Love and Poetry Across the Pacific with Aja Monet and Jazz Money

Words by by Karen Leong | Photos of Aja Monet by Grace Bukunmi | Photos of Jazz Money by J Davies

Poetry is a constructed conversation on the frontier of dreaming. ― Matthew Zapruder, Why Poetry

In poetry I am most drawn to ritual. I used to keep a little black book in the front pouch of my backpack for ease of access whenever something piqued my interest or flowed into me. Poetry was the compact, convulsive space where I could retreat a little from the world – and all that I wrote was what I found beautiful. 

For a flippant girl, I harboured all my softness in the text. Friends would ingratiate themselves, like a burr sealed to my side for the chance to flip through those pages where they rightfully guessed: inside I burrowed something of myself. This was where the veil separated the psychic and the painfully vulnerable. Among other things, I restaged the slipping of my home city, my grandfather’s death. Poetry was the conscious, willful entry where I drew myself up short to the image I worked hard to project. 

I often return to the line from the intro to Ride Monologue, by Lana Del Rey: 

I once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet

But upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky

That I wished on over and over again, sparkling and broken.

But I didn’t really mind because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true freedom is.

At 24, I have been writing poetry on and off for 10 years. The issue with writing becoming your bread and butter is that sometimes you lose the ability to self-mythologise. You start to see in starkness. My re-entry into the writing world had diminished my belief in my poetic capacity – these days I am Karen, writer, sometimes model, never poet.

Nothing quite prepared me for my conversation with American poet and writer Aja Monet and Jazz Money, a poet and artist of Wiradjuri and Irish heritage. 

From our various locations – the Bronx, Wiradjuri land and Hong Kong – Poetry served as the universalising buffer, the adhesive that rooted the three of us to the tenuous webbings of the outer world. I felt, in its very stillness, that our words offered something, an image maybe, or patterns that interlinked, like connective tissue, invisible yet indivisible, its existence wrought out of words because we had spoken it so.  

Like Aja and Jazz, I believe that poetry is to be wielded through life. 

Aja Monet believes that poetry deals in the first and final frontier of the interior world. As a spoken practitioner, she ascribes to ideals of love and community from a traditionalist lens, explaining, “I call myself a blues surrealist poet and the reason why I try to subscribe to those terms in addition to poetry is because I'm leaning on a tradition and many traditions, which is rooted in an approach and in a way of thinking about the world.” Monet’s belief is circuitous when we consider that much of the genre of the Blues as a specific invention mined from the historical developments and civil unrest facing African Americans. The apparatus of Blues Music and poetry form a circlet of resistance in her contemporary practice. 

Further reasons for the form according to Monet are rooted in its provisional, emotional shorthand. Poetic techniques that are used to help elicit emotion and sonic resonance are there to guide the technical side of things, but are ultimately secondary in importance. Says the artist, “At the end of the day, poetry is less about the art of writing a poem as much as it is about the way one perceives and moves through the world. so I think that as one lives in the most authentic way possible, one starts to perceive the world in a different way.” As Monet says, that power so direct in its interrogation of the world has the power to shift our own perceptions of ourselves, and one another. 

In line with the following, the major retrospective of Jazz Money’s work is concerned with the complexity of humanity made simple in poetic form. Money says, “This is a form that is able to make complex things very  presentable, and also able to take things that are simple and presentable, in that it cuts across all people. It cuts across age and race and gender and sexuality and distance and time. I can read poets who were writing a thousand years ago and still be completely moved by their writing because it is about a human experience and it's about an embodied and embedded way of being, which to me is why it's such an eternal form.” As a Wiradjuri wordsmith, Money triangulates all of her writing as a continuation of her ancestors’ practice for centuries. Protest through existence is something the poet understands atomically, as she sits at the intersection of her queerness and her Aboriginal heritage. “I mean, it's just a reflection of life, right? Protest and a lived political experience are themes that are very present in my life and in my work, but also the importance of balancing that against joy. We live in our joy and we live in our laughter.”  To balance and integrate that into language is the truest way, according to Money, to make things good and fair. 

Money comes up with the example of Maxine Boniba Clark, an Afro-Australian poet who exported a similar fantasy of having a room of their own to create. She says, “Yeah, we'd all like to have a room of one's own, but I'm at my kitchen table while a kid spills juice on my latest manuscript. And like that's how we make art and what would we be like without that, you know, like what we're just going to wait until we all have a room of our own and we're going to have really, really boring art.”  No, to Money, poetry is latent when it's written on the back of a receipt, stuck in traffic, as much as anything else. Poetry, to be prised open, moves between “slow and durational and ancient and very immediate, and very time pressed.” 

