Featured Poet Ashley Jones Interviewed by Catherine Hall Kiser
/Ashley Jones’s debut poetry collection, Magic City Gospel, won the silver medal in poetry from the Independent Publishers Book Awards. She has also been awarded a 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her poems appear in many journals and anthologies including: Academy of American Poets, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Fjords Review, Quiet Lunch, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, and the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy. She received her MFA in Poetry from Florida International University. She teaches Creative Writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts, co-directs PEN Birmingham, is the Second Vice President of the Alabama Writers Cooperative, and Founding Director of the Magic City Poetry Festival.
SONG OF MY MUHAMMAD^1
after Walt Whitman
I know I have the best of time and space in my two black fists
in my black brain, the way I can never, will never be measured,
this, my immeasurable greatness,
this, my beauty and my speed
I do not need
your white Jesus or even your feeble praise—
I know I’m the prettiest thing that ever lived.
No friend of mine tells me who I can worship,
no friend of mine stops my dance around the ring,
no friend of mine labels my chair anything but throne,
I have no chair, no church, no philosophy that does not salute me as a king,
no man can stop my left hand hooking, hooking,
no man can stop the poetry I keep under my Lousville lip,
I’m so mean I make medicine sick.
Today, I shoulder my way into a crowded heaven,
where my hands are steady and my mind is strong,
and I say to my spirit:
you are golden, even here, golden,
and my spirit says: I am satisfied.
____________________
1 using lines from Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, verse 46, and Ali’s own words
RIDDLED IN THE HEART OF DIXIE
I am the tail of a kite in the Birmingham sky.
I am the crumb of hair between the teeth of an afro pick,
the slats of butter in biscuit dough.
I am Sheriff Taylor’s clear breaths in that backcountry whistle,
the rocks beating beneath Opie’s country toes.
I am the smell of fatback in a cast iron skillet,
the crust flaked off of cornbread in the oven.
I am the sparkling bellies of trains as they pass by Railroad Park.
I am the pothole cupping a tire,
the red dirt on the hill near grandmother’s house,
I am the sour and the grain.
I am the lemonade and pound cake,
the gulp of air in y’all.
I am the tick of stars becoming brilliant in the sky.
Open your mouth and let me land on your tongue.
Let me wash you in Alabama heat
and tell you who you are.
SLURRET
You a spade, a spook, an open-mouthed
black pickaninny. Ashy Aunt Jemima,
Americoon, you blue-gummed Beluga,
you cotton-picking jigaboo. You, drenched
in chicken grease, you watermelon head,
you tar-skinned porch monkey, ain’t never gonna
get a job, you yes suh shuck and jiver,
you hanging tree baboon—for years, we watched
you bleed beneath our skin-splintering whip,
we watched your eyes embolden, swell like veins.
You turned your begging hands to thick brown fists.
What are you made of? What fabric sustains
its fibers, stays elastic despite rips—
embossed with flame, but a brocade remains.
Interview with Ashley M. Jones by Catherine Hall Kiser
I met Ashley at the Alabama Writers’ Cooperative annual meeting in Gulf Shores, Alabama in 2018. Her calm demeanor and quick mind (evidenced by the poem she presented after a five-minute writing exercise) intrigued me, and I wanted to know her better. I purchased her book of poetry, Magic City Gospel, and found her writing to be lyric, rhythmic, and raw in its honesty. Her second book of poems, dark//thing, draws the reader into a world of history, racism, affirmation, Southern slang, rich culture, and a resilient truth. Our interview was originally conducted online via ZOOM on May 1, 2020 and later edited for print.
CHK (Catherine Hall Kiser): So, you grew up in Alabama, the deep South. I also grew up in Alabama and have lived on the Alabama coast most of my life. I relate to much of your language, story, and imagery. Your poems bring me out of myself and into your world, to the places (physical and mental) where you experienced life in the South as a black girl. Did your experiences as a child lead you to writing poetry? Was there someone in particular who introduced you to the world of poetry?
