By J.A. Holm
J.A. Holm
Let’s start with the title. How did you come to name the collection Television Fathers?
Sylvia Jones
Initially, the manuscript was titled “Buzzard” due to my very deep bird affinity—I would say about one-third of the poems from that original manuscript are included in the collection. I’d been thinking a lot about how “the television used to go off,” back in those days before streaming—an abrupt end to programming that signaled bedtime for some and existential dread for others. All that converged into Television Fathers, which gestures at a lineage of watchers and watched—the paternal hum of media ancestry that links us, even when the screen goes dark. One of my favorite things about Television Fathers is how it denotes a common ancestry. How do we hold onto what we’ve lost between now and back when the primordial television used to go off. As a reader, I’m always suspicious of other people’s voices in a poem, and that extends to the internal scrutiny applied to my own technique on the page. The collection’s pathos is more or less a generational handoff. That to me is symbolic of the relationship I have with ekphrasis as a form and as an avenue of tapping into certain “forget-me-nots” as historical truths.
J.A. Holm
What was the process like in choosing the poems that would ultimately reside in this first book? What sort of throughline were you imagining as you compiled your work into what has become Television Fathers?
Sylvia Jones
There’s something anthropological about combing through the archives. Initially, I had a kaleidoscope of poems touching on everything from silent film-era blackface stunt doubles to Martin Wong’s cryptic murals. So, I spread them out—my single question began to unify the pieces: How do we recognize ourselves when so many cultural narratives cast us as caricatures? I wanted the book to be both an index and a mirror—ultimately, the poems follow that thread of self-image under the bright lights of technology and history. I recalled encountering Nam June Paik’s Buddha Watching TV at the VMFA, a heavily trafficked cultural hub—as I’m sure you’re aware, suffice to say stumbling into it, lackadaisical as a like twenty-year-old—without intent or bias during those undergrads years, is how I want readers to experience the text, interested in one thing, upended and led astray by something else altogether: a mundane event, a person, a day of the year, or an overheard song, I’m a heat-seeking missile for haphazard insights, bore out of common struggle—I’ve always been a fan of anachronism because it really represents an opportunity to play with linearity. In hindsight, I think it really enabled me to scale the true uniqueness of that window in time. Suffice to say it’s all exculpatory!
J.A. Holm
Can you tell me a bit about your publishing process? Did you run into any issues while trying to publish your manuscript, and if so, how did you overcome those?
Sylvia Jones
I think the main issue was overcoming the general apathy that comes with having to live and work to pay bills while also supporting myself. There’s also a strong pull towards anti-intellectualism that’s been brewing for quite some time, but that’s an aspect of my relationship to reality that I fought tooth and nail to emote through the poems themselves.
J.A. Holm
How did you end up deciding to publish with Meekling Press?
Sylvia Jones
Meekling Press reminded me of reading Tisa Bryant, Lynne Tillman, and Gary Indiana—work that’s formally adventurous but intimately human. I heard they champion authors who enjoy coloring outside canonical lines. When I sent my manuscript to their book open call, I was near to almost fully burnt out from the hamster wheel of the prize industrial complex. Sure enough, when we connected, they mentioned how Television Fathers felt like an “unspooling reel” of the American diaspora. That was it. They wanted the whole sprawl.
J.A. Holm
In “First Black Cop Bop” you mention, with the poem’s refrain of Nas’s line “I ran like a cheetah with the thoughts of an assassin,” into a mosh pit at a house show in Shockoe Bottom, a neighborhood in Richmond, Virginia, for those who don’t know. What connection do you have to RVA?
Sylvia Jones
Richmond is where I stumbled into adulthood. It’s also the first place I ever got arrested. On a karmic level, the city has a way of layering history in everyday corners—I was an undergrad there, roaming sweaty mosh pits in Shockoe Bottom after nights of frantic studying—and frantic living. Shockoe Bottom is so layered: the site of old slave jails and auction blocks, now peppered with house shows and experimental music. It’s a place where history hovers, reminding you that the personal always collides with the political. In the Bop, Nas’s line resonates because it’s both an affirmation of energy—run like a cheetah—and a biting awareness of danger. Richmond taught me that sometimes the joy of a mosh pit and the grief of generational trauma intersect in surprising ways.
