Friday, August 12, 2016

Poet Patricia Spears Jones on A LUCENT FIRE - Art Saves Lives!

Christal Cooper

*All photographs are labeled with description and copyright at the very end of the piece.  

Excerpts granted copyright privilege from Patricia Spears Jones and White Pine Press



Patricia Spears Jones:
A Lucent Fire:  New & Selected Poems
“The Salvation In Art!”

When horrible things happen, people don’t run to prose, they run to poetry because it has that ability to connect powerful emotions with ideas in one package. It can happen in prose, but when you really want to get down to it, it happens in poems.”

--Patricia Spears Jones


       Today our country abides in a state of chaos.  Political parties are broken; our government is considered untrustworthy; and our peace officers are viewed as aggressors.  The spirit of the middle class is fading and the rich – as always – get richer.  This is today – but this is also yesterday –especially in the lives of African Americans in these United States.


       How do the disenfranchised enjoy self-empowerment in mainstream American, and still maintain the memories of the injustices perpetrated against their fathers and mothers?  Should they maintain these memoires or should they deny the whippings, the brandings and the selling of their bodies wholesale?  How can people of color embrace the past, live in the cultural present, and still maintain individual power?


       These questions that must be answered.  And Patricia Spears Jones does that in her poetic collection A Lucent Fire New & Selected Poems (White Pine Press November 10, 2015.  http://www.whitepine.org)


       Jones illustrates the turmoil the disenfranchised endure and its effect on individuals and the surrounding community.  But Jones doesn’t stop there.  She recognizes the possibility of maintaining an identity of power without having to betray a past of identity of oppression.


       And the medium that makes these points a reality is art.  Jones explores these possibilities in verse, but Mary Baine Campbell describes Jones’ connection to all art forms in the book’s introduction.


       “In this again Jones’ world resembles the real world, that place of intersection of all our lives and visions and creations (and alas, uncreations).  And again, in line with the value of aliveness that orients this collection, from “Early” to ‘New and Uncollected,” the arts make their appearance most often through the medium of artists, alive and in motion.  The moving, singing, typing, painting, acting, street walking, drinking, loving, shopping, thinking, shoe wearing characters of Lucent Fire include Billie Holiday, Rita Hayworth, James Brown, Sly & the Family Stone, Sylvia Plath, Kara Walker, Lynda Hull, Marilyn Monroe, Thulani Davis, Mary J Blige, Borges, George F Hunt, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Kurt Cobain, Fellini, Fats Domino, Rodgers and Hammerstein (and hart), Mabou Mines (http://www.maboumines.org) , the Wooster Group (http://thewoostergroup.org/blog/), Godard, Neruda, Mishima, Beuys, Lecan, Diamond Galas, Akilah Oliver . . .”







       There are eight sections to this book, and they include poems from her books:  Early Poems (consists of Mythologizing Always 1981 Telephone Books),  The Weather That Kills (June 1, 1995 Coffee House Press http://coffeehousepress.org), Femme du Monde (June 7, 2006 Ta Chucha http://www.tiachucha.org), Painkiller November 30, 2010 Ta Chuchua http://www.tiachucha.org), Repuestas (2007 Belladonna Books http://www.belladonnaseries.org/books), Swimming to America (2011 Red Glass Books), Living in the Love Economy (2014 Overpass Books www.overpassbooks.org), and New and Uncollected Poems.
       







Early Poems
“Mythologizing Always: Seven Sonnets Change in Seasons or The Break-up Sonnet VII” sets the stage of the state of unrest in the past and in the present.


There are scars always
Faithful clicks on the psychic metronome
A shiver in the limbs perhaps
A grimace just before the smile

       In the last stanza, Jones offers small protective measures the disenfranchised can take in this state of unrest: 

But holding on to the dead is worse
You move on/move away
Let your shoulders carve a space for some sky
And you don’t ever, ever look back
For fear those Biblical tales are true
And you never could stand the taste of salt.

“The Mythologizing Always” sonnets and “The Birth of Rhythm and Blues” are examples of how compelling poems can mean something totally different to the reader than the poet intended.


In an email dated August 10, 2016 Jones wrote:  “Hello Chris – interesting interpretations.  The sonnets are about a love affair and while your interpretation could mean others, it is really about the loss of romantic love.   


