Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader - Softcover

Jonas, Stephen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0872867919 ISBN 13: 9780872867918

Publisher: City Lights Publishers, 2019

Synopsis

“A true poet of modern classic culture in mid-twentieth century U.S.A.”—Allen Ginsberg

“At their best the poems have an intensely oral, I would like to call it glossolalic, freedom, as if they captured the essence of what one might like to express in the moment of rapture.”—David Rattray

Beginning in the 1950s until his untimely death at age 49, Stephen Jonas (1921-1970) was an influential if underground figure of the New American Poetry. A gay African-American poet of self-obscured origins, heavily influenced by Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, the Boston-based Jonas was a pioneer of the serial poem and an erudite mentor to such acknowledged masters as Jack Spicer and John Wieners, even as he lived a shadowy existence among drug addicts, thieves, and hustlers.

Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader is the first selection of his work to appear in 25 years. With a biographical introduction and a postscript delving into recent discoveries concerning the poet's birthplace and background, Arcana is a crucial corrective to our understanding of post-war American poetry, restoring Jonas to his rightful place among the period’s vanguard. Featuring previously uncollected and unpublished work, a section of never-before-seen facsimiles from notebooks, and a generous selection from his innovative serial poem Exercises for Ear (1968), Arcana is a much-needed retrieval of an overlooked American poet, as well as a valuable contribution to African American and Queer literature.

Praise for Arcana:

"The work of Steve Jonas, though vital to many of his more illustrious contemporaries, has remained obscured far too long, particularly as we've become unaccustomed to the high stakes once involved in the life of poetry. Accompanied by a reprint of Joseph Torra’s invaluable introduction, as vital and fresh now as when it came out 25 years ago, along with David Rich’s extraordinary archaeological dig into genealogical records and biographical materials to clarify Jonas’s self-effaced origins, the publication of Arcana is an important event in our increasingly evanescent cultural history, evidence of what is real."––Ammiel Alcalay

About this title

About the Author

Beginning in the 1950s until his death at age 49, Stephen Jonas (1921-1970) was an influential if underground figure of the New American Poetry. A gay African American poet of self-obscured origins, heavily influenced by Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, the Boston-based Jonas was a pioneer of the serial poem and mentor to such acknowledged masters as Jack Spicer and John Wieners. Major publications include Love, the Poem, the Sea & Other Pieces Examined by Me (1957), Transmutations (1966), Exercises for Ear (1968), and Selected Poems (1994).

Garrett Caples is a poet and an editor for City Lights, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He has edited or co-edited books by Philip Lamantia, Frank Lima, Richard O. Moore, and Stephen Jonas.

Derek Fenner is an artist, educator, poet, and researcher. He earned his MFA in writing and poetics from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. In 2000, with Ryan Gallagher, he co-founded Bootstrap Press, where they have published over 40 books by poets across the country.

David Rich is the editor of Charles Olson: Letters Home, 1949-1969 (Cape Ann Museum, 2010).

Joseph Torra is a poet, novelist, and editor. He edited Selected Poems by Stephen Jonas (Talisman, 1994).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Exercises for Ear III
in this same parc
I saw, broad as day,

two sailors take
turns in the eighth

geodetic year of
getting to know

earth-mother while
two chapters bodily

lifted themselves from
the King James

version
of thou shalt nots
Exercises for Ear LXIII
tho’ my songs
not deckd out in
baroque trimmings
of adjective baubles
they, nonetheless, stand
lean & cleanly de-
fined against a gray de-
cember sky
as against the on-coming
of a spring
when all shall be
too gaudily dis-
playd w/ too much of ev’
rything to be
clearly outlined
Love, the Poem, the Sea & Other Pieces Examined by Me
.... not so much for receiving
stolen goods
as for placing the junk
dead as the world
before the senses
In such times
one is put upon within
You know how we squeeze today
for meaning
the few words we have left to us
Here in a word is the sea before me
but the sea cannot be squeezed
So I sit as close to it as close as safe
The sea speaks if speech be sound
but speech is not sound
so turns for meaning
to the Poem
If the sea is anything
it is deep in silence
below
and beyond a few pebbles
chatter thrown against sand
Thalassa