AMJ (Ashley M. Jones): I’ve been writing poetry since I was about seven years old. It’s because of two things - In my household, education and art were priorities. My mom got her degree in education and social work and worked before she decided to stay at home. My dad is a fireman and he does portrait art in pencil; so, we were set up to be artists in that way. We learned to read early (I think I was reading books at the age of three). Mom taught us to recognize words, put sentences together; we created art, made our own play dough. We would color and paint. We didn’t have cable, so we watched educational TV. I went to EPIC Elementary (Educational Programs for the Individual Child) in Birmingham. The whole premise of the school was individualized education for each child. There were kids in class who had hearing disabilities or were in wheelchairs. The concept was that everybody was the same. We all learned sign language; in every program, we would sing and sign the songs. It was a cool place to go to school. I think it was in the 2nd grade that our teacher assigned us to write books to be published (by which I mean we would get them laminated). I thought back then: “I want to be a writer.”
In 2nd grade, we had an assignment to memorize something and present it to the class in costume. I had been reading a book by Eloise Greenfield, called Honey I Love and Other Poems. This was my favorite book. I chose the poem “Harriet Tubman”:
“Harriet Tubman didn’t take no stuff, wasn’t scared of nothing neither, didn’t come in this world to be no slave, and wasn’t going to stay one either….”
There’s more but that’s the refrain. Actually, there is a poem about this in my second book. I chose that poem, got dressed up as Harriet Tubman, recited the poem and in that moment, I remember feeling a power I’d never felt before. I was speaking in the voice of this black woman (author) about a black woman. There is a way in that whole book that she used language, a certain swing I’ve experienced in the way black people speak English. I started thinking about this in college when I took linguistics and studied dialects. I learned about different grammars of different dialects; our teacher said there is no such thing as a wrong dialect and every single dialect has its own grammar. I was taking Spanish as my minor and I realized language is not a rigid thing. I didn’t know this as a seven-year-old, but I liked the way my grandmother, my aunt, mother and father spoke. I was a “library mouse” and spoke ‘proper’ English. When I recited that poem, I really felt like I was finally tapping into the ancient wisdom of black language and black poetry. I started writing poetry after that and have been writing ever since.
CHK: Your poetry is imbued with images and stories of the South: family, food (cornbread, collards, cast iron pans, bacon, grits, biscuits). Can you talk about this contrast of things that nourish and delight with the pain and injustice of life for a black person (especially in the South)?
AMJ: I incorporate these images for many reasons. It relates to the South and our history and my ancestry as a black person in the South. In order to love something and in my case, it’s Alabama and a southern identity, you have to love it completely. You have to understand the bad parts and the good parts. It’s a whole experience. You can’t just say “I love grits,” but I’m not going to think about the other stuff. I didn’t realize that until I left for graduate school. Everybody I knew growing up in Alabama, in Birmingham specifically, had this love/hate relationship with the South. We’d like it here and love our family but were hearing horrible things about where we are from or the way we have been treated. You feel like, “I have to get out of here there’s never going to be any progress.” When I was 22, I went to graduate school in Miami, a totally different culture. I started to realize how much I missed my family but also, I missed the South. I didn’t realize how much I value the culture because I was too busy thinking about the painful history. When I left, and started writing in my graduate program, I started trying to write myself back home. That included the things that were painful about being a Southerner, and I started falling in love with the whole experience. None of us would be who we are without the traumas and the joys that have happened. So, I try to do that in my poetry. It’s hard to write some of that stuff. It’s traumatizing to put some of it on paper or to relive or research, and sometimes I need a helping hand, something light to bring in or pull me out. That’s why both of those elements exist.
CHK: I am drawn in by the rhythmic quality and use of language in your poems. In the poem, “Riddled In The Heart Of Dixie,” I read the lines: “I am the pothole cupping a tire” and “the gulp of air in y’all” over and over, for their beauty and perfection. Can you talk about what influences your poetic “ear”?
