most of the New York State-based organizations did not know many poets outside of the state, which was really disturbing to me. They knew a small cohort from where they were from. They didn’t know anybody else.
The biggest things we have to fight are the silos that we put ourselves in in terms of who we’re writing for, who our audience should be, and how they should act. I think it’s a real problem, but that’s maybe me being an old crank.
LitNYS: Tell us about the American Poets Congress.
SJ: It got stymied in 2020 by Covid, but it’s that kind of loose and spontaneous sharing with people. I put up the Facebook page for it because I had to keep it going. It started with a conversation that I had with John Keene. And then I called people. I always thought about it as a way to bring people from every state in the Union to New York where we would talk about language.
I wanted to go beyond politics to the ways in which things are mythologized in this country. We have lost the mythology. We have lost the power of how to do that. So many people want to make very clear statements about what they are for or against, so things become less nuanced.
What are some of the stories we share? How do we then start to talk about these things, so that we not only talk about them but talk to each other? I keep thinking poets are the people that ought to be able to do that.
LitNYS: The Academy of American Poets secured substantial funding from the Mellon Foundation to give to state poets laureate for programs/activities in their states. Any sense if that will continue during your time as NYS Poet Laureate?
SJ: If they have it again, it’s big. They’re waiting to see if Mellon is going to repeat it. I have some ideas about what I would like to do.
LitNYS: It would address what you already talked about — bridging the upstate/downstate divide.
SJ: That might be a possibility. The other thing I was thinking about was creating what I call sites of progress ... New York State is where all kinds of important ideas and actions first took place. The suffrage movement started here. The abolitionist movement expanded here. Baseball was created here. All kinds of recuperative housing, and influential things started in New York State. I would love to identify about four or five of them and figure out what kinds of programming could be done around them. That would be bridging the upstate divide because it’d be all over the state.
LitNYS: What advice would you give a poet starting out today?
SJ: I tell everybody—every poet—to read because that is one of the most important things to do. There are any number of ways in which you can write. There are workshops everywhere of all sizes, shapes, and qualities. But the problem is that a lot of people do not read, so they always wonder why their poems are not getting published. Well, [it’s] because they sound like all the other ones you didn’t read.
I think most people who want to publish at this point have some idea, and there’s a fairly clear path. If you think you want to be a career poet, everybody knows that you can get an MFA, but they don’t know that you probably will not get a job with it. There are not as many teaching jobs to keep claiming.
People need to connect. If you are in a great workshop, if you meet people who really understand what you’re trying to do and you understand what they’re trying to do, you should become friends for life. I’m still friends with Robin Messing. We met in Lewis Warsh’s workshop back in 1975.
Don’t be afraid. I don’t know if either of you’ve ever had this happen where you’re in a workshop and people are afraid to share their work because they don’t want somebody to steal their stuff. I have actually encountered that. It is so strange to me. I don’t think anybody is gonna steal my stuff because they’re not going to make very much money from it!
There are people who are really fascinated by words, ones who love poetry, and who really care deeply about language. And then there are other people who want to get famous. Sometimes they’re one in the same, but most of the time they’re not, so you have to remind people that this is not about celebrity.
There’s not a lot of money in poetry. People are looking for that TV series or the glittering prizes. I spent most of my poetry writing years just writing, and trying to develop in my own way, shape, and form. I just kept writing and sending stuff out there. Once in a while, somebody would publish it.
A lot of people want to get everything done before they’re 30 or they think it’s over. If you’re going to live to be 70 or 80 years old, and if you think you know what you want by the time you’re 30, you have a big problem, especially if you are a writer or an artist. The whole thing is about working through your whole life. How do your ideas change? What happens when you read a different set of writers? What happens when you travel and see something that you hadn’t really seen before with your own eyes? What happens to you and how does that show up in your work?
My God! Having a life is so precious and is more than a career, more than getting your winning first book. That’s great, but the question is: Can you do the second book and the third and the fifth? Can you do some other kind of writing? Or do you want to suddenly start painting? Creativity is either abundant or it is scarce, and it’s up to each individual to figure that out.
Does this help any young poet? I have no idea, but I think it would help all of us to think about the fact that if we are healthy enough in our minds and bodies, we may live a lot longer than everybody thinks. You can’t plan out your life. Write and read, read and write, and find those friend poets.
LitNYS: An MFA really creates this profile of a writer, usually a white woman who is under 30 and a novelist. That kind of fame everyone was striving for is completely unrealistic. A lot of writers don’t make money from their writing.
SJ: I think a writer should be paid, period. That’s all there is to it. And poets definitely should be paid. We live in a market economy and unless there are levels of support outside of the market, there are no prizes. There are both public and private funds that are given to writers for their work. If not, it would be a whole lot harder. The problem is [that funding], especially private funding at this point, is so intensely selective. There are 1% of poets who get all these big grants.
Copy editors are the unsung heroes and heroines of publishing, and they have saved any number of writers from putting out something that would be terrible. They catch stuff nobody else seems to catch. The first time my manuscript was seriously edited was when I did my book with Copper Canyon. She actually went through and did a super close reading, gave me incredible notes, and helped me reshape the whole manuscript like it was real. I’m in my seventies and that was the first time that has ever happened.
