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When The Beloved Community by Patricia Spears Jones was published by Coffee House Press last year, I bought the book immediately, but put off reading the poems until after my cataract surgery which was scheduled for the spring. My vision was getting so bad that life was becoming a blur including the words, and I wanted to see and read The Beloved Community clearly when I did.
Sometime after the surgeries, I was waiting for someone at the gym—it was going to be a long wait—and I opened my backpack, and took out The Beloved Community where it was waiting. I have to say that the gym with its clanging weights, piped in music, huffs, puffs, and grunts of the exercisers, and the hum of the machines soon drifted away as I began to read.
The first poem, “Lave,” is epic. It’s about the great migration of African Americans from the rural south to the urban north in the early twentieth century, focusing especially on the women, who were the last to leave, and this would include Patricia Spears Jones herself who moved from Arkansas to New York in the early 1970s.
The second poem, “Morning Glory,” is about what follows the arrival when the destination becomes a home and a community, which is to say Brooklyn where the poet lives and life still moves.
“Lave” and “Morning Glory” combine the mythic and the real, the historical and the personal, the past and the present, Patricia and all the women before her; and these first two poems, so full of movement, did move me completely into what turned out to be a masterful, pleasurable, worth waiting for read.
It has taken a while—life is busy especially for Patricia who, as the Poet Laureate of New York State, has many engagements—but I finally got to visit her at home in Brooklyn, and recorded her reading poems from The Beloved Community that you can hear in the video below. Enjoy.
Here is Patricia reading “Lave” at MoMA:
Morning Glory
Sunlight softens helicopters hover
Skies above Brooklyn Presidential
Visit, murder investigation, matters little.
Noise in the skies, noise on the ground.
You should prune the morning glories
I tell my elderly neighbor.
She refuses. She likes the way the vine has
Curled around her fence with a ferocity
That cannot be so easily cut back. I get that.
Wildness is rare on a Brooklyn city block,
Old roses return late May as if to say, ha! you
Think we do not know the season? Squirrels
Roam the bricks of buildings, while the gleaners
Fight with raccoons for the spoils of left-out trash.
Huge green leaves for plants with names
Unknown to me sparkle on mornings bright
And dead tree leaves demand constant sweeping away.
The tabby is big, old, and tired—too many kittens
Not enough food—these are ungenerous cat lovers.
Neighbors greet each other and shake their heads
At the young men and women, mostly, but not
All Whitefolk running running—or their faces
Drowning in a pool of handheld devices.
You almost wish they smoked or cursed
Had personality—but they run and run and run
Thus, the joy of this vibrant morning-glory vine
Rooted in her garden’s disarray—happily dominating.
Oh, morning glory—purple, green
Leaves plump as Italian cookies, blossom
Your hearty display for all to see, hold your
Vine’s haven on Macon Street. Only
Winter, harsh winter will take your vines
Back to the ground your wildness calmed.
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At the Poetry Project
The publication of The Beloved Community was celebrated at Saint Mark’s Church in the Bowery last year. Matt Proctor recorded the whole reading and I am going to include it here.
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The Beloved Community is published by Copper Canyon Press. You can check it out here:
https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/the-beloved-community/
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You can read more about Patricia Spears Jones here:
https://psjones.com/
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The Beloved Community
Patricia Spears Jones was inspired to write “Lave” after seeing Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration panels on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. After I read the poem, I researched Jacob Lawrence and was amazed by the length, breadth, depth and width of his Great Migration panels. One thing about a beloved community is the sharing. I am going to do some sharing too and include the two paintings mentioned in the poem.
And here is a link to Jacob Lawrence’s Great Migration paintings: https://lawrencemigration.phillipscollection.org/
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I visited the laundromat where the title poem, “The Beloved Community,” takes place and took some photos there to commemorate.
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By Patricia Spears Jones reads from The Beloved Community – Don YortyDon Yorty | word pond 19 Oct ’24 at 4:23 pm