9th Annual NaPoMo 30/30/30 :: Week 4 :: Curated by Constantine Jones
“Poets Without a Book (Deal)”
In leading with this phrase I hoped to illuminate common threads between the poets profiled for my curation dates by way of choosing a specific constraint with respect to the poets I asked to contribute. All of the profiles here are written by my fellow friends & family in poetry. These poets are teachers, reading series coordinators, community organizers, independent journal curators, parents & students. They are luminous individuals who give so much of themselves to their respective communities, but they also share one other commonality — despite the abundance & earnestness of their work, none of them have a “book deal” as is most commonly recognizable.
I want to be very clear here — I highlight this aspect of the contributors deliberately, not because I consider the lack of a book deal a negation of their heart / their work, but quite the contrary. I do this as one of many attempts to push back against the assumptions of validation that come with having a book represented / marketed / vetted by “Big 5” publishers or otherwise more “illustrious” institutions. I had a feeling that, by canvassing this particular group of people, they would naturally gravitate to poets who spoke to that same aesthetic of poetry for its own sake / in service to something larger than notoriety or a paycheck. I happily report I was correct. It seems impossible to me that the poets profiled here had gone unnoticed in the past 8 years of this experiment, yet also I’m heartened by this fact.
Now these voices, (some gone, some not, some well-known, some not so much) are able to speak themselves into this new strange decade through the mouths & hearts of poets who, I ultimately believe, are sincerely in the service of language for the betterment of their communities & the world at large.
Constantine Jones is a Greek-American thingmaker raised in Tennessee & currently housed in Brooklyn. They are a member of the Visual AIDS Artist+ Registry & teach creative writing at The City College of New York. They also volunteer in the LGBT Center Archives, where they conduct research on queer Greek-American histories as they intersect with HIV. Their work has been performed or exhibited at various venues across NYC & their debut hybrid haunted house book, In Still Rooms, is out now via The Operating System.
