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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: A Human Joy

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: This is Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Helena de Groot. Today, A Human Joy. One of the questions I think a lot of artists struggle with—while also trying to make a living—is: how do I keep the market out of my art? How do I make what I want instead of what I think a curator or a publisher may want? How do I get out of that competition mindset, where every other artist is a threat to you getting that prize or fellowship? To answer some of these questions, the poets Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley Jones decided to collaborate on an anthology titled, What Things Cost, with poems by working class poets. The anthology offers up an alternative. Instead of market-think, they give you a community of poets who see each other, support each other, stand with each other in solidarity. Rebecca described it to me lovingly as a “union.” And yes, she meant a trade union. And you might be forgiven for thinking that it’s pretty hard to be working class and a poet, because poetry doesn’t exactly pay. But the opening poem in the anthology by Ruben Quesada really blows that thought to smithereens.

The poem is titled “Poetry Is Bourgeois”. So he writes:

On the way home from work

on the northbound train

I heard a young woman say

poetry is meant for the rich

poetry is for the privileged

poetry is for those who can spend

time to write words meant for change

it is a life carelessly spent

writing. This is a lie.

Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley Jones are living proof that it is a lie. That you can be a poet, even when money is a struggle. So when I sat down to talk with them, I asked them first about their childhoods and all the ways in which money shaped them. We started with Rebecca.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: I grew up working in my parents’ diner. We suffered a major economic downfall and my father lost his job working at Captain D’s when I was around seven years old. And in order to keep our house and make sure that the kids were fed, my parents went into a lot of debt to buy their diner with the hope that they would be in charge of their own financial story, you know? And that’s the great American dream, right? Start a business and you’ll be okay. And they worked around the clock. My father would get up around 4:00 in the morning and come home around 5:00, 6:00 at night. My mom would go in at 8:00 and get home around 1:00, 2:00 in the morning, seven days a week. I started working there. The restaurant opened when I was eight years old. I started, I was one of the first employees. I was the dishwasher. And, you know, as I grew up, I was trained to move up in the restaurant. So, you know, dishwasher, server, kitchen help, front house manager. This was my childhood. My parents took off two days a year, Thanksgiving and Christmas. So, you know, I grew up watching my parents believe so deeply that if they worked hard enough, we would succeed. And that’s not always the case. And so, you know, I now have a life as a writer and a professor, but I have that life bought on the backs of my parents, who had to use their bodies to make ends meet, you know. My mom loved to read, but she wasn’t able to finish school because her parents couldn’t afford the books. They were subsistence farmers in East Kentucky. So she gave me a life of books, but at quite, quite a cost.

Helena de Groot: How did she do that? Give you a life of books?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Well, she made sure that we were housed. She made sure that we were fed. And she made sure that I had the space and time to do well in school. When she was 15, she was told she had to leave school and go to work to provide for her family.

Helena de Groot: Was she bitter?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Oh, that’s a good question. No, no, she was—she isn’t. She’s really proud of herself. The level of stability that she was able to achieve was extremely hard won, as I’m telling you, and is a kind of trophy, you know. She was able to buy houses. She was able to do work that was meaningful to her. And she has two daughters who are well-educated, and she has two grandchildren that are well-educated on their way. I think she’s really proud of herself and I’m really proud of her.

Helena de Groot: And when did that financial fate of your family change? You know, from the real precarity that you talked about as a little kid, when your father first lost his job and your parents went into debt, to the stability that you talk about, when did that happen?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Well, as I intimated, they lost the restaurant.

Helena de Groot: Oh, okay.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: It wasn’t a successful business. And so things went further downhill. That happened around the time that my father was dying of cancer. Which was a rare

Helena de Groot: (EXHALES)

Rebecca Gayle Howell: (EXHALES) Yeah, which was a rare cancer that his oncologist told him was probably brought on by stress. So, he crossed over when I was 17. And from there, my mom built back her life. She went on to work in real estate and able to provide herself a Social Security that she now depends on. She lives on $1,000 a month.

Helena de Groot: And how old is your mother now?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: 76.