‘The Birth of Rhythm and Blues’ is about my mother—her voice and Holiday's are explored in that poem and it is very specifically about my birth (by Caesarian).”

From The Weather That Kills
       In “The Birth of Rhythm and Blues” Jones speaks through Billie Holiday, of the men who have betrayed her, but the below verses also describe the condition of African American women.



A Black woman’s life is like double jeopardy.
All you win are dreams for your children
and the right amount of lies to make waking worthwhile.

        The next verses describe Holiday’s view of the world as a little girl; it also could describe the working class’s view of America today:



                For a world larger than the screen door that slams
early morning, and the reeking breath of a man once handsome and
            friendly

       And then it hits you.  This poem is not limited to the voice of Billie Holiday but includes voices of Professor Longhair, Big Boy Crudup, Ruth Brown, Aretha Franklin, Mahalia Jackson, Otis, Etta James, Little Richard, all who have fallen into oppression by a system of white privilege – through the use of the evil caesarian:






A noble operation for Caesar used for a poor Black Woman
already wanting to break this wall, as hand claps break a forest’s silence.  Uterine wall collapsing,
so they cut my mother’s belly and drag me out
wailing too.

In the second stanza of “In Like Paradise/Out Like the Blues” we learn of one artist’s way of giving hope to the downtrodden, through his painting.




2.
After Rufino Tamayo returned from mapping
the Cosmos, he returned to his wife and said

Stars are like flowers in the desert.
They shiver fresh in the aeon knowing
that they will become memory, hunger,
the core of dreams.

It is up to me, then, to bring back their beauty:
taut, seamless before the eyes of men and women.
To amplify the vitality of their illumination
(righteous shimmer above melancholy clouds)
To remind humanity that without them night would never come.




       In the third stanza, a couplet, Rufino Tamayo lives through Jones, and reveals that it is possible for something to be ugly and awesome at the same time.  If this is possible, maybe it is possible to hold on to an oppressive past identity and still maintain an identify of power? 



3.
The death of a star like the death of a flower
Is awesome, ugly, a relentless warning.

And this great dichotomy can only be accomplished through art, and it is through this art, that makes the dreams of equality come into fruition.

4.
Artists make whole somehow the ways
In which dreams persist.

Each of us turns to the hunger of stars
And wipes the crumbs from our mouths.

On canvas, they laugh like children.
In essence, they scream like children
And struggle like children to eat, grow, copulate, then flash out
A name perhaps.  A body gone.

From Femme Du Monde
       In the poem “Saltimbanque” there are different individuals who use variety of art forms to change his/her perspective of life, to unify, and to resist their oppressors.
       In a November 27, 2015 interview with Barbara Henning of The Poetry Project Newsletter, Jones goes into great detail about the writing of “Saltimbanque.”  Jones had been working as Director of Development at the New Museum where she was content and happy. 



But all of that changed when she learned that Toni Cade Bambara died at the age of 56.  Jones felt the muse leading her to quit her job and to focus on her poetry, which she did three months later. 



“In the meantime I got the residency at Virginia Center for Creative Arts for the month of April. I got there and slept for three days. I was so worn out. When I woke up, I started reading things at random and there was this book by T.J. Clarke, The Absolute Bourgeois. That’s when I started thinking about the position of artists.



Also 1848 is fascinating to me because it’s that year where there were revolutions and rebellions all throughout Europe and they were all put down and they were harbingers of things to come. And there were slave rebellions, many big ones in the U.S. and probably in South America although I don’t know that history.”




Banners dirty and torn, fragmented song sings air.
Why are the revolutions of 1848 present?
Weapons in the hands of peasants, slave rebellions
in the American South, the monarchy crisis,
Plutocrats measure their new-found power in gilt, silk, velocity.

“Also, there was a French speaking artist there so I talked with her and realized that Daumier was the perfect figure. He was popular and he was a famous artist, but he had this whole cache of paintings he couldn’t show because they would have just kicked his ass into jail.”




Suppose Daumier had behaved differently?  He walks across
Paris uneventful.  News banal – barricades, congresses,
the secret societies ineffectual.  What would his cartoons reveal?
The fat bellied bourgeois slimmer?  The masses
stepping into well-made shoes?
Or would he have – as he did in private – made more paintings
of the saltimbanques:  street performers suppressed,
by order of the State?

