We begin another week here on My Poetic Side with a look at the poet Hettie Jones, who has died aged 90, and the Macedonian poet who has won an international award.

Poet Who Nurtured the Beats Dies Aged 90

The poet Hettie Jones, who, with her husband LeRoi Jones, published the work of several of their literary friends, has died at the age of 90.

Hettie Jones was raised in Queens in a conventional Jewish middle-class household. She was a rebellious teenager who went to Columbia University to study drama but dropped out to work for a jazz magazine. During this time, she met LeRoi Jones, a young poet, and the pair fell in love.

The pair enjoyed hanging out and listening to jazz musicians, and although at the time they were a rarity, a mixed-race couple, Hettie thought that their world was perfect, and colourblind, until she discovered that it wasn’t. The pair were heckled one day with racial slurs and jeers, and whilst she wanted to protest, LeRoi held her back from doing so. At the time, interracial marriage was against the law in a number of states.

The pair were responsible for setting up Yugen, a literary magazine that counted many of the popular Beats poets amongst their contributors, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Diane di Prima and Gregory Corso. They also founded Totem Press to help with the publication of new writers’ poetry. Their home was a sanctuary for young writers, whether they were looking for help with their writing or wanted to party. Despite being disowned by her parents, but welcomed by his, the pair married in 1958.

By the early 1960s LeRoi’s fame had increased, he had many affairs and in 1965 he left his wife and two young children, changed his name to Amiri Baraka and married fellow poet Sylvia Robinson. He disavowed his white ex-wife and, with her, all of the many white artist friends they had made over the years.

Whilst the pair were married Jones worked as an editor at Partisan Review, later going on to work at a number of publishing houses, and teaching writing at a number of higher education establishments. She wrote 20 books, some of which were for young adults and children and focused on Native and Black American themes. She published three collections of poetry as well with the first being published in 1997.

Her poetry is described as playful and full of rhyme and direct address.

Hettie Jones is survived by both her daughters and a granddaughter.

Poet From Macedonia Receives International Academic Award for Contemporary Literature

Silvana Dimitrievska, a Macedonian poet from Skopje, has been named one of the winners of the “Lucius Anaeus Seneca” award. This is an International Academic Award for Contemporary Literature given by the Academy of Philosophical Arts and Sciences in Italy.

This is the seventh year that the award has been running and it is awarded in a number of different categories. The winners are decided by a 30 strong group of board members all from different backgrounds but sharing the same values for contemporary art and literature.