{"id":734,"date":"2009-02-11T05:28:00","date_gmt":"2009-02-11T13:28:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=734"},"modified":"2009-02-11T05:28:00","modified_gmt":"2009-02-11T13:28:00","slug":"stephen-jonas-neglectorino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/stephen-jonas-neglectorino\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Jonas, Neglectorino"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

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Yesterday \u2014 10 February \u2014 was the anniversary of the death of Stephen Jonas, as Ken Irby reminded me. (A death that came, Ken wrote, exactly one month after Olson\u2019s in 1970). One of our major neglectorinos, Jonas was core \u2014 with John Wieners & Gerrit Lansing \u2014 to the Boston poetry scene in its heyday in the early sixties, a scene that also saw the brief but essential passage of Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. Jonas, gay and junk addicted, was a lively & mysterious figure who told different biographical tales on different days, and was of (probable) latino, african-american, scotch-dutch, and creole origins. But before all he was a poet \u2014 by all rights a major poet of his era. I first came across his work in London in the early seventies, as his two available books at the time \u2014 Transmutations<\/span> & Exercises for Ear<\/span> \u2014 were published by Andrew Crozier\u2019s Ferry Press in the U.K. Exercises<\/span> especially was one of the books of poems that taught me the most \u2014 a \u201cHow to Hear (and Read)\u201d for an age in which that new music, jazz, had become central. to any and all involvement, intellectual and sensuous, with art. As Gerrit Lansing wrote in the introduction to Exercises for Ear<\/span>: \u201cThey are practice on the poet\u2019s keyboard, or for study for study by those who aim to listen like poets to the twang of the specific.\u201d Jonas\u2019 most ambituous work is however probably his Orgasms\/Dominations<\/span> series (or open-ended sequence) which, as far as I know, has never yet been published in its entirety. Checking with Amazon this morning it would seem that his Selected Poems<\/span>, edited by Joe Torra & published by Talisman House in 1994, is now out of print. Time thus for a new edition, maybe a Complete Poems<\/span>?<\/p>\n

Given his composition-by-field techniques, involving multiple indents, the work is difficult to reproduce on the web \u2014 but here is one of the small Exercises<\/span>, as a teaser, followed by an extract from John Wiener\u2019s introduction to Transmutations<\/span>.<\/p>\n

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Here, from Wiener\u2019s intro:<\/p>\n

How long ago Steve, it was
we walked along Arlington Street
throwing words to the wind,
Before junk, before jail before
we moved to the four corners
of the world.
Anf you lived on Grove Street
and wrote poems poems poems
to the Navy, to Marshall, to
Boston Common. A simple life.
\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday \u2014 10 February \u2014 was the anniversary of the death of Stephen Jonas, as Ken Irby reminded me. (A death that came, Ken wrote, exactly one month after Olson\u2019s in 1970). One of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/734\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}