aja monet

A jazz poet, eh? One of those beat bohemians with a goatee and a pipe, one who drinks red wine and keeps nodding his head while listening to bebop jazz? Dig it, man!

No, no.

Or at least Saul Williams, the poet who read texts accompanied by a jazz band in Tampere Jazz Happening the last time, is not like that. And that was not his questioning predecessor, Jayne Cortez, either. For her poetry was a combination of civic activism and literary influencing. “Music is a way for a poet like myself to reach those who are not otherwise that interested in literature,” Jayne Cortez said in October 1997 before the gig at Pakkahuone.

aja monet (born in 1987), performing in Finland for the first time, is one of the most recent links in this long chain of black American (jazz) poets. One of its early artists was the powerful figure of Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, whose first poems were published a century ago.

monet remembers reading his texts  – and remembers his influence now on her first album, When the poems do what they do (2023), where a poem in a way comments on another poem. Hughes’ bleak and still topical Kids Who Die (1938) inspired aja monet to write For The Kids Who Live of all the children who at some point in time follow her and all of us adults. Like her predecessors, she wants to write about today and its future.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, by a single mother, aja monet says that she has come up with stories since the age of eight, but was inspired by a less usual thing. She wanted to feel what it was like to write with an old-fashioned mechanical typewriter, which she then got as a Christmas present. aja monet still regards it as her own “instrument” – writing heavy texts requires pressing, and even before getting the book from the printing press.

aja monet, who now lives in Los Angeles, has studied literature at two universities and been awarded a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in both. She has published three books, the most recent of which is My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter (2017), dedicated to mothers, daughters and sisters. The fourth collection of poems named Florida Water: Poems will come out of print in December.