Aja Monet on poetry’s power
In a BET feature, Aja Monet argues that poetry is the “real spaceship,” framing Black poetic lineage and imagination as tools for building the future — a strong, vocal thread in this year’s National Poetry Month coverage. (bet.com)
Aja Monet told BET on April 10 that “the page becomes a real spaceship,” and she used that image to argue that poetry is not an escape hatch from reality but a way to travel across history and imagine a different future. The interview ran as part of BET’s “Still We Write” series for National Poetry Month 2026. (bet.com) She is not speaking from the edge of the poetry world. The Kennedy Center describes Monet as a Grammy-nominated “surrealist blues poet,” and notes that she won the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam in 2007. (kennedy-center.org) That “spaceship” line lands differently once you know what she means by poetry. In the BET interview, she calls it an “ancient tradition” and says the art form can connect people to other periods of time if they know how to approach it. (bet.com) Her argument is also political in a very plainspoken way. She told BET that many current crises come from “a lack of political imagination,” and she framed artists as the people who help the public picture another way to live. (bet.com) That idea runs through her career. KQED reported in 2024 that Monet spent years in Florida working with Dream Defenders and the Community Justice Project, so her poems grew alongside organizing work instead of apart from it. (kqed.org) Her lineage is also explicit. African American Poetry says Monet has named June Jordan, Jayne Cortez, Carolyn Rodgers, Wanda Coleman, Audre Lorde, and Phillis Wheatley as poets she admires, which helps explain why she talks about Black writing as a continuum instead of a trend. (africanamericanpoetry.org) The performance side matters too, because Monet is not describing poetry as silent words trapped in a book. Mother Jones wrote in 2025 that her live shows pair poetry with a jazz band and draw heavily from the Black Arts Movement tradition of poets performing with musicians. (motherjones.com) Her recent work keeps pushing that mix of page, stage, and movement. The Kennedy Center says her 2023 album, *when the poems do what they do*, was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album, and it lists collaborators including Lonnie Holley, Christian Scott, Marcus Gilmore, Samora Pinderhughes, and Weedie Braimah. (kennedy-center.org) This is also why her BET comments fit the moment so neatly. The Academy of American Poets says National Poetry Month marks its 30th anniversary in 2026, with a national closing event on April 28, and Monet’s interview arrives inside a month when poetry is being presented as public culture, not niche homework. (poets.org) So when Monet says poetry is the “real spaceship,” she is making a very old claim in a very current year: Black poets have long built tools for memory, survival, and future-making, and the page is still one of those tools. In her version, the technology that needs upgrading is not the phone in your hand but “the human heart.” (bet.com)