 “So this poem is about what it means to resist.  What does it mean to restrain oneself? How do you figure out how to undermine power? What will the powerful do to you?”




Were their songs too political, pornographic?
Had their children not received instruction from the priests?
Were their dancing dogs and wily monkeys better off
Burned?

Have we not enough water?
Is there not enough air?

“The saltimbanques were the street performers, whole families with animals, monkeys, etc… and the French are such great bureaucrats. They outlawed working with animals and performing children. A significant number of them starved to death including the animals they worked with. All of this was done because they were street performers and their songs were not sanctioned by the state.”




Sous les paves, la plage
Songs of freedom scorch parched throats.
Workers and students defy enforced alienation.
Rise together, spray police with pamphlets, curses,
on the very paving stones that once were danced upon
by the saltimbanques, their children, and trained beasts.

There is the art form of hero worship – and it is through this hero worship that artists, intellectuals, and idealists unify to create their own armies of resistance.




While an ocean way, under an image of the ever-defiant Che,
intellectuals, idealists, the disaffected rallied across
a hemisphere.

In the last line of the fifth stanza poets express their power through words, debates and learning to handle guns.




               In the mountains of Central America,
poets purged themselves in clear, cold streams,
debated desire, and learned to shoot.
Sous les paves, la plage.

       Stanza six presents the violation of the disenfranchised:



6
On a road to Biafra, in the slums of Manila,
on the back streets of Kingston, inside the chain-linked lawns
of South Los Angeles, people make a song, new song, riot song
as a stockpile of promises collapses the shanty towns,
miners’ camps, the migrant workers’ buses traveling north
from Florida seats sticky with overripe oranges.

Under the pavement, the beach.
Under a stockpile of rotting promises, human stench
Bodies gunned down in daylight in Manila, Mexico City,
Memphis, Tennessee.  Cameras chasing children
grabbing a solid taste of fire.

And earlier  that year, Soviet tanks pressed against
The Prague Spring, a winter storm drowning flowers.

       Stanza seven is what the world’s response should be – through the example of Martin Luther King Jr.   



“I wanted to place King in jail, to show his deep humanity in the face of oppression, but also to show how he like those performers was codified by the state. I mean Martin Luther King got his ass kicked too, in many horrible ways.”




7.
Martin Luther King Jr. sat bleeding in a Birmingham jail.  He worked
his mind along the sacred stations of the cross and found,
if not solace, then the tattered cloth called dignity,
as he prayed for the souls of his jailers.

“But I also wanted the position of the clown, the saltimbanque, the performer to be revered— that it is one of powerful ways to resist. Why else does the state do so much to regulate ‘entertainment?’ We have to put on another face so we can continue when we leave the jailhouse behind. I wanted to give him that.”




Tracing Alabama dust, his cross just heavy enough o bear,
Word could have been miracle, joy, power.
It was likely to have been song, people, or alone.
He made, in private, a face mimicking the fat, snuff-dipping guards.
Clown face turned towards jail-floor dust
His tears roll away holy laughter.  Saltimbanque
In a moment of amazing tenderness and pure rage.

From PAINKILLER
In “Failed Ghazal” the speaker of the poem is sitting in a Brooklyn living room with the scent of roses and ginger where she has a memory of eating Chinatown ginger cookies in 1975 San Francisco.  She searches New York’s Mott and Mulberry streets for the same cookie.  The scents and the cookies represent a culture that the speaker of the poem is trying to recapture now living in Brooklyn. 



By the third stanza we know this is an elegy to
Poet/Playwright Peter Dee.

He sculpted poems and plays where his characters, many of them
            children took chances large and small to find ways to be
            tender, loving, despite abandonment, despair, the world, the        
            world, the world.

       In “Notes for the Poem, “Beloved of God”/A Memory Of David Earl Jackson” she remembers David Earl Jackson as well as the elderly African American men who managed to survive the prejudices inflicted upon them.  

I now know why I have always respected aging Black men
To have defied the bullets ever ready to find their targets,
These are men of immeasurable luck.  The sixty-something gentleman
on the 4 train, Friday morning, his voice still Georgia rich, schooling
a younger Black man.

