PATRICIA SPEARS JONES
(Oral Tradition Winner)
In that photo were you trying like the Italian neo-realists to offer a more elevated and/or different way to look poor men, criminals, thugs, et alia and their stylishness? Or is this simply another picture of a Black man with gold teeth and a way into a kind of thuggish stylishness that under girds funk and other forms of Black music? It don't mean a thing w/out some swing and swagger. Is this a way to bring cinematic values to your poetry through the lens (literally). Italian neo-realists come to mind, but also Bunel's films of the late 1960s/early 1970s The Discreet Charms of the Bourgeoisie in which said bourgeois people try to eat their dinner, but are always interrupted by violence, dreams and storytelling. There are often interruptions in your poems from real life incidences to discourses esp. in Skin, Inc. Are those interventions the narrative related to those gold teeth--da grille? How/why/ and do we always have to "get" the connections? Because in many ways, I do and I don‘t. TSE: I am trying to recall the first portrait I ever saw in my life and I cannot but I hope it wasn‘t Jesus. It is, I think, an impossible task trying to remember such. Some faces get shoved down your throat early––the Mona Lisa, Che Guevara and JFK, MLK & RFK, those living room rug-portraits. At Harvard, I saw a film titled Fred Ott‘s Sneeze (also known as Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze). In the five-second film, one of Thomas Edison‘s assistants, Fred Ott, takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. I met the man in Oral Tradition Winner in Drew, Mississippi. He was sitting outside rolling something to smoke but not smiling until I began a conversation with him. I have never rolled a joint, but I asked him how fast he could roll one and he laughed and rolled a few for me. In the series of photographs given to me by him, there are many interruptions. But, the gold teeth are the only ones imposed on the portrait by him. It comes from within-within the composition of the photograph and it challenges flatness. Yes, cinema has influenced me, but so has the postage stamp. Oral Tradition Winner is also a haunting photograph for me in the same way that the final frozen frame of The 400 Blows (Truffaut) is but more adult with a signifying grin thrown in. I am always braking away from the regular walk to gather or tighten or loosen the line in poems. This photograph attempts to loosen the portrait. I don‘t think ―thug‖ when I see this photo. I think ―worth,‖ the worth of a mouth and what words, our words––slang, slanted language, slanguage––are worth. If this photograph could talk, it might say something heroic.
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