New York-based poet Hettie Jones read her award-winning poetry Wednesday to a small group in The Old President’s House. She talked about her life among the “Beat Poets,” a group of American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. They stressed the limits of free expression in the conformist 1950s. Many Beat Poets wrote about sex, drug use and unconventional behavior. Jones is among the few female Beat Generation writers. “It is exciting to have a female poet from the Beat Generation rather than a man,” said creative writing graduate student Jennifer Nunes. “The men of this period are everywhere.” Jones was at the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement in New York. She was formerly married to LeRoi Jones, another Beat poet who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka. Jones’ family disowned her because of her interracial marriage with Baraka. “I always made family out of friends,” Jones said. “I had made up my mind that I wanted to marry him. My family was not evolved enough to accept it.” She told the story of her life with LeRoi Jones in her 1990 memoir “How I Became Hettie Jones.” “We were all just glad to have run away from home,” Jones said. Jones is currently involved with the PEN American Center’s Prison Writing committee, which works to advance literature and foster literary fellowship. She also runs a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills and teaches in the graduate program at The New School in New York City. Jones said this was her second trip to Louisiana. She had previously taught at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women in St. Gabriel. “If I had to go to jail, I’d rather go in New York,” Jones said. “St. Gabriel seemed like a rough place.” Jones read from several of her published collections of poems and also some unpublished work. The poems she read contained a variety of themes, from feminism to her Big Apple experiences. “Writing about New York is like writing about America in a lot of ways,” Jones said. Jones lived a few blocks from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. She read several poems written at a time when she said “the air was full of people and you were actually breathing in people’s bodies.” A combined effort of the LSU Creative Writing Program, the Department of Jewish Studies and the Women and Gender Studies department brought Jones to campus.
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Beat generation poet visits campus
By Jack LeBlanc
April 1, 2008