More recently invented, the Bop was created by Afaa Michael Weaver. It’s a twenty-three-line simple poem made of three stanzas, each followed by a single-line refrain. The refrain in my poem, “The First Black Cop” comes from a song by the hip hop artist Nas, the track, “N.Y. State of Mind” appears on his debut studio album Illmatic (Columbia, 1994).
In “The First Black Cop,” voice occurs in a notably dichotomous fashion (speaker vs. cypher). This is why I take pleasure in the footwork that comes with measuring each line for its own music. Looking ahead, I see both forms as viable options to combat artificial intelligence anxiety in literature. Perfect jump-off points for conveying the radical future ahead for all languages. Of all the generational curses I’m trying to break, it’s the idea that Black people deserve to be on the receiving end of violence.
J.A. Holm
Tell me a little bit about how Don Draper from Mad Men ended up in the book.
Sylvia Jones
Draper is the distilled spirit of American advertising, a man standing at the crossroads of aspiration and deception—his presence in my poems let me probe the tension between surface-level charm and underlying moral vacancy. Draper is a Trojan horse: the father figure who sells us illusions about ourselves. Here I’m thinking about Imitation of Life, about Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner or Trading Places—on the surface, everything’s either idyllic and/or comedic or polite, but beneath that veneer lies a slow-burn commentary on race, class, power.
J.A. Holm
I believe “Man with Shotgun and Alien” was the first poem of yours I encountered. Tell me a bit about that piece.
Sylvia Jones
The poem takes its name from the painting by Noah Davis “Man with Alien and Shotgun” which I came across randomly on the internet, during the tail end of grad school. Though I’ve yet to see it in person, it’s such a poignant piece, so much in fact that an early first impression of the painting made me think of this guy Solomon Brown whom I’d never heard of, up until briefly working part-time at the natural history museum as a visitor desk attendant. Outside the museum doors, there is a bronze plated plaque with his picture and a text inscription of “Fifty Years Today,” his most known poem. The poem commemorates his fifty-year tenure at the Smithsonian. Anyhow, I was so fascinated by his legacy as a poet and the labor as well as equity implications of his tenure as “the first African-American employee from 1852 to 1906.” All of this is to say, there are so many instances, dare I say breadcrumbs of “the old world” all throughout the city IN EVERY CITY/TOWN/PLACE, and I think now more than ever I really see that as an anthropological exercise and a way toward a poem!
J.A. Holm
In the book, your poetic voice seems to put emphasis on brevity, sharpness, and wit. Who are your poetic inspirations? And for that matter, who are your inspirations in a general sense, perhaps non-literary?
Sylvia Jones
Paul Celan and Wisława Szymborska—two poetic north stars of mine who lived through some truly wild stuff. I am often humbled by this notion of “if they survived it, then so can I!” Granted Celan’s exit was still premature, but what I mean is I’m off-put by the quick and easy urge to overcook the catastrophe, but it’s useless in the long run. In fact, anything that keeps me from being able to hear the voice in my head that allows for transference between my imagination and the page, is useless. Beyond those two, every single poet explicitly or slyly mentioned in the collection is a definitive inspiration from David Wojahn, to Richard Hugo, to Wanda Coleman, to Toi Derricotte, to Charles Simic, to those whose borrowed lines helped me shape the centos.
J.A. Holm
In the poem “Bob Kaufman like Tendencies,” you mention how your mother doesn’t know who Kaufman is and that your former stepfather tried involving you and your siblings in a Ponzi scheme. What was that like and what is a Bob Kaufman tendency?
Sylvia Jones
It was comedic in its absurdity—like a blooper reel from an 80s sitcom. The lines between real life and performance blurred. Kaufman’s “tendency” is to confront chaos head-on, letting it swirl into a cosmic prayer. In other words, a Bob Kaufman tendency is the impulse to find mysticism in the mundane, to jump from a single line to the entire Black diaspora’s heartbreak in one breath. My stepfather’s scheme mirrored that carnival of illusions but writing it out felt like reclaiming some narrative power—no matter how wild the ride.
