Mother Jones illustration; Courtesy of Ashley M. Jones
In 2023, while on a group hike through the Sipsey River, Ashley M. Jones, Alabama’s youngest and first Black poet laureate, sat in a clearing and wrote the titular poem of her new book, Lullaby for the Grieving. Four months after she’d been named poet laureate in 2022, Jones’ father, Donald Lewis Jones, died without warning. He was Midfield’s fire chief, a man who, Jones says, inspired her to always want to leave a place better than she found it. As she wrote, she thought about how similar the hike was to her grief; unpredictable and cumbersome. “Small steps, like prayers— / each one a hope exhaled / into the trees. please, / let me enter. please, let me / leave whole,” she wrote.
Lullaby for the Grieving was written over the last three years. In this collection of poetry, Jones carves a space to reckon with her personal grief alongside what she describes as a communal “political grief” that Black people experience every day from “being in a place which never wanted you to be human and reminds you every day that it still doesn’t consider you a human.” This grief inspires poems like “What It Really Is,” an acrostic about critical race theory where Jones wrote, “Centuries are cut into the skin stretched across my womb. Will / every lifted voice be silenced? When does a / theory become a threat?”
This discussion of political grief and examination of history feel especially poignant as slavery is redacted from national parks and some museums. Jones’ work, which is often in conversation with history, helps us understand “who we are as a nation and who we can be as individuals.” However, as she found in her journeys throughout Alabama, these conversations aren’t new, but they’ve become more visible to some, as “it seems like there’s a resistance to understanding basic history and basic human decency.”
Lullaby for the Grieving doesn’t shy away from complexity. The collection, through its epigraphs and experiments with form, creates a detailed mosaic of the South while memorializing her father. Yet, the collection isn’t only about grief; it’s also a celebration of the vibrancy of life and the importance of community in remembrance. In our conversation, Jones explained how poetry helped her heal, the meaning of monuments, and what she hopes readers take away from her work. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How did writing this book allow you to process your grief?
I think it really just gave me space to process everything. I’ve always said that poetry is how I understand myself and the world, and although I already knew it was true, experiencing intense grief will make you actually do this processing work.
I mean, it was very hard to write a lot of these poems about my dad. Some of them, I was like crying while writing the poem, and that’s not something that normally happens to me, even when I’m very affected by what I’m writing. This was so close, it was right on the nerve but writing it down was very therapeutic. Also, it allowed me to develop a different type of relationship with my dad; that’s part of what happens when you lose someone. You have to understand that even though that person’s body is gone, the relationship doesn’t have to die.
When you were writing, were there ever memories or topics that felt too hard to encapsulate in one piece?
The best example of that is “Snow Poem,” which is toward the end of the book. It’s a heroic crown of sonnets about my dad. Obviously, most of the book is about my dad. I mean, he’s on the cover, for Pete’s sake, but I knew that there was more to say about him. I thought that one way to try to encapsulate how big his life was to those of us who loved him, and how big this grief process is, was to literally make the biggest, most ridiculous form, using the heroic crown of sonnets for that.
I think there’s probably many more poems about my dad that I’ll write until I die, but in this book, I knew that, in addition to the “Grief Interludes” and all the other poems about my dad, I needed to represent through form, this huge feeling that [my family is] going through.
In the book’s blurb, along with your personal grief, you also talk about a collective “political grief” tied to Black Southern identity. Could you expand upon what “political grief” is?
What I mean by that is, on any given day—and I’ll just speak for me, because maybe it’s not true for every Black person—I’m reminded of what status Black people have in this country.
But also looking back at history—and being from Birmingham, I think this is why I think about history so much—there are so many moments where there’s been collective grief over a great loss, or just tiny moments. I am not a very physically imposing person. I’m 5’5″ on a good day. I’m not beefy, I’m not muscular. I don’t look like I can hurt anyone, but I have had a couple of experiences where people will hold on to their stuff, their belongings, tighter.
I’ll never forget in an airport, I remember just going to the gate and this white family, looking at me like I was the boogeyman, and the dad of the family looking me in the eyes, made sure his children went ahead of him so he could be blocking them from being next to me. And I’m just like, “What am I going to do to y’all? I’m just in the airport,” and that’s a moment of grief to know, “Oh, I’m not even a human being to you. What does that even mean? What am I then?”
What does the healing process look like for that political grief?
To get through grief, I’ve had to do a lot of self-reflection and being honest with myself about myself and the past and what I want for the future. And it’s maybe the same for the political things that we grieve. I think we do have to reflect on ourselves. We do have to reflect on our history, and we have to be honest in those reflections.
It wouldn’t serve me well in grieving my dad to pretend that he wasn’t a human being. He was a great man, but he was a man. So, to sugar coat or to erase parts of him that were very human, that’s doing a disservice to him. And the same is true for looking at our own history; it doesn’t help us to pretend that things didn’t happen or that they happened a different way. So, I think to heal politically, we really just need to pause and understand that the truth is helpful, even if it might hurt. In the end, it’s going to help to know it.
Poems like “Map of the Capitol, Montgomery, AL, USA” have interesting uses of form, mimicking a map or timeline. What came first the poem itself or the form, and overall, what role does form play in the collection?
I love using the whole page. I think sometimes as poets, we forget that we’re artists and we can explore the page. The poem will tell you what it wants and what it needs.
So, I let it tell me, “Girl, I need to be a map, right now,” so I will make that map. With that poem, the map came first. I wrote it as a commission for an art exhibit called “Monuments” that’s opening in October in LA. The form came to my mind because I thought there was really no better way to illustrate the irony and the pain of those street names, and also my experience in Montgomery.
Speaking of monuments, the press release for your book talked about the language of monuments and memorials and how they can fuel a community of voices. Could you expand on that?
In [“Map of the Capitol, Montgomery, AL, USA”], I’m thinking about the role of monuments. What do we memorialize publicly, and what other things are monuments, instead of these statues or street names. And for me, in some ways, a piece of literature can be a monument. We can make other ways, memorializing those who have done great things. Maybe we won’t get a cement statue in the capital city, or maybe we see something like a monument to someone who maybe was not the nicest to our people, but we can find other ways to preserve our history.
So, yeah, I think my poems are doing that. In some ways, this book is a monument to my dad, just as much as it’s a monument to what it means to be Black in America and surviving. I think this is literally a monument in that it bears his face, the book bears his face, but also because I’m trying to recreate him, not out of plaster stone, but out of words.
As the funding for the arts everywhere has been disrupted, how has that shaped conversations as you’ve traveled around the state serving as an advocate for the arts?
I think what I noticed is that people are hungrier than ever to find ways to make these things happen without having to involve the government. I think we finally understood that looking to institutions to save us is not a serve. Looking to institutions is never going to bring us the salvation that we desire. Looking to each other, finding community that is truly what’s going to make us become the community we are supposed to be. I’ve seen people getting creative with how to fund. I’ve seen people take a pause where it’s needed. I think people are really energized around preserving art and artmaking.
We are learning to look to each other and look for each other more. I think we’re going to see in the years to come that people are a lot less isolated, because it will be necessary for us to rely on each other.
What do you hope the reader is left with once they finish the book?
I say this all the time, and I’ll probably keep saying it forever. The one thing I hope people always get from my work is the thing that I feel like Black writers have been doing forever, which is an understanding that Black people are human beings.
From this book, in particular, I hope people understand that the grieving process is lonely, but that nobody is alone in it. All of us have to go through this, and if my book can be the friend in the corner who understands, I’m glad for that.