Helena de Groot: Okay. Okay. Do you talk about books still?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Oh, yeah. I buy your books all the time. She loves, you know, plot driven novels, loves a good story.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: So I’m always learning about writers that she’ll love. And I’m kind of a trafficker of her (LAUGHS) reading.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) And the plot-y stories, does she make an exception for your poems?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Well, (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Rebecca Gayle Howell: You know, she’s not a poetry reader, and Lord knows I don’t blame her. You know, it’s funny, you know, the anthology starts with that beautiful poem by Ruben Quesada. And I really think that that’s right. But we treat it as it is a high middle class, upper middle class commodity. I think we’re wrong about that, but it does have repercussions treating it that way. Yeah, she, my first book was in many ways an expression of gratitude to her and her parents. Its set on a subsistence farm. And when it came out, I remember her saying, “It’s so strange that people want to read about that stuff.”

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: But I, I think it was meaningful to her.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm. Ashley, what about you?

Ashley M. Jones: Well, I grew up, I guess you could say lower middle class. My parents met in college. They went to an HBCU here in Alabama called Alabama State University. And their parents worked very, very hard to provide that future for them. My mom was adopted by her aunt, who had many, many jobs. She was a single mom. She raised her one biological daughter and a bunch of other daughters who she just kind of took in. She worked as a sharecropper at one point. She worked at a chicken plant, in the school kitchens, in people’s homes, white people’s homes. So she did anything and everything to provide a comfortable life. My mom says she didn’t know she was poor until she got older and she was like, oh, wow, you know, we didn’t have anything. And yet we had everything. My dad had a slightly different upbringing. He was one of 12, and his father was not a great man. I won’t go into too much detail just to respect my dad’s privacy. May my dad rest in peace. Wherever he’s listening from, I don’t want him to get angry that I’m telling his business, so. Yeah, his dad was not a great guy, so there was definitely a challenge in growing up with that many siblings, with the threat of emotional, physical abuse at all times. And so, my dad and his siblings learned how to grow things. They grew food to eat. They spent a lot of time outside, and growing up, my dad also was faced with people telling him he wouldn’t succeed. He had a teacher in first grade who told him that he was stupid, that he would never amount to anything. And of course, going home, he wasn’t getting encouragement from his own dad. From his mom, yes. My grandmother was a saint, truly. But he, you know, applied himself and went to college and got a degree in business, ended up working as a fireman after a few different jobs. But once he and my mom had my older sister, they knew it was time to get something super stable. And so he, like I said, ended up working for the fire department here in Birmingham. And he worked his way up to assistant chief in Birmingham. And then after 26 years working there, he retired and then got a retirement job as the chief of Midfield Fire department, because my dad was an over worker, like I am. And I’m trying to unlearn it. My dad actually passed in 2021 from a heart attack, and although it is not rare to have a heart attack, I do believe stress is a huge part of what happened to my dad. I mean, obviously like, diet, heredity, all of that. But my dad was under a lot of stress. And now that he’s gone, I think I’m realizing even more how much he did for us. As I said, we grew up lower middle class. Toward the end of his life, I would say maybe middle middle class if that’s a thing. And we didn’t know that we weren’t, you know, as privileged as any other kids. You know, we had everything we needed. I never felt like I was missing anything. And just like my mom, as I got older, I started to realize, oh, we actually didn’t have a lot of money.

Helena de Groot: Mm.

Ashley M. Jones: And now that I’m working myself, I don’t know how anyone raises children, ever. Like, (LAUGHS) I don’t get it. And there were four of us. And my dad was the person working. He and my mom decided that she would stay at home since his job was better when they started having kids, because they wanted us to be cared for at home, perhaps because of their upbringings. And we were very well-educated as well. That was a huge thing in our household, that you got your education, you did well in school, you set your goals and you, you know, reach them. And all of us are successful adults now because of that foundation. I never felt like there was something I couldn’t do. I felt like I literally could do anything I put my mind to, because that’s what my parents told me, and my parents are always right. So, you know.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS)

