Patricia Spears Jones

Last night, new Guest Writer Gabriella Phillip attended the most recent Women Poets at Barnard reading, featuring Lynn Emanuel and Patricia Spears Jones. The two poets both read and discussed a diverse selection of their original poetry.

Lynn Emanuel, who currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh, started the evening by reading a few of her original poems from her sixth collection of poetry, “The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected”, which won the 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry prize from the Academy of American Poets. In one of her poems, inspired by Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, she discusses her symbolic obsession with the conception of a woman transforming into a dog.

She criticizes the fine art of living and human relations to ambiguous tragedy. Readers can explicitly notice Emanuel’s comparison between this transformation to that of marriage. In the poem, she specifically mentions feeling as though she was an actual dog and how by embracing this tyrannical dog-like treatment, she was completely replaced with this hypothetical ideology. Such symbolism connecting not only humans and animals, but also inanimate objects, showcases Emanuel’s unique style of writing modern poetry.

Patricia Spears Jones, who recently served as a fellow of the Black Earth Institute, read a few poems from different sections of her newest book, “A Lucent Fire”, each of which is rich with surrealism and offer readers an animated entrance to her life’s work as a female poet. Jones creatively emphasizes black, female, queer, economically disadvantaged, chaotic, and displaced lives that can appear quite unrepresented in poetry writing. The job of the poet is essentially to say something that will matter, that can improve the experience of living and speak back to the erasures and violences in our world and Jones does exactly that. Her relatable diction allows readers to fully engage in what she is trying to convey through her collections of poetry.

Both of these women showcase that poetry is actually a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that are manifested into words to be shared with the world. It’s hardworking and moving women poets such as Lynn Emanuel and Patricia Spears Jones who name the unnamable, point at frauds, take sides, start arguments, shape the world and stop it from going to sleep. These two literary feminists inspire the young people of this generation to “get up offa that thang”, as Jones quoted from the 1976 song by James Brown, and speak your mind because especially in these politically challenging times, all of our voices matter and deserve to be heard.

A brilliant poet via Barnard