She particularly remembers the victims of police brutality, now symbols of the Black Lives Matter Movement:   




Here we are at the start of a new century, in the Year of the Dragon,
and we look back to a tangled history of blood desires and blood
             letting
or denial and lies.  The violence consequences of white supremacy-
             four young men
raised in fear and marked by badge and gun with the chance to

lose sight of mission and common sense in the shadow of a doorway
where every boogeyman story crystallizes in the body, mind, and
            heart of a
young African man doing nothing in particular.

Toward the last stanza she tells how African Americans should respond to this travesty, especially when denied justice.





We live. We do not become so foolish that we think we cannot
                change the world.
We remain as open to new ideas and as defiant of old expectations
             as that aging man,
still angry and still working to make a difference that I heard on the
             No 4.


There was nothing specific about David Earl Jackson – suggesting that when one person is disenfranchised it affects the whole community

Savoring the beauty of noise, gossip, anxiety and joy,
We pour libations and we remember who has been sacrificed and why.
We celebrate half a century of moving on terra ferma,
Dancing away from the bullets.”

From REPUESTAS
       This is the shortest section of the collection and consists of three poems in which Jones converses with the great legendary poet Pablo Neruda.



 In the second poem “Y Cuando se muda el paisaje, son tus manos or son tus guantes?” Jones describes gardening as an art form and compares that to the theatrical art of set directing – creating a scene for a better world.




“And when you change the landscape, is it with your bare hands or
              with gloves?
I changed the landscape with gloves on
I hate dirt beneath my fingernails
I like manicures, but that’s another poem

Oh yes the theatricality of scene setting is pleasing
like a rain storm’s beating the hard green of magnolia leaves.

From SWIMMMING TO AMERICA
       In “Mary J Blige Sings “No One Will Do’ Jones pays tribute to Mary J Blige and James Brown.   



      In the poem she divides the world into two parts – James Brown’s world the Soul Nation, and the world that oppresses, the Soul Less Nation. 




This behavior continues to shock citizens of SOUL LESS NATION
Busy as they are with their markets, markers, and ministers without
             portfolio

They see only the smiling countenances of miserable men and women
Oh so folkloric in fake fur floor length coats, rhinestones and hot
           pants.

SOUL NATION gives up poly rhythms and an occasional orgasmic
            Shriek.

Jones empowers the disenfranchised, through the words of James Brown. 

GET UP OFFA THAT THANG and make yourself feel better
GET UP OFFA THA THANG and change the shape of weather.

Then Jones urges those disenfranchised to appreciate the Ambassador of soul “who brought us the ache and art of Black America, claiming”

Patriarchy of funk and feeling just about as good as you can get
When you walk a walk so defiant, every one wants to sample your
            will.

From LIVING IN THE LOVE ECONOMY
      
In “Day After May Day” Jones acknowledges the great dichotomy of justice and injustice. 

Life is full of injustices large and small
but also moments of tenderness and regard

Her solution is once again – art in the form of music, the beauty of the sky, and the chanting of prayer:

But on a chilly May Morning, U2 on the CD
I can see the Ox’s half moon horns
the peacock’s blue to green
and the cups petal shaped edges.

And offer one more prayer to the God of Friendship.

       In “Family Ties” Jones is unemployed, middle aged, and in debt with no new prospects.   In an interview with Henning she said she was laid off from her non-profit job that she held for ten years.  Family and friends gave her encouragement, but she was facing reality – she was a black woman, middle aged, and having a difficult time to get people to even respond to her resume.     



It was horrible.  Everybody I knew had someone who lost work in their family or been cut back or didn’t get the raise they should gotten.”

My brother is nervous, my lack of employment
Wears on him, my Mama, and my baby sister.
They are nervous. I am nervous too. Day to day

Hour by hour.  My heart rate rises.  And it keeps raining.
If I could just gain a toehold, shove a door, find
My clichéd Plan B.  Oh, but I am my own Plan B.

Jones responded through her plan by expressing it boldly in poetry.




Poetry on scraps of paper.  Poetry on the side table.
Poetry is the realm of the possible, where middle-aged
women find love and work and great apartments

       Jones told interviewer Barbara Henning that this crisis in her life turned her to write her poetry collection Living in the Love Economy.





I’m very proud of the work I did in Living in the Love Economy because those poems also track not only me, but also my neighbors.”   




I aspire to a better situation; a different position.
To that day close in the possibility of later
as poems rip through much ordinary mutter
and the clutter of paid bills and plans for travel.