Ashley M. Jones: (LAUGHS) So I am now, you know, working as a teacher. And I run a nonprofit and I’m serving as poet laureate of my state right now, all because of the foundation. I mean, if I had not had what I had, if I had not had the privilege to not have to ever have a job as a young person—I didn’t have my first real job until I graduated grad school. Like, every other job was like a student job or whatever, because my parents made sure I didn’t have to worry about that. And again, it wasn’t until I became a real adult that I realized how incredible that really is, to know that my dad, for example, made sure that we didn’t have any student debt coming out of undergrad. And yes, we had some scholarships, but everybody knows those don’t cover everything. But he literally, literally paid for four kids to go to college. I don’t understand how the man did it, and I know he must have been tired to the bone, because sometimes he would work two jobs as a fireman. He would have his regular fireman job and then do something else on his off days. And still have time to tend the garden and play with us and talk with us and deal with our, you know,

Helena de Groot: Woes. (LAUGHS)

Ashley M. Jones: Our teenage weirdness.

Helena de Groot: Yep. (LAUGHS)

Ashley M. Jones: (LAUGHS) Truly an incredible man, but I definitely think now just about what stress can do and what sort of burdens are on people, especially if you’re carrying another otherness, you know, being a Black person, we’re already stressed. Studies show that we have stress that goes down to our cells. Like, we are stressed from the times of enslavement to now. We are carrying those things with us. So to have that and to know that my dad probably faced so many, you know, racist situations that he never told us about. Plus, trying to make money, plus living in America, I just can’t imagine how he made it. And I’m just very grateful, you know, for him and for my mom for doing that just so that we could enjoy life. I don’t know what kind of love that is, but for me, it’s the best example of what God’s love is, looking at my parents.

Helena de Groot: It’s interesting that both of you mentioned the physical toll of hard work. And it comes up again and again in the anthology, too. And I was wondering if we can get to a poem and then talk a little bit about that through the poem. So it’s the one by Kevin Goodan on page 9.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Ashley, would you like me to read it, since I selected it?

Ashley M. Jones: Please. Yes.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Kevin Goodan, he was not just a firefighter, he was a very special kind.

Helena de Groot: Kevin was a firefighter, too?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Yeah. This poem is about his life as a firefighter. So I’ll just read the first sentence of Kevin’s bio in the book, because I think it’s important context for the poem. Kevin Goodan worked for the US Forest Service as a wildland firefighter for 10 years, three of those years on the Lolo Interagency Hotshot crew. So he was the front lines.

Helena de Groot: What does that mean? Like, are you in a helicopter? Are you, like, on the ground? Like, what does that look like, do you know?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Well, it’s my impression that you’re on the ground and you’re in the fire.

Ashley M. Jones: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Is that right, Ashley?

Ashley M. Jones: That’s my understanding, that people who work forest fires are just there, like, in it.

Helena de Groot: Yeah.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Yeah. And Kevin is a friend, and I can tell you, he still deals with really significant lung issues. You know, the thing that you’re noticing about a particular kind of work requiring that the person doing it give up their body’s integrity for money. You know, it’s true while it’s happening. My mom and dad were very tired all the time. But I can tell you, those, the effects of that never leave your body. And that’s what Ashley is describing, I think, about her daddy, and that’s part of the story of my own father. So I’ll read. This is a long breath poem, so.

(READS POEM)

Untitled

We give

Our lungs

To the fire,

Their frothy

Pink and

Trembling

Capacities.

The hinge-work

of our knees

Also.

What’s good

Of our backs

We give,

Disks in

The spine,

flattened,

Springing

To the nerves.

Shoulders

Tendon-bright,

Straining

The sockets.

We give

Bruise, we

Give gash

Whatever

Bleeds, bleeds—

Shin bones

Divoted

From tool-blows,

Armpits raw

From sweat-rimed

Nomex

Grating under

Line-gear straps,

Heels

Blister-jelled,

Popping,

Back of neck

Seared, glistered.

Give ankles

Hobbled,

Ligaments

Tattered

Sutured

Tattered.

Skin we give

To ember,

To aramids,

To the long

Memory

Cancer has.

Ears given

To squelch,

Break,

Rotor wash,

A far voice

Calling

Weakly

For water

For God

Who is

Water

Out there

In the

Brittle woods.