People editing from small presses actually are doing [the work]. The publishing world has never been about serious money, unless you are in the genre sections where people really do make money. If all three of us wrote romance novels tomorrow, we could do quite well because this is the most profitable genre right now, which I just read in the Financial Times. I think it would be great if there was more money for all of us, but so much [depends on] what’s going on with the marketplace. Now with AI if you can get anything as a writer, take it.
LitNYS: How do you stay committed to the literary arts over the years because it’s always under attack, whether it’s from book bans or from big publishing?
SJ: I’m maybe just stubborn. Most creative people are and have a great deal of pride. Pride can keep you going, keep you standing. I also have never thought that poetry was a small thing. It may be treated that way, but I don’t have to treat it that way. That could be totally delusional on my part, but if it kept me going, then it kept me going.
There’s so much about American culture that is absolutely amazing, wonderful, rich, and deep. There’s so much that’s horrific, awful, and brutal. And they’re all at the same time. It’s always been that way. I am not a cynic. I’m an affirmative skeptic. There’s a lot of affirmation in my life and a lot of skepticism. I think that’s kept me going over the years.
LitNYS: You were at CLMP, and you were also the Program Coordinator at the Poetry Project at a time. How did associations with those organizations promote your writing career, since being in community with writers, particularly at the Poetry Project, was very important?
SJ: The Project was important, but because I went there early on it also taught me a real lesson about the limits of those kinds of associations. The majority of the portraiture of those projects was white, mostly male, not completely, but mostly male at the time.
LitNYS: This is in the seventies…
SJ: There were some anthologies that I certainly got to be on the tail end of the memo on. A lot of things were going on. Nobody told me anything about it. I was one of the two Black people at the Project; Charlotte Carter was the other. We just were not part of the deal. [They wanted] white from the northeast or from New York City. I, unfortunately, was working with Mabou Mines, the theater company, and hanging out at Food Cafe and on the loft jazz scene. I had these other connections. I don’t even think of it as racism, so much as solipsism, like “I only see myself and whoever is in front of me.”
"It’s a mixed bag," to use the old saying of Richie Havens. I think that’s the way it is unless you are working specifically in an all-Black organization. It might have been a different sort of situation, but because I was living in the East Village, it was very mixed, but I think it made me.
I still remember what June Jordan once said to me when I did a reading with Sara Miles. We did a reading at Barnard in 1976, and it was packed and we were both really nervous. June Jordan said, “All you need to do is your very best. Don’t worry about anything else.”
LitNYS: It sounds like you found community at the Nuyorican.
SJ: I found community in all those places. I found community at the [Poetry] Project. I found community at the Nuyorican. I found community at Basement Workshop, and I still miss her to this day. I’m talking about Fay Chiang. In the [East] Village, downtown, there was a really interesting mix of people and a mix of organizations, all of whom were nonprofit, all of whom were basically poor, all of whom were also totally open. Anybody could show up on a Monday night for the open readings and get up there and do their fake Patty’s.
LitNYS: Just being around you, one can tell that you’re in it for the beauty, for the fun, and for the people you meet.
SJ: That sounds like living to me. Mostly, I think my work should be read and thought about and be in conversation with all the others. I’m as good as all the other writers. There is a picture of me, Natalie Diaz, and Jericho Brown that I posted [online] because we all read for Copper [Canyon], and I totally was right to be there.
No problem with that. I have read with some of the best poets in this world and have held my own. I’m as good as whoever else is out here.
I may not get all of the glittering prizes, but I worked very hard to get to this point. I had no idea that I was even in the running. If you do what you really think you want to do, and you do it as best you can, and you just keep at it, the door will open. And [for me] it opened really, really, wide.
In 2017, the Jackson Prize gave me the chance to quit adjuncting. It gave me the wherewithal to be able to take residencies that I would not have been able to do otherwise. It gave me a cushion for three years, and I can always have that in my credits. It reminded me that I was not invisible.
We need more people to review poetry on a consistent basis. There are a lot of mini reviews, but there’s no New York Review of Poetry or American Review of Poetry, it would be really interesting if there were. Or, at least more people [should] talk about a range of folks and not just the same curated cohort that always gets mentioned by a million people.
I also wish we could figure out more ways in which to make our journals multilingual and have greater support for translation, especially in New York State.
LitNYS: People feel like poetry is hard.
SJ: It is. I mean, not always. Some poetry is not so hard, but if you’re talking about someone who’s very serious about language (it can be hard).
Kenneth Saltzman for his Substack did a close reading interview with me about my poem Saturnine, and I said, “It took me a long time to finally get somebody to publish it.” I sent that poem to a lot of places, and they all turned it down until Erica Hunt posted it on her Poem of the Day. I can’t remember who it was, but someone said to me about that poem, “You go for the hard stuff in your poems. You go for the blood inside.” I guess I do.
Maybe different organizations that are curating poetry programs could select a writer to review a book they are publishing or working with. That might be a real way to amplify what people are doing curatorially, and also make them really own up to the critical stakes in their curatorial choices. That would be fascinating.
Any and all ways in which all of our organizations can work to expand the support for living as a writer in this State would be wonderful. That’s my last, last bit of wisdom.