J.A. Holm
Would you speak to the role of social justice in your work? You are an abolitionist and have taught incarcerated people; how has this informed your writing?
Sylvia Jones
Teaching in jails forced me to confront a brutal reality: that society often thrives on the dehumanization of Black and brown bodies. Television Fathers doesn’t dwell on victimhood, though; it tries to reorient the conversation. Right now I’m currently thinking of how the movie St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) glosses over its treatment of Black women or, how Little House on the Prairie heavily trafficked in idyllic American myths at the expense of Indigenous histories, or how easily eugenics narratives conveniently vanish from mainstream histories. These poems are a questionnaire or operate like an out of sync thought experiment—the overarching hypothesis, began as an indexing need and gradually turned into an informational questioning. What does seeing a gay person on television actually do for non-famous gay people? What do Black people on television mean? Why is representation so often considered a net gain for the represented population? How does this impact our actual material reality? How come one celebrity equals ten thousand regular folks? What does that say about dignity and class struggle? Violence and surveillance? Suffering and discretion?
J.A. Holm
There are several instances of ekphrasis throughout the book. I engage with ekphrastic writing frequently. I find it to be the perfect jumping off point for poetic exploration. Can you speak on your relationship with ekphrasis?
Sylvia Jones
Ekphrasis to me is akin to James Van Der Zee’s photography—an intense, almost conspiratorial dialogue between the subject and the viewer. Martin Wong’s La Vida is really special to me because I got to feature it alongside a really incredible ensemble of voices and artists, thanks to the NYC Gay and Lesbian Center. The painting itself speaks to the verisimilitudes and more dynamic class conversation which I hope the book spurs. I’m also a big trivia-head and oftentimes spend my time trying to figure out how I can make the poem a puzzle without turning it into a pop quiz. Noah Davis’s painting is the opening poem of the collection. It’s one of those subverted portraiture paintings that startle the viewer, like Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dead Christ. If anything the poem is an appetizer/gateway drug to the painting. I just want as many people as possible to enjoy Davis’s artistry, and it really fits in with the ethos of the times of course. Both poems become another vantage, another living lens, where comedic or dramatic moments either explain or overshadow, never both—a deeper historical exploitation.
J.A. Holm
Speaking of ekphrasis, in the second half of the book—“Drywall Highway”—we are met with poems engaging with David Levinthal’s photographs of mass-produced figures which portray African American stereotypes, inspired by Spike Lee’s blackface montage from his film Bamboozled. What was it about the film, or the photographs, that was so impactful for you and led to including these six images in the collection?
Sylvia Jones
Bamboozled wrenched me from any naive belief that minstrel iconography was just a relic; it’s a living, breathing part of cultural memory. Levinthal’s pictures of these plastic figurines underscored how mass production perpetuates those same distortions. When I respond to an artifact, I’m bridging centuries of context with my own vantage point. It’s generative and interpretive, reminiscent of how Jean Genet once described finding deeper truths in the margins. I love that it unsettles the idea of a static history.
In Glenn Ligon’s “We Need To Wake Up. . .” installation, he strips Richard Pryor of speech and in doing so exposes the silences that shape Black identity on screen. There’s a paragon of incidents that helped to shape my thinking on the dynamics between subject and screen and viewer. In “Drywall Highway”, I wanted to freeze those stereotypes, like Ligon did with Pryor’s voice, and ask the reader: what’s truly being said when the comedic veneer is removed? It’s a painful but necessary excavation.
J.A. Holm
What does the future hold for you, are you working toward a second manuscript?
Sylvia Jones
Yes, but the second manuscript is a shape-shifter. I won’t pretend to know exactly where it’s heading yet. The tension between popular imagination and public domain keeps my craft focus steady. It might be part-cabaret, part-lamentation. I’m exploring the phenomenon of late-night radio psychics, the hush of 3 a.m. infomercials, and the broad question of how we commodify longing. I can’t help myself. That’s half the fun—letting the next wild swarm of words appear when they’re ready.