Give lips

Heat-crazed

Blubbering

Double time

Double time,

Water

Boiling

From eyes,

Lashes

Rancid nubs,

A beard,

Moustache

Smoldering,

Tobacco spit

Tobacco

Slobber.

Fingers

In gloves

In ash

Swollen,

Putty

To the bone,

Lactic surge

In arms

In calves

As we pause

Swiping back

The grime-slicked hair

Then bending

To our

Ash-dark art

Once more.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. I mean, it’s interesting how, like, you know, his job in many ways cannot be more different from, you know, the working class jobs that you describe. You know, Rebecca, from your parents or Ashley, you know, yeah, your father on the one hand, but then especially your grandparents. But that those things come back, right? Like the way in which the body is, like, used up. You know, “what’s good of our bodies, we give.” I mean, he says “our backs,” but. I want to connect that to the title of the anthology, What Things Cost, because it’s—you’re not talking about money is what I’m trying to say, right? So, I mean, also, I guess. But you know, what things costs beyond money. So can you, can you talk about like, you know, why

that is the title that you come up with and how do you answer—it’s not a question, but like, what has that hard working life cost? What have you noticed in your own life, your own experience?

Ashley M. Jones: So what things cost, or what I’ve seen in my life as it relates to cost, is that often we pay with our lives, and that word is expansively defined, not just my literal life, but my identity, my history. I’m a Black person from Alabama, so I’m very aware of the costs of existing. I’m aware of what it costs to be where I am today, who I am today. And then the literal cost of things is on my mind often. I am in a position of economic privilege, somewhat. I mean, that’s always with many grains of salt. I’m not a billionaire by any stretch of the imagination. (LAUGHS) But looking at, you know, where my parents were at this age, I am ahead, you know, which is what they wanted. But I feel it’s really unfair that something as insignificant as money, you know, could determine a quality of life. That’s always been really strange to me, even as a child. You know, you look at the paper and think, “What is this thing? This is meaningless.” And then when you learn that that thing, that piece of paper, was traded for people’s actual bodies, it’s hard to really contend with. And even now, sometimes it’s hard to—how do I want to say it? It’s hard to know how people see me or people who look like me when not very long ago, I was seen in the same way you might see a couch or, you know, a box, or some object, you know. So even now, like, that whole idea of what I’m worth is something that I contend with. I’m worth a lot to myself, but I don’t really know if all I’m worth is my work. Even as someone who’s not working manually, I think about this constantly. As I mentioned, I overwork. I’m always—I’m on break right now and here I am with you all, happily. But that just goes to illustrate, like, I’m no stranger to just fitting things in. And I’m not sure if that’s just something I got from my dad or something that we both have adopted to keep up in this society. And I did struggle for a long time with equating my own self-worth with the work that I do. So sometimes I would push myself to do as many things as possible so people would find me valuable or likable in some way. And it’s hard to unlearn that, especially in a capitalist country, and especially as a person who’s descended from people who were enslaved. That is something that we are still carrying. And that’s something that everybody’s carrying, whether they want to admit it or not. The way you see Black people or other marginalized people is influenced by that history. And you are, even if you don’t realize it, unconscious bias is a thing. Part of that is how you’ve been conditioned to value certain humans based on what their skin color is or what economic status they hold. There are many people now who blame those who are experiencing poverty for their own poverty. And that just boggles my mind. You know, who would choose that life?

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And it’s a beautiful point—I mean, it’s, let’s just say, startling in its truth, the point you raise about how the literal price of a human being not all that long ago is connected to the way we define our self-worth today in relation to how hard we work. And the ways in which we kind of have to fight that, you know. So I would like to know from both of you, like what are some of the ways in which you try to, like, reclaim your sense of self-worth away from labor. Maybe Ashley, you want to start, since you kind of raised that.