From NEW AND UNCOLLECTED POEMS
In “Wearing Mr. Song” Jones pays tribute to the hat (designed by Luke Song) Aretha Franklin wore at President Barack Obama’s Inauguration.   





      The poem is packed with compelling moments:  the power of the African American Woman, cultural changes that allowed an African American Man to be President, and finally, an anthem dedicated to all the artists Jones wrote about in this collection – though many are now dead – it is because of them this moment in “Wearing Mr. Song” is now a reality.  And last but not least we are an America in need of change, capable of change, and will change for the betterment of all humanity.




Wearing Mr. Song

So what if her voice is just a half beat ahead of the taped
Strings swelling somewhat over the Mall, all these people
All this color, a dash of cold to keep everyone awake

And sing she did wearing a gray chapeau from Mr. Song
How righteous is that?  The trim, just so.

How righteous is Aretha early morning, so damn happy
A President who looks like a skinny version of her brother,
A second cousin, an old boyfriend.  The helpful guy at the bank.

How can you think the Lord better than that preacher from
              California
Who seemed to think he was at some crystal palace, the walls
            Cracked
And crumbling under the weight of his bigotry?  Truth is told.

She will have none of that.  Oh no.  She sings “sweet land of liberty.”
Voice crackles in places where once it climbed fearless of octaves

It is still her voice.  She’s still Aretha.  This is America.
And things do change.  And change can come.

When it needs to.
      
CONCLUSION
       In A Lucent Fire, Patricia Spears Jones exposes the atrocities and conflict, and, she gives empowerment to those living in these terrible circumstances.  The disenfranchised and those championing the disenfranchised have the power, through art, to change their world:  whether it is picking an orange; designing a hat; singing; dancing; playing music; painting; writing; acting; sculpting; reading; uplifting those who defy the oppressors; praying to a Higher Power; and yes – even poetry.





Photograph Description and Copyright Information

001
Left:  Patricia Spears Jones at the Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Attributed to Janet Goldner
Right:  Jacket cover of A Lucent Fire

002
Patricia Spears Jones.
Attributed to Rachel Eliza Griffiths

003 
Patricia Spears Jones, second from left, participating in a poetry reading in 1977.
Attributed to Richard E. Powell 

004
Patricia Spears Jones visiting Atlanta as a Rhodes College senior. 

005
Jacket cover of A Lucent Fire

006
Advertisement of poetry event Patricia Spears Jones took part in.

007
Mary Baine Campbell
Web photo Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

008a
Rita Hayworth, originally from Brooklyn, NY in 1947
Public Domain

008b
Sly & the Family Stone in 1969, photographed by their photographer and A&R director, Stephen Paley. Clockwise from top: Larry Graham, Freddie Stone, Gregg Errico, Sly Stone, Rose Stone, Cynthia Robinson, and Jerry Martini. A similar photograph was used as the cover of Rolling Stone #54 (March 19, 1970).
Public Domain

008c
Sylvia Plath in 1967.  Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

008d
left, “The Means to an End A Shadow Drama ion 5 Acts”   Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law
right, Kara Walker’s Facebook photo.  Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

008e
Poet Lynda Hull
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

008f
Marilyn Monroe in 1953.  Public Domain

008g
Thulani Davis
Web photo Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

008h
Jorge Luis Borges in 1951. Public Domain.

008i
right, Church Lady Holy Bible

008j
Thomas Sayers Ellis
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

008k
Kurt Cobain performing at the 1992 MTV Music Awards
CCBYSA 30

008l
Federico Fellini.  Public Domain

008m
Fats Domino performing in Germany in 1977
Public Domain

008n
Rodgers & Hammerstein
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

008o
Jean-Luc Godard at Berkeley in 1968
CCBY2.0

008p
Yukio Mishima in 1956.  Public Domain

008q
Joseph Beuys giving a lecture in Achberg, Germany 1978
Photograph attributed to Rainer Rappmann

008r

008s
Diamond Galas performing in QE Hall in London.
Attributed to Andy Newcombe
CCBY SA 20

009a
Jacket cover Mythologizing Always

009b
Jacket cover The Weather That Kills

009c
Jacket cover Femme du Monde

009d
Jacket cover of Painkiller

009g
Jacket cover Living In the Love Economy

010
“My first publication (Mythologizing Sonnnets) when I lived on 95th and Riverside Drive.  I still have the beaded bracelets.  The sculpture now sits on my living room window still.”