AMJ: I think nobody’s ever asked me this; it’s exciting. As cliché as it’s going to sound, life influences my ear. I have academic training. I’ve been to school, but the thing that makes me most excited are things in life. I’m always trying to reimagine or capture something I’ve seen or heard or experienced––a poetic moment that happened in my real life, I’m trying to paint it on the page. In the poem you just referenced, I’m trying to imagine or display images from home. I could hear and see those things very clearly; I wasn’t thinking about simile or metaphor. I don’t always think about that stuff; if that makes sense. I just try to put the image down as accurately as possible. I can’t write if I’m not experiencing things. I can’t just stay inside, I have to go out see things, meet people, read things, and then I try to put that on the page.
CHK: Who are some of your favorite poets/writers? What is it that you respond to in other poet’s work?
AMJ: I’ll start with the easy one, my favorite poet of all time: Lucille Clifton. She is THE poet for me. If I go down in history as somebody who loved Lucille Clifton, that is great, perfect. I say this better in an essay I wrote a few months ago, in Mentor and Muse, they did a Lucille Clifton tribute issue. She talked about how she writes out of her own experience because she didn’t always feel invited in. Growing up I learned the classics, but unfortunately the classics did not reflect people who looked like me or even women. When I read Clifton’s work, I felt like, “OK, this is not someone who is trying to trick me. She’s not trying to hide things. She is just telling me things plainly, but also very skillfully. She’s clearly the poet, but she’s not trying to showboat.” She’s just saying: “Here’s my experience, here I’m telling you about my hips that are big. Here I’m telling you about my curly hair.”
I also love the poet, Rita Dove. She is someone I found early on as well. I loved her book Selected Works. It is the book I carried around my senior year; I read it and re-read it and wrote notes in it. I met her in grad school (Florida International University, Miami) when she came and gave a reading. It was a crazy moment to hand her the book that meant so much to me.
Toni Morrison, I don’t think I need to say more.
I’m drawn to work that doesn’t have pretense. I’m trained to be able to decode the most difficult poems. I don’t enjoy when a writer is closing me out of the experience. I love reading writers in whose work I can see myself; it doesn’t have to be a black person’s writing. I love Sharon Olds, even though she isn’t a black woman, I feel invited in for conversation. I love honest story telling. In poems, I want a real story, with poetic turns, figurative language that blows my mind. . . that’s what I’m looking for.
CHK: I see two poems that are “after Ross Gay.” I am just now discovering his work and heard him say in an interview, “It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.” Although your second book of poems is titled dark//thing and there are tragic, inhumane stories of racism and terror, your poems rise in fierce strength and joy. Does this make sense, not happy joy, but joy of spirit and unity?
AJM: Ross Gay is someone I’m also still discovering. He intimidates me in the best possible way. Physically he is a very tall man, and he radiates joy and a golden aura, it’s very trippy to see him in person. I’ve never been able to approach him; he is a guru or something!
I think my poetry has a large capacity for joy, for me and for the reader. I feel joy in being able to tell stories I didn’t hear growing up. I don’t love the word progress, but I’m able to say certain things and people receive them in the traditional literary landscape. It is difficult to live in this society as a black person, but there is so much joy in our culture and in the history. I hope that readers are able to get there. There is happiness, we made it, we are telling the story and somebody hears us.
CHK: What books or writers are you reading now?
AMJ: Not poetry, interestingly enough. I do read poetry but sometimes a novel or book of short stories will just get me. I’m reading The Sun Does Shine, a memoir by Anthony Ray Hinton. He is involved with the Equal Justice Initiative with Bryan Stevenson in Montgomery. He was wrongly incarcerated and put on death row for 30 years. After he spoke at our school, the kids were in tears. They thought, “Gosh this man is an angel.” This man went through the worst experience. He said: “I know I have to control my own happiness. I had to keep living to honor my mother’s memory and I knew God was going to see me through it. And now I’m travelling the world to tell my story, not to say it’s all good, but to say you can survive it and we have to fight it. I got out so we can fight together.”
CHK: You write in various poetic forms – Broken Sonnet, Sestina, Abecedarian, Villanelle, Golden Shovel, Haiku – how do you choose to write in a form? How does form influence the poem?
