Hettie Jones

Hettie Jones

Hettie Jones (born Hettie Cohen on June 15, 1934 in Brooklyn , New York City ) is an American beat writer.

Life

Betty Cohen was born to a Jewish immigrant family. She studied theater studies at the University of Virginia and later at Columbia University .

While working for the jazz magazine "The Record Changer", she met the black poet and music critic LeRoi Jones in 1957 . A year later, to the horror of Hettie's family, the two married. They had two daughters, Kellie and Lisa. Her parents pressured Jones to have the children aborted in both cases, and after she failed to do so, they disinherited them. Even after her divorce from LeRoi in 1966, Hettie Jones remained rooted in the black community. Her daughter Lisa, now a successful writer herself, sees herself as "black with a white mother."

Both spouses were an active part of the then beat scene in Greenwich Village . Jack Kerouac , Allen Ginsberg , Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane were regular guests at the apartment.

Hettie supported her husband financially, which made his lyrical work possible. Jones himself hesitated for a long time to publish his own work: Joyce Johnson remembers Hettie's “Schweigen” as a young writer: “she writes poetry herself, but has never stood up with it at a reading of her own — makes no particular mention of it, in fact — telling herself it isn't good enough ”. In her autobiography, she writes about the role model she was exposed to, including within the beat scene: Men had little use for an outspoken woman, I'd been warned. What I wanted, I was told, was security and upward mobility, which might be mine if I learned to shut my mouth.

Together, the couple published the literary magazine Yūgen from 1957 to 1963 , in which works by famous authors of the beat generation such as William S. Burroughs , Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Philip Whalen appeared.

Jones was best known for her autobiography How I Became Hettie Jones . In it, on the one hand, she describes the beat scene of that time. On the other hand, she reflects her position as a white Jewish wife of a black man. She herself confronts numerous social conflicts and has to find her place in them. As a poetically ambitious woman in a scene who, in Jack Kerouac's words, saw women as chicks . As a Jew in a predominantly non-Jewish society that wanted to keep being Jewish. As a woman who barely saw herself as white because she was Jewish but was viewed as white by the African American community. As the mother of two black children who were not acceptable from the point of view of white society. Her name plays a crucial role in the identity-finding processes she goes through. It begins, in the book as in real life, with Hettie Cohen to H. Cohen-Jones , Mrs. Hettie Jones and Hettie to Hettie Jones.

Her volume of poetry, Drive , published in 1997, won several awards, including the 1999 Norma Faber Award from the Poetry Society of America . Her poems and short stories appear in the Village Voice , The Washington Post , The Boston Phoenix and Plowshares , among others . Jones also founded Totem Press, a publisher of Allen Ginsberg , Gregory Corso , Frank O'Hara , Edward Dorn, and Gary Snyder. As part of her work in the US PEN Association, she was very committed to promoting literacy through writing courses in US prisons. Jones lives in Greenwich Village and is a lecturer in creative writing at New School University .

Works

• Poems Now, 1968
• Longhouse Winter, 1972
• Living with Wolves, 1975
• Having Been her, 1981
• How I Became Hettie Jones: A Memoir, 1990 Excerpt - Autobiography
• Drive, 1997; Hanging Loose Press - Poems
• All I Told, All Told - poems
• No Woman No Cry; together with Rita Marley , 2004 ISBN 0-330-49330-2 - biography of Rita Marley

literature

• Nancy Grace: Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation , Rutgers University Press

Web links

• Photo by Hettie Jones