Ashley M. Jones: Well, I raised it, but I don’t know that I have a good answer. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I said, try, okay, I’m not saying how did you succeed? You know, what are some of the little ways that you’re—

Ashley M. Jones: Right. I mean, I definitely haven’t succeeded yet, but I’ve tried to start monitoring my production mindset. You know, I’m trying to take time for myself and recognize that spending time with me for me is valuable. And I guess in my working life, there are some ways that I’ve tried to sort of reorient my mindset around production and money and all of these things. I run a nonprofit, as I mentioned, and really anything that I do in my writing life is very focused on recentering the conversation and redistributing resources. So, in my nonprofit, we are mostly grant funded. None of the board receives any money for our work. All of the money goes back into the community, to artists or to community members who need it. And a lot of things that I do in life have that goal. To get resources from those who have them and redistribute them to people who actually need those resources. And it may be money. It might be exposure, which I know people don’t think is a real thing, but it is a real thing. As long as it’s not the only thing, you know, you’re doing. Or opportunities for people or lifting people up, or if somebody says, you know, “Can you come do this event or do you know someone?”, I will always say, “I know someone. Please hire that person.” I’ve been blessed with many opportunities and it’s, I think, my responsibility to make sure all of us have space and opportunity. So in that way, I think I’m changing the value. I’m not the only person in the world who can be a poet. You know, somebody else, everybody else can do this. And so I think it’s important, at least in my life and work, to make sure I’m always making room for everyone else, instead of buying into the myth that I have to just work, work, work for myself and myself alone. Because I’m not here on planet Earth by myself, you know, everybody else is here.

Helena de Groot: That’s such a nuanced point that it’s not even about like, “Oh, let’s find ways to get myself away from work,” right? Getting a massage or who knows what. But that it’s about doing work that actually allows other people to live, and then therefore allows you to live and feel like the world is a better place for it. Rebecca, how do you get away from, you know, the labor? Your self-worth as your labor mindset, let’s say.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: It’s a mindset that’s very difficult for me to separate from. And I’ve spent most of my literary life working as absolutely as hard as I could all the time to make more space to create. I founded a press. I founded an online writing studio that supports low-income writers. I’ve ran this conference and that, right. Over and over again, what I ended up doing was making more space by reducing my own support.

Helena de Groot: What do you mean with that? I don’t think I understand reducing your own support, what you mean?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: The support I was giving myself.

Helena de Groot: Ah. Uh-huh. Right.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Self-care to the side in order to, “Okay, this need is in front of me. Let me rise to the occasion.” And I now am a cancer survivor myself, and I’ve moved through several years of serious sickness. And there’s nothing that will teach you to slow down quicker than really being sick. So what I find myself now is in a space of realizing that I literally can not do enough good in this world if I’m not taking care of myself, right?

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: That it really is a mutually dependent wellness and wholeness. And so, now I’m in this space in my life where—and this is one of the things I love about my friendship with Ashley. You know, we, we’ve worked on these things together. But really, the kind of conversation we have with each other, it’s often like, “Have you taken off work yet? Can you just rest? Are you taking your Sunday? Take your Sunday, you know. Are you sick? Go home.” You know. So this is the kind of most common, I think, conversation that you and I have had. And I’ve become very, very intentional in trying to have that conversation as often as I can with my students, with any writer that I’m mentoring. We can get into a trap as writers to think that, “Oh, the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.” There is, there is no poem without health. There is no cultural service without health. And so, prioritizing that intentionality as much as I can in my own life, I’m still really learning how to do it, and also prioritizing that conversation in my relationships. I think that—and this is really core to the anthology for me, too. We, I think, hope that this book can contribute to a conversation of care.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: We have in this country a long history of stereotyping working people. This group is stupid. This group is lazy. This group is backwards. Right? If they’re poor in America, it must be their fault. They must be making bad decisions. Right? And that’s a very helpful tool for anyone who needs to justify their own benefits from extraction. But it’s also a really helpful tool for anyone who wants to divide working people against each other.