AMJ: I will start by saying that for me, writing in form is newish. All through high school, I hated form, hated, hated, hated formal poetry. I thought it was outdated. I hated form even in college. I was reading Clifton, and she doesn’t write in form. I was writing in her style which is almost the opposite. In grad school, I took a poetics class and it broke open something new to me. I realized this could be something completely different and real and relevant to my life. I also learned how to use rhyme and meter. I use form now, not as a cage but as a fence or container, as something that could aid what I do.
In the second book, the first poem “Slurret” is talking about the struggle of black people. I felt like the sonnet would be useful because it is a familiar and respected form.
I wanted to do something that I saw Gwendolyn Brooks doing in her work, taking forms that are hailed as traditional poetry and writing about something that is not as celebrated. I wanted to do this by bringing in my people and words that are ugly and painful. I don’t think the poem would have been the same if it had not been written in the sonnet form. If I want to obsess over something I’ll write a sestina because I have to keep going over the same six words, or a Villanelle.
CHK: Your poems resonate with what I call the truth of experience. Even when you write about historical figures, you seem to have known them, to have been with them. When I read “Songs Of My Muhammad,” a poem that weaves words of Walt Whitman and Muhammad Ali, I feel like you knew them and are sharing your experience. How do you help your students find their own relationship with truth and express what they know?
AMJ: This is a great question, “how do I get my students to tap into that sort of experience”?
CHK: Yes, how do you get your students to pull from their experience rather than write what they think is hip and cool?
AMJ: What I try to do with my students is show them work that is tapping into something authentic. I tell them it is important to have some connection to what they are writing about. You have to find some kernel of truth. If you don’t find some real emotion in the poem, it’s not going to be an experience where the reader will be able to connect, and you, as the writer, won’t be able to connect. I try to encourage students toward their own experience.
CHK: How do you weigh the emotion of poetry with politics; can poetry make us better as we strive to understand each other and ourselves?
AMJ: Yes! Someone said recently, “Oh people think a poem can’t change or save anybody’s life”. Maybe, literally a physical piece of paper isn’t going to stop a bullet from killing me but the idea of a poem or “to poem” as a verb, can save or change someone. It can also educate people. It can change minds. Here in Birmingham, we have 100 Thousand Poets For Change, a world-wide event that happens every September. Poets get together to read in support of general change and betterment of society. A couple of years ago, the non-profit we worked with was called Shutdown Etowah. They work on trying to dismantle the Etowah detention center (which is the worst in the nation) for immigrants incarcerated by ICE. The conditions are horrible; they sleep on the floor and don’t get proper food. All we did was team up with this non-profit, and they said if y’all can raise $100,000.00, we can match it and will be able to free some people, get them legal help to get them home back with their families. We set that goal and exceeded it, just by reading poetry. By doing that, we literally changed lives and took people out of that horrible situation. It shows that Art has that power. Maybe in my life Art has more power than any other traditional politics that I’ve encountered because it’s not just – “here are my talking points, here is my platform.” It’s, “here is my human experience, I want you to hear it and understand it and then we can move on from there.” People respond a lot more to “I’m a human being, this is what I’m going through,” than “I am this political party and this is what I want to get done.”
CHK: What are you working on now? (poetry or other projects?)
AMJ: I am making face masks for my family on the sewing machine.
For writing, I have finished a third manuscript, and I’m trying to get it taken up by somebody. I am also trying to write a book of essays.
I published the one on Clifton and I’m working on some others. I’m also working on, I don’t know that I would call it a memoir, I’ll call it non-fiction.
CHK: How has isolation and the Corona Virus affected/influenced your work?
AMJ: Well my job––work, means I can’t go to school and see my students. We have to do it through the computer. I’m glad we have technology. We haven’t had official word, but I’m prepared to continue online with high schoolers and college students next Fall.
I haven’t been writing a lot. I haven’t had the energy for it. I’ve been telling people that staying alive is taking a lot of energy. I wrote a poem a couple of days ago which came by surprise. I was outside on the phone for a board meeting, (with Sue Walker interestingly). I was in my parent’s backyard (I’m moved back here for the lockdown to be with family). So, I was in my parent’s backyard and the wind that particular day, I don’t know was going on but it was a beautiful wind, that wind was doing something, it was a divine wind, and that wind became a poem. I guess I’m going to have to be open.