Aja Monet shares this belief in that we all hold varied identities, namely one which we mount our perceptions in the world and one which perceives us. But she leaves us with this: identities are entry points but not the means to the end. They do not encompass the totality of who we are.  The role of those signifiers do deepen and shade the spectrum of the human experience, but they do not run concurrent with the systemising matrices that hold us in place. 

The poets Monet fell in love with and held true to the tradition that she dispenses — “getting us to think about how we can show up better for each other.”  She is certain that we thrive in the face of constraints. Restriction and paring down are innate assemblages of good poetry, and she believes that any good artist can learn to use and move with it — rather to resist. She brings up Lucille Clifton’s body of work — short, trimmed with efficacy, and open to certain criticism that she may not be all that to a poet. Says Monet, “But to me, what fascinates me about her is that she had children, she had many children, she had a husband, she had to take care of them. She was a black woman, she had to work, she had to find ways to put food on the table. And, that constraint of her daily life produced the actual form of her poems. And so, there was a sense of urgency to getting the words down. And a certain amount of time because she didn't have all, she wasn't Virginia Woolf. She wasn't sitting in a room of her own with somebody patron to pay for her to sit and reflect, you know? So, you know, it elicits a different kind of reaction to her creative process.” 

In the end of her song I Am, Monet says the following with unguarded reserve:

I am, I am

I am not that I am

I am and we are

We, we, you and me

I am, I am because of you

We're here together, there's no me without you

I am, I said there's no me without you

Monet’s work shines a light on what is situated around the text — the inner crevices and workings of collectivism communicate even outside the borders of wordplay.

I also wanted to know how the localities of the city and coast shaped their writing experiences. Was it fixed, or fluctuant? Words, as approximations of experience, carry the load of having to explain to one another how one came to be: This is who I am. This is how I was raised. 

Monet is a Brooklyn Native whose work is steeped in rhythm and consonance. She cautions me from diminishing the very pneumonic devices central to poetry —  ionic pentameter, personification, alliteration, personification  — as sterile techniques, when what they allude to, in perpetuity, is the pulse of meaning. The rhythm to the city and its pacing is inseparable from Monet’s body of work. The sense of urgency is ever prescient, “Whether you're going to the corner store to get, you know, a bag of potato chips or whether or not you're rushing to make it for an interview for the first day of your job or, you know, make it to school on time.”  

As an artist living on Gadigal Country, Jazz reminds me that we are walking backwards into the future. Every footstep she’s taken comprises a miniscule fraction of a journey that’s been happening for tens of thousands of years, where a story's been happening since the first sunrise. “I'm a Wiradjuri person, and we're river people. Rivers are such an important part of the way that I am in the world, and I think that shows in my writing a lot, a care and custodianship and kinship with river systems.” 

For Money, honouring the trueness of place starts with ongoing dialogue. A couple years ago, while working at the Fremantle Biennale, she constructed a large poem that hung across the bridge connecting Central Fremantle to North Fremantle. Upon translating the work from English to Noongar, realised the crux of similarities between her people and the Noongar elders:  “They’re River People as well. This installation was all about the river that runs underneath the Fremantle Bridge, and the trees that we use to build the pylons of the bridge that were taken from Country 150 years ago. I thought, How can the work be heard by Country? And the true language of that place is Noongar language.” 

Embracing the metaphysical in this climate means to unburden ourselves from the price of being alive. Coming to terms with the labour of living, as discussed, is one of the quickest ways to snub a poet’s fire. Money’s practice is intentionally separatist from any fiscal pressure, because she believes making a living out of art obscures its meaning and mention. “One is enslaved to the productivity of things. Just create,”  she reminds. 

Answering the call to create is to be moved by love and courage. That cleft is where inspiration is most critical to one’s calling in the midst of upheaval and destruction. Poetry stands in attention to that,  a labour of love that passes cleanly through the speaker. The house of our craft, the poetics of matter and mind and the homespun realities of the places that bore these two women and their craft speaks to the sui generis of poetry, a practice fastened in place by all those who came before them. 

With the temerity that comes from her strong faith, Monet says this: “The poem is in the way that you love. It's the way that you live. It's the way that you cook. It's the way that you dance. It's the way that you sing. Um, you can be an architect. You could be an architect. You could be a waitress. You could be a poet. You could be, you know, poetry is really about the metric of one's love, passion, depth, and truth in a thing. 

“I think it's less about if I were to say, ‘Oh, she dances like a poet’, or ‘She sings like a poet’, or ‘He mows the lawn like a poet’. Be present in all you do. Devote to it all. And one will surely become a poet.”