the Greek reminds us
but the Greeks are profound and too
elude us and no one likes
to be found out.
In a dead world
as matter of course
California becomes a sun symbol
I supposed you
born there
So in thought I leap
thinking to rush up gladly
to greet you
just as would any
another creeping thing.
Along Washington St.,
the stores will close in an hour
—the sparrows are hopping about the grass by
to say its green I suppose and alive
with parasites I do not see
being birds these things do interest or they do not
they are still birds
—Saint Francis, indeed
you were a fool
for had/not you
we would all of us go screaming mad
down the street so
serious we are come to take ourselves.
Love, we say
but the flower we see
A Rose edges by degrees
the secret locked tight within the unfold of bud
the hedge that is the sea defines its limits.
In life
Love
that switch/blade belly thrust
be quick
say what you will death is slowly
withdrawing the blade of life
also Love
if in life I am ever in Love I am consumed.
Choice?
I shall
with doubt
bloom in my season
and bloomed
be blown out to sea
or up
where the other gas,
Heaven?
that is to come
in the Hollywood
of the end!
But we have before tasted
those ecstasies of extreme unction
so let’s you and me
keep it clean and simple
complexity
not to be involved.
Poem is the child’s ear
and love is naked and unashamed
to cry that it is not fondled.
This reminds me
that is the sea crys
its cry is
merely a surface noise.
Its secret is much deeper
but men are no longer interested
In the sea of their minds
they have visions of other worlds
accurately numbered
they visit them daily in papers
and in the meantime plan
within a decade
to shoot The Moon. Good
as it is
a dead issue in this they at least show foresight
Let them get out of the world
whatever means they may
not by any long shot
is the sea dismissed from the mind
For a time the sea defines
the mind’s periphery
but after a time the sea is all around you
and over their worlds.
When you speak of
B. Donahue I think always the Irish Sea
his horses are also the sea’s
’tho we do bet our hard to come by
resources of life
the sea takes us
horse and rider
In every race
It must be thus and so
Tragedy enters our lives
not so much B.
Donahue as the Greek
who also had notions of other worlds
but continued to live by the sea
as their language (which I have had of records)
attest.
Today science fiction
yes but the real sea
throwing hints as pieces of driftwood
the twisted gray remains
burn or preserve as what-nots
they give warmth or they give chill.
Mike, I have seen pieces of driftwood
two
so twisted together you and I
would be hard put to extricate. How can I so
subject our two lives to so trivial a thing
a twisted freak thrown together in the sea of
unconcern to be dis-
carded on some obscure beachhead of our world?
It is fat summer here and the ducks
quack because of it.
The birds will no longer come
to investigate the grass. They
work by signals
as we poor things pour
over our signs for some parasite of meaning.
It has been a lean season for you and me.
I did not intend a serious poem but the Poem
has a will all its own
I am a poor vehicle
a transport in summer were
I to be discarded also
in the season of decline.
Love
O self willed love
though unworthy
remember me kindly at the hour of decline
know that I sacrificed all
to say nothing.
Hereafter
it will be stark winter
every sign indicates it
In the long night there will be time enuf
To think what pigs we have made of ourselves.
An Ode for Garcia Lorca
In New Orleans Walt Whitman was married.
An Anglican priest duly performed the dark rite.
sub rosa. The Mint paid. So did the Butterflies
and Lesbian Sparrows. (coined from old metal)
The Ceremony took place- slowly-in the shade!
Creole ladies avoided the sun like the plague.
‘cadjuns’, being the only pure stock,
farmed their boys out like studs.
These are Walt Whitman’s children. And here,
to convince you, is a photograph. A dirty
photograph. Beneath huey long’s bridge,
the which consumed ten hershey bars; The Pair
stripped to the waist, standing in drains:
The Sun upon their belly buttons. Outsized,
(these pictures always exaggerate) low hanging cloud for
adjective.
The bride’s maid, with a bunch of pansies, (fades) were
graciously received. There are no differences here!
There are also his children and, in case I didnt warn you,
this is a poem.
The background is a blurr about the horizon.
NOTE: In a photograph the foreground is by that time
background, (adding “not really” to it).
It’s five o’clock.
It gets dark early.
I cant see to finish this.
One of Three Musicians
The first time I heard Ornette
Coleman I thought
about Picasso’s
Three Musicians
w/ their neo-
classical in-
struments: cigarboxes w/
soft line strains drawn
across barrel staves, tin

cans thrown
(or kicked) in Congo Square
these “fakers”
with jaw bone percussions out of dead
horses & instruments from
the child’s hand
They reproduce the spears, the screams
the outbursts of dark religious ex-
orcisms. these are not the
shoed peasant feet out of Brueghel’s
paintingThe Kermess, these are
bare black feet pounding
delta clay
the wire & steal singing over
broken barrel staves,
saying a theatre is any place
free associates come in
to play.

About this edition

• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0872867919
• ISBN 13: 9780872867918
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264
• Editor: Caples Garrett, Fenner Derek