014
Patricia Spears Jones giving a poetry reading from A Lucent Fire

015
Patricia Spears Jones in the 1980s
Attributed to Gene Bagnato


017
Billie Holiday in 1949
Attributed to Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress Public Domain

019
Billie Holiday as a little girl, age two, in 1917
Public Domain

021a
Henry Roeland Byrd aka Professor Longhair in the 1970s
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

021b
Arthur Big Boy Crudup
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

021c
Ruth Brown performing in 2005
CCBY2.0

021d
Aretha Franklin in 1967
Public Domain

021e
Mahalia Jackson in 1962
Attributed to Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress
Public Domain

021f
Otis Redding performing in a trace ad for his single “Try a little tenderness” in 1967
Public Domain 

021g
Etta James performing in Deauville, France in 1990
CCBYSA30

021h
Little Richard in 1967
Public Domain

023
Rufino Tamayo in the process of painting
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

024
“Sandas”  Watermelons
Oil on Canvas
Attributed to Rufino Tamayo in 1965
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

025
Rufino Tamayo Mexican Artist in 1945
Attributed to Carl Van Vechten
Library of Congress Public Domain

029
Left, jacket cover of The Poetry Project Newsletter Issue December January 2015/2016 in which Barbara Henning’s interview of Patricia Spears Jones appeared.
Right, image of Barbara Henning from her web page at
www.barbarahenning.com

030
Toni Cade Babara
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

031
Left, web photo of T.J. Clark, Fair Use The Absolute Bourgeois

032
Painting The French Revolution of 1848, depicting the Battle of Soufflot barricades at Rue Soufflot St. on June 24, 1848
Attributed to Horace Vernet
Public Domain

034
Left, Honore Daumier in 1850; attributed to Vicotr Laisne/Laine
Public Domain
Right, Gargantua, lithograph by Honore Daumier, Public Domain

036
Patricia Spears Jones taking a selfie of her favorite hat story in Harlem on a hot summer day in 2012.

038
Family of Saltimbanques
Oil on Canvas
Attributed to Pablo Picasso
Public Domain

040
Che Guevara at the funeral for the victims of the La Coubre explosion.
Photo taken on March 5, 1960
Photo attributed to Alberto Korda
Public Domain

042
Alberto Granado, left, and Che Guevara, right, aboard their “Mambo Tango” wooden raft on the Amazon River.  The raft was given to them as a gift from a colony of lepers Granada and Guevara had given medical treatment to.
June of 1952
Public Domain

044a
Manila slum during Typhoon Ketsana’s landfall on the Philippines 2009
CCBY20

044b
Bird’s eye of Kingston, Jamaica after the 1907 earthquake
Image attributed to the Sustainable Sanitation Alliance
Public Domain

044c
Image of South Central Los Angeles where most of the April 1992 riots took place.
CCBY20

046
Martin Luther King Jr in 1964
Public Domain

047
Martin Luther King Jr’s mugshot at his arrest in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963
Public Domain

049
Martin Luther King Jr speaking at an anti-Vietnam War rally at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul on April 27, 1967
CCBYSA

051
Typical American style fire escapes in Mott Street (Chinatown) Manhattan.
Attributed to Hu Torya
CC BY SA 3.0

056
Black Lives Matter die-in protest at Metro Green Line against allegations of police brutality in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Attributed to Fibonacci Blue
CCBY20

058
Stop the violence image in Brooklyn 
Image attributed to Patricia Spears Jones.


062
Left, Pablo Neruda as a young man. Public Domain
Right, Pablo Neruda recording his poetry at the Library of Congress in 1966.  Public Domain

063
Image of flowers in Patricia Spears Jones’s Brooklyn neighborhood.
Attributed to Patricia Spears Jones

065
Mary J Blige and James Brown
Both performing in Hamburg, Germany - Blige in 2000s and Brown in the 1970s 


075
Patricia Spears Jones


078
Patricia Spears Jones surrounded by Poetry at a bookstore. 

080
Copies of Living In the Love Economy

081
Image of Patricia Spears Jones’s Brooklyn neighborhood
Attributed to Patricia Spears Jones

083a
Mr. Luke Song
Fair Use Under the United States Copyright Law

083b
Aretha Franklin wears the famous hat at President Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Inauguration
Public Domain

083c
President Barack Obama
Public Domain

085
Patricia Spears Jones standing in the doorway of Chartwell Booksellers, an independent bookstore owned by Barry Singer.
Photograph attributed to Barry Singer.