Helena de Groot: Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: And the antidote to that is care. Hearing each other’s stories, on their own terms, you know? Giving up the power to judge, giving up the power to frame or reframe. Just listening. Is a big step toward, “Oh, I can care about you.” And for me, democracy depends on that care.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

Helena de Groot: One of the things that maybe surprised me but shouldn’t have is how much love there is in this anthology. You know, the love that the parents, as you’ve already described, you know, parents or grandparents show their children by working themselves into the ground so that their children may have a better life. But also different kinds of love, you know, like even love of the work in a way that capitalism almost like, tries to rid ourselves—like, it wants us to be excited about work, but then as soon as we actually get excited and get into a thing, it’s like, well, now you’re taking too long. Now you’re not being efficient. Now, you know, this or that, right? Like, there has to be some kind of—and now we’re going to fire you without giving you even a day to say goodbye to your coworkers who have become the people you spend most time with. You know, on and on, right, like love is constantly extracted out of the system. And I think human beings do their utmost to inject it back in. And one of the poems that really just broke me wide open is a poem, an ode to tobacco, and to the tobacco farmer, you know, and his relationship with his crop, which is sort of described almost as a relationship to a cherished child’s.

Ashley M. Jones: Yeah. So I love that poem, the ode to tobacco by Crystal Wilkinson, who’s an amazing writer. And it’s true in that poem she’s talking about tobacco, but also about the love that her grandfather had for her.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And to be perfectly honest, when I first read it, I didn’t really immediately realize that the tobacco was literally the “you,” you know, like, the tobacco is what the ode is to. It says, “Oh, tobacco.” And still, I somehow missed that on the first read. I thought it was about her, you know? The granddaughter. Since you, Rebecca, read the first poem, Ashley, would you want to read this one? So it’s on page 138.

Ashley M. Jones: Sure.

(READS POEM)

Oh, tobacco.

You are the warm burnt sienna

of my grandfather’s skin

soft like ripe leather.

I cannot see you

any other way

but as a farmer’s finest crop.

You are a Kentucky tiller’s livelihood.

You were school clothes in August.

The turkey at Thanksgiving.

Christmas with all the trimmings.

I close my eyes

see you tall

stately green

lined up in rows.

See sweat seeping

through Granddaddy’s shirt

as he fathered you first.

You were protected by him

sometimes even more

than any other thing

that rooted in our earth.

Just like family you were

coddled

cuddled

coaxed

into making him proud.

Spread out for miles

you were the only

pretty thing he knew.

When i think of you

at the edge of winter,

i see you brown, wrinkled

just like Granddaddy’s skin.

A ten-year-old me

plays in the shadows

of the stripping room

the wood stove burns

calloused hands twist

through the length

of your leaves.

Granddaddy smiles

nods at me when he

thinks i’m not looking.

You are pretty & braided

lined up in rows

like a room full of

brown girls with skirts

hooped out for dancing.

Helena de Groot: Thank you. It’s so beautiful. Yeah. I was just wondering, like, the love part, right, whether that’s love of family members or love of the work, is that something that you, like, decided on to include from the outset, or is that something I kind of emerged as you were gathering poems? Maybe Ashley, do you want to start with this one?

Ashley M. Jones: I don’t know that we had a conversation where we said, “There will be love,” you know, but I do think just because of who we are and because we wanted this to be a very expansive anthology, there was room for that to come through. Because I think also embedded in the idea of working has to be love. You know, our parents wouldn’t have worked the way they did if they didn’t love us or want something more for us. I don’t have any children of my own. Maybe one day, you know. But I do work hard to make my family proud and to be able to care for anyone I love. Like I’m, you know, already planning, whenever I get my dream house, I’m going to have, like, a little apartment for my mom so she can be cared for, you know? But also the love of my students or anyone who’s watching me. That’s another reason why I work as hard as I do, to just provide inspiration and space for them. So I think that’s coming through the poems naturally, you know, because everyone who has contributed or whose poems are represented here has a deep love for their communities and for their families and for the truth. And so I think it’s only natural that that would be coming through to the reader as well.

Helena de Groot: That is such a beautiful

Rebecca Gayle Howell: I think it’s

Helena de Groot: Oh, sorry. Sorry, Rebecca, go on.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: I just want to add that I think anyone who tells the truth about how, how difficult it is to make it in the U.S. if you don’t have significant support under you, anyone who tells the truth about that is read as complaining, is read as someone who hates this country. The opposite is true. My father was a marine. And as he was dying, he told me that the things he was most proud of in this life was me and my sister, and having been a marine.

