Reading A Lucent Fire by Patricia Spears Jones
A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems by Patricia Spears Jones (White Pine Press 2015)
“Life is full of injustices large and small / but also moments of tenderness and regard” Jones writes in her poem “Day After May Day” and to me this epitomizes the spirit of this collection.
A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems by Patricia Spears Jones. Cover art “Untitled” by Sandra Payne.
This poem appears in my favorite section in A Lucent Fire, the excerpt from her chapbook Living in the Love Economy. In the title poem of this section, Jones writes, “The Love Economy is complicated: affection is scarce / Jealously traded as a penny stock and pleasure calculated / On past accounts, overdue.” Jones tells us in the notes section of the book, “These poems were written during the first year of the Great Recession, 2009” and you can tell—there’s an atmosphere of uncertainty, scarcity, and change. That uncanny pairing of “pleasure” and “calculated” appears at points throughout the collection. It feels wrong, taboo somehow, even though this is the reality that Jones and we, her readers, live in. A writer’s mercy though is that the tensions that burden our lives, power our writing.
I want to consider “Living Room,” the first poem from this section, at length. Here’s the poem:
Marilyn Nance’s photograph—“Last Shot in Lagos”
One man in a military uniform; the other in a long white robe
Plants that I cannot kill from neglect or overwatering
A peacock feather wrapped in gold thread
Shimmering in dust; the CD rack tilting
Pictures of my family framed and scattered amongst
Hardcover books, stacks of magazines and souvenirs
Two new blue candleholders
Which match the blue art deco era vase
Bought on Flatbush in the Black man’s antiques Shoppe
Now replaced by SPRINT
The sharp blue light of this cold winter day
The way I think about lovers who made me smile
MILK, the movie not the drink
Guillermo’s fan for Bride of Kong Sing Along
we unavoidably sang off-key:
Ay, que pasó con ellas?
Que pasó con las novias de King Kong
Ay King Kong!
Ay King Kong!
I read this poem never to my knowledge having seen the photograph to which Jones refers, so I am sent off in search of Marilyn Nance. I learn that the photo was most likely taken at FESTAC 77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture which took place in Lagos in 1977. There’s a great interview with Nance here at Africultures that ends with, “There was a time when Africans from all over the world converged. I want it to be KNOWN that this joy HAPPENED. Joy Matters!” which for me rhymes with the emphasis on pleasure and joy (and “tenderness and regard”) in A Lucent Fire.
What does it mean for the speaker of this poem to start it looking at a photo from Nance’s FESTAC archive? In particular at a shot that contains one figure garbed in a military uniform and the other in a white robe? Readers enter sthis poem through a vestibule, moving through an image that depicts a tension between war and peace (that is nonetheless sourced from an archive of Black joy).
We enter into the living room. (Only as I write about it do I notice the architectural quality of the poem’s form here.) The living room is filled with stuff. Stuff is lively—in the case of the plants, literally living. No, not just living: unkillable. We pass through one dichotomy into another: from war and peace to smothering and neglect—two extremes of care gone awry.
The doubling continues. Jones begins with a photograph and now we find family photos in the living room. Is there something that connects these photographs? Jones also doubles down, so to speak, on blue. A thread of blue, and more doubling, merge (“two blue candleholders”) like two subway lines converging and leads us, stop by stop, to “the Black man’s antique Shoppe” in Flatbush.
The antique shop is another kind of archive, closed by gentrification, turning the speaker back onto her inner resources. In memory’s archive, she finds old lovers. She goes to watch MILK, just out in 2008. Interestingly, Harvey Milk was elected as a city supervisor in 1977, the same year FESTAC was held in Lagos. I can’t believe this is insignificant! Even if Jones didn’t consciously mean for the years to correspond exactly (and who’s to say she didn’t?), she undoubtedly means to evoke the temporal convergence of the Black Power and the Black Arts Movements, and of Gay Liberation.
The poem ends with a dangling section in Spanish, which translates to: Oh, what happened to them? Oh, what happened to King Kong’s lovers? Is this an allusion to the 1976 remake (and is the Guillermo to whom Jones refers meant to be Guillermin, as in John Guillermin, the movie’s director) or am I making too much of the 1970s connections in this poem? In any case, I can at least notice that there is another doubling here: earlier Jones thinks of “lovers who made me smile” and we close in a sung chorus which wonders what has become of King Kong’s lovers.
King Kong is a franchise periodically resurrected, still racist, still popular. I can’t help but think about the resonances between the period of Milk and FESTAC (and Jones’s former lovers) and the period of Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street (and all the passionate encounters happening around them) —as well as the resonances between the racialized violence and economic immiseration that would prompt each era’s insurrectionary upwellings; fierce, but also undergirded by joy and communalism.