Patricia Spears Jones Discusses Her New Poetry Anthology & Her Collection at the Schomburg Center

As poet Patricia Spears Jones gets ready to release her fifth anthology of poetry The Beloved Community in fall 2023, learn more about her through her collection of personal correspondence, photographs, and audio recordings at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Originally from Arkansas, Spears Jones moved to New York City in the 1970s where she has been an activist, curator, educator, journalist, and scholar. 

Spears Jones made history from 1984–1986 when she was the program coordinator at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan. She was the first Black woman to hold the job. She curated the reading series at Word Sunday in Brooklyn 2014–2016. Spears Jones also contributes to Bomb magazine and is a senior fellow at the Black Earth Institute, a progressive think tank. The poet has also been a lecturer at LaGuardia Community College, led poetry workshops at the 92nd Street Y, and will be teaching at Barnard College this fall.

Essence.com named Spears Jones one of its “40 Poets They Love” in 2010. Additional accolades include the Pushcart Prize, which honors poetry, nonfiction, and creative nonfiction published by literary magazines or small presses during the current year, and a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts.

In 2017, Spears Jones received one of poetry’s highest honors—the Jackson Poetry Prize. It highlights poets of exceptional talent who deserve wider recognition. Presented by Poets & Writers, a nonprofit literary organization, awardees are anonymously nominated by their peers. Judges hailed her work as having "steadily and quietly enriched the American poetic tradition with sophisticated and moving poems. More of us should know who she is, and even more should read her.” 

Please tell me about your new collection of poetry, The Beloved Community. What were the inspirations and topics covered?

The Beloved Community is a poetry collection. As such, these poems written through the lens of my own Black American femininity explore desire for community, how vulnerable our ties are to each other, and the many ways we grieve—basically how we relate to each other and to the material world.  

I am fascinated by the accidental, yet important intimacies that arise from living in the city—the title poem is an anecdote that at first seems simple, but it’s a moment of shared fragility as a stranger comes to terms with the death of a neighbor.  

We live in a politically and culturally fraught time and there is this horrific human capacity to inflict pain and create mayhem—whether via “bad news” boyfriends or murderous racists. The poems try to honestly interrogate humanity in small and large ways.

What were some of the challenges you faced writing this collection and how did you work through them?

The only real challenge that every writer has is to make the work as strong and as perfect as possible. We always fall short. The attempt is the joy and terror of writing.

Your collection is available for researchers to explore at the Center. What would you like for them to learn about you after reading your materials?

I think they will know that there is a very smart, adventurous, occasionally maudlin, looking for love and life energy person who made it work. Made poems, made magazines, made anthologies and was willing to take chances and sometimes they worked and a lot of times they didn’t. But, it didn’t stop me.

The life of an artist is about persistence and there are times that it doesn’t work. But, that doesn’t mean in the end you don’t make the work that you want to make. My first full-length book did not come out until after I was 40.

What do you want people to take away after reading your poems?

I hope that the poems provoke inquiry, empathy, and deepening outrage at injustice, dishonesty, and brutality.

The book includes cover art by famed abstract painter Stanley Whitney. Why were you interested in using his art for the cover?

Stanley Whitney creates planes of joy, anxiety, empathy, and inquiry through color and line—his paintings talk to me and seem to be in serious dialogue with the themes of The Beloved Community. We both seek out from the chaos of this difficult world moments of pleasure, moments of beauty, moments of truth.

If there is anything you’d like to add that has not been asked, please feel free to do so.  

These poems were written from 2016 to 2021—so cover some of this nation and indeed the world’s worst times—but they are not meant to “report” on the era. We can create a community that allows love and creativity and joy to flourish, or we can continue to exploit and intimidate those seen as Other. I refuse to be the “other” in this world. As a Black woman, I fight to be in the center, at the core, the standard bearer. 

I think Black artists have always done this, but the claim has rarely been forthrightly made. Now’s the time to do so. Like the Black women who left the South during the Great Migration—the journey away from hell is the first step towards liberation. We owe our foremothers a great debt.

The Patricia Spears Jones Papers in the Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division cover the 1970s through 2010s. There are drafts of poems, along with handwritten editing notes for poems such as “Belissima,” “Hope, Arkansas 1970,” and “A Question of Weather.”

Other items include essays and popular culture reviews that Jones wrote for outlets such as Bomb Magazine, The Village Voice, and Essence magazine. Researchers can also explore Spears Jones’s work as a playwright through a draft of Mother (1994), which Mabou Mines commissioned her to create.

Spears Jones share the drafts of works that received critical acclaim such as the manuscripts for 2006’s Femme du Monde plus projects that did come to fruition such as 1994’s Women’s Visions of Lorraine Hansberry and Her Work.

There are also personal moments such as photos from her 40th birthday party, a letter to a dear friend that Jones did not recall writing, and a letter she wrote to her father. The two had a strained relationship at times, she said.   

Some of the highlights of her audio-visual materials in the Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division include Jones’s 2009 conversation with fellow poets Quincy Troupe, who organized and produced the event, and Lucille Clifton. Spears Jones served as the moderator (ID# 272264).

Additional recordings include a 1981 conversation with legendary actress Madge Sinclair (ID 542812), readings with the Barnard Women Poets Reading (ID 542798), plus media interviews over the years with outlets such as Minnesota Public Radio (ID: 542804). 

Years before the Center acquired Spears Jones’s collection, she took part in the program Talks at the Schomburg: The Startling Life of Pauli Murray. The event celebrated the republication Song in a Weary Throat: Memoir of an American Pilgrimage, a memoir written by Murray, a civil rights activist and legal strategist.

Spears Jones closed the evening with readings of Murray’s poetry (1:31:25) and two of her own works (1:35:10). “Aretha Franklin Sings What a Friend We Have in Jesus” is from 2015’s critically hailed A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. “Glad All Over” is from 1995’s The Weather That Kills. The program is available to view online.

The Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division holds A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems, The Weather That Kills along with the anthologies Pain Killer: Poems Written 2000–2006 (2010), Femme du Monde: Poems (2006) in its collections.

Interested in reading The Beloved Community? You can pre-order a copy through the Schomburg Shop online.