Helena de Groot: Wow.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: And poem after poem in the collection I think speaks to that truth that, you know, when you, only something you really love can hurt you.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. And it’s like that Baldwin quote, right, that—I’m paraphrasing because I’m bad at remembering things, but that, you know, it is exactly because I love this country that I, you know, uphold the right to criticize it.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Yeah, that’s right.

Helena de Groot: Well, I have an uncomfortable question about that love and the giving back that you both feel, right, like your parents worked so hard or your grandparents or there’s this whole way in which, you know, you are indebted to them. Do you have guilt? Rebecca, maybe let’s start with you.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: I don’t. I think Ashley said it best. You know, this is the life my parents sacrificed everything to make possible. And I work hard to share that with as many people who are in my sphere as I can. I’m not perfect, but I try. We can idealize the kind of labor that my parents did, my grandparents did, Ashley’s parents did, Ashley’s grandparents did. Another version of these sort of stereotypes is to say, “Oh, well, look at the labor martyrs build the U.S.”

Helena de Groot: Sure.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: Aren’t they saints?

Helena de Groot: Yep.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: And that’s, you know, that’s just as dangerous.

Helena de Groot: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You’re not insulting them by calling them lazy, but you’re insulting them by being like, “You’re the grease that makes the system turn. Thank you for letting us reduce you to grease.”

Rebecca Gayle Howell: That that’s the highest that that person can achieve, right?

Helena de Groot: Yeah, right.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: My people are from Appalachia, so you see that in the miner myth, certainly. Yeah.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. So, you know, Ashley, what about you? Like, what is guilt? Is that a thing that sometimes trips you up or what is your relationship to it?

Ashley M. Jones: Well, I think I feel like Rebecca feels. But I also, I also do feel guilt sometimes, especially now that my dad is dead. Like, I wonder if there was a way that we could have helped. I know we couldn’t. We were children. I know it’s illogical to think that way. But to know that he grew up in such a hard, a hard way. And to know that I’ve sometimes thought, “Oh, I’ve got it bad for like some reasons,” you know, and not say that I have nothing to feel bad about. Certainly, I’ve lived a life myself, even though I have not had to go out in the dirt and work. There’s definitely been, you know, struggles that I’ve had to go through. But sometimes I do think about those lives that they lived and the lives that they didn’t live, you know, like what they couldn’t do because they were faced with raising us or because they were born here in America. I just wonder what could have happened. Like, my dad had the ability to do portraiture with just pencil. He didn’t have any lessons. He just magically could draw photorealistic images. And so sometimes I wonder, like, if he had not, if he’d had different parents or different circumstances in life, could he have been a famous artist somewhere living a life of luxury. But at the same time, I do think everything happens for a reason. And so, perhaps everything was orchestrated so that I could be what I am. I don’t know. You know, feeling guilty can only take you so far. We know that. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: 100 percent. Yeah, exactly. You don’t actually help the people that you feel guilty towards by feeling guilty.

Ashley M. Jones: No.

Helena de Groot: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I want to make my way back to “O Tobacco”, right by Crystal Wilkinson. And I wanted to make the segue by talking about beauty and art, you know, because in that poem that we read earlier, the Kevin Goodan poem, you know, the firefighter, it ends—so, you know, he’s been working in the blazing heat, killing his body over it, and then writes, you know, after all that, “we pause / Swiping back / The grime-slicked hair / Then bending / To our / Ash-dark art / Once more.” What does it evoke in you? You know, the fact that art is mentioned as kind of like the final chord in this poem? You know, like, where’s the art in the work? Or where’s the art in the life of a person who gives everything to work, who is asked to give everything to work? How do we as humans—how have you seen, while your family members were, like, putting in all those hours, what were like little corners that you feel like they were living their lives in artful ways? They were like not suppressing the human urge to make art, because that’s just who we are.

Ashley M. Jones: Yeah, I mean, I’m just going to say, yeah, without a specific example first and I’ll make my way there. (LAUGHS)

Helena de Groot: Okay. Okay.