Wednesday, August 3, 2016

Quick Analysis on Phillip Margolin's WOMAN WITH A GUN

Christal Cooper

Book Analysis By Chris Rice Cooper:
Phillip Margolin:  Woman With A Gun



       It is 2015, and Stacey Kim is a 28-year-old dreamer who goes to med school to please her parents only to realize that her real passion is in writing.  When she inherits a large sum of money from her grandparents she quits med school, enters into an MFA creative writing program. 

                    excerpt from movie poster of Bridgett Jones' Diary 

       There she meets her professor, Morris DeFord, the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Ward for Fiction and a finalist for the National Book Award.  DeFord tells Stacey that her short story “A Fragment of the Day” was one of the finest pieces of fiction he had ever read.   This gives her the craving to write the great American novel, and the courage, after her graduation, to move to Manhattan where she lands a job with the Wilde, Levin, and Barstow law firm.  

                     Mixed media by Chris Rice Cooper 

       She assumes she will be full of ideas of writing in her Manhattan apartment and her job at the law firm will give her plenty of inspiration, but she is terribly wrong.  Her apartment is so small it practically just fits her bed, she is bored at her job, and her zest for writing is gone –she has writer’s block, which other than rejection, is the writer’s greatest fear.

                           Mixed Media by Chris Rice Cooper 

       But all that changes when one day during her lunch break she attends a Salvador Dali exhibit, and completes the Dali exhibit with time to spare – just enough time to visit the exhibit next door:  the photography exhibit of Pulitzer Prize winner Kathy Moran. 

                                          Salvador Dali November 9, 1939

She is captivated by one photograph titled Woman With A Gun, the photograph that earned Moran her Pulitzer Prize. 


All of a sudden the block disappears and Stacey has this craving, the urge to write her great novel based on the photograph Woman With A Gun.  But that is where Stacey’s story ends – on page 8, and she doesn’t enter the picture until page 165.

 
              Photograph by Chris Rice Cooper 

       On page 9 it is now 2005, and we meet a variety of characters for the next 156 pages and it is in these 156 pages that we learn the most about Kathy Moran, District Attorney Jack Booth; and the mystery woman in Woman With A Gun is not a mystery as of page 15, when the reader learns her name along with other backstory about her.   

                        Mixed Media By Chris Rice Cooper 

The reader also learns everything else in these 156 pages, including three more homicides that occur, jumping from 2005 to 2010 and back to present day 2015.   In these pages there really is no mystery, and even though District Attorney Jack Booth and other officials in these homicide cases seem to be in the dark, I as a reader found it pretty easy to read between the lines and figure out the case long before Stacey Kim comes back into the game on page 165.  

                          Mixed Media By Chris Rice Cooper 

       Still even after Stacey Kim reenters the book on page 165 it is not Stacey who solves the great mystery but Jack Booth who figures it out not by studying the mystery of the Woman In The Gun but by discovering the identity of the bearded man in another picture taken by Kathy Moran and figuring out the direction the image Woman With A Gun was taken.

Stock Photo of bearded man photoshopped by Chris Rice Cooper 


       The things Stacey Kim encounters on page 165 until the very last page of 294 is far fetched from her quick love affair to a lawyer involved in the cases, to two acts of violence she suffers and survives; and to her being embraced by the participants in these murder cases.  Most novelists, especially those not published, are not so openly embraced and invited into the center office and center residences of the people involved in murderer cases, especially those cases that are still considered unsolved. 

                     Mixed Media By Chris Rice Cooper 

       On the other side of the coin, Women With A Gun is a good read and takes place in Philip Margolin’s home state of Oregon, which in itself is a character beautifully cast in this novel.

                      Oregon's Lone Ranch Beach CCBY SA3.0

       Margolin’s background is in the criminal justice field as a defense attorney who has handled over 30 murder cases; and with 18 novels, all of them New York Times Bestsellers, Phillip Margolin is doing something right.


                      Phillip Margolin April 27, 2008 Fair Use