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

Christal Cooper

https://www.facebook.com/christalann.ricecooper

caccoop@aol.com

*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!”

http://psjones.com

“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

left, George F Hunt http://www.artbygolden.com/ghunt.html

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 95^th 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

http://blacklivesmatter.com

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.