Ashley M. Jones: Just because my dad was a very artful person. And could find joy and humor in everything. And maybe that’s what it is. He could make a joke out of literally anything. And he was a paramedic as well. So he had some pretty grisly stories that he told us, but he had us rolling on the floor laughing, literally, you know, with some of the things that he experienced and people that he met. He even managed to make a story about being held at gunpoint by someone who he was, you know, helping, a funny story. I don’t know how. And I think maybe it has a lot to do with growing up in an abusive household, learning how to just kind of make it through. But I think my dad saw the world in a very interesting way. He, of course, saw a lot of the darkness that exists, but he did see a lot of the beauty as well, whether it was in his garden—he was very tender with his garden. A man who had very coarse hands, who was always working on hard things like saving people or putting out fires, that kind of thing. But also with us, he was very tender. Like I felt very loved and adored by my dad, even though he might not have used that language all the time. I think he saw the beauty in life in those things and people. And so even in the midst of a very long work day, I think he maybe found moments of silence and peace or found ways to bring himself back to the art of the job and of life. And everybody who knew him, now that he’s gone, you know, hearing people talk about him, I think he was that way with everyone. Everyone has a good story to tell about my dad or something funny that they shared together or the way that he made them feel, you know. So I think that there are ways, you know, even in a life that is difficult to come back to the art, even there at the fire. Although I don’t know Kevin Goodan personally, I can imagine just from the poem that there are ways to even look at something as frightening as a forest fire and see some glimmer of something beautiful that, yes, you’re trying to tame, but you know you’re also sort of at the mercy of the world in that way.

Helena de Groot: Rebecca, what is the way in which you feel like your parents or one of them had pockets of art in a way that almost contradicts their situation?

Rebecca Gayle Howell: You know, I think that art is not a commodity. And it’s not an arena for a particular economic class. It’s a human joy. To make something new, to make something beautiful. And that has very little to do with once economic resources. So, for example, my father working in that kitchen, 4:00 in the morning, he walks to the diner, gets up at 5:00 or 6:00. I still think about the food he was making there. It was so important to him. Core to his every day of those days was making really good food. At the least cost that he could charge for it so that working people could get a good meal during their day. So, he was a working person working as hard as he could with the goal of giving nutritious, delicious food at an extremely affordable cost so that working people could have something good in their systems. So that working families could be okay, you know. And man, by 5:00, 6:00 in the morning when the breakfast doors open, he would have—and I’m not kidding you—he would have a line around the building of people who’d come to eat with us before they went to work. You know, so for me, the environment of my childhood was hard, hard work, but it was never in opposition to art. There was no conversation to be had about that. So that when I started reading poetry, it was because my dad was getting his chemotherapy in a town where there was a bookstore, and he just started bringing me the books that were on discount. And they were poetry books.

Helena de Groot: (LAUGHS) I’m not going to go into the reasons for that.

Rebecca Gayle Howell: (LAUGHS) Big surprise! Big surprise. And once he saw how much it ignited my spirit, immediately, it was a part of our lives together. Immediately, art was at the core of our conversation, you know. So, making a beautiful life is one of those human rights, I think. Because of what it does for our spirit, our soul, and again, our care for each other. We want to—when we make a thing beautiful, we want to share it.

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Helena de Groot:What Things Cost: An Anthology For the People was edited by Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley Jones, with Emily Jalloul as Associate Editor. Rebecca Gayle Howell is a writer, translator, and editor. Her books include American Purgatory and Render / An Apocalypse. She received a United States Artists Fellowship, the Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellowship for Writers and Musicians from the Carson McCullers Center, the Kentucky Arts Council’s Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship, and the Pushcart Prize. She also teaches poetry and translation at the University of Arkansas. Ashley Jones is the current poet laureate of Alabama, and the author of Magic City Gospel, dark // thing, which won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry from Pleiades Press, and REPARATIONS NOW!. She’s also the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival, codirector of PEN Birmingham, and she’s on faculty at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and the Converse University Low Residency MFA Program. She was also a recent guest editor for our very own Poetry Magazine. To find out more on both Rebecca Gayle Howell and Ashley Jones, check out the Poetry Foundation website. The music in this episode is by Todd Sickafoose and Eric van der Westen. I’m Helena de Groot and this was Poetry Off the Shelf. Thank you for listening.

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