The Fool, Jessie Jones
Icehouse Poetry/Goose Lane
Editions, 2020
The Fool has a Dante-esque quality. Jones combines an atmosphere of spiralling descent followed by a matching ascent in sinusoidal alternation, with a touch of the modern-day city that the speaker traverses through, capturing moments from the lives of its inhabitants as laying out a collection of stolen family photos: a trip to Las Vegas, a swim in a pool, a visit to the hospital with a concussion, what seems to be the death of a father. There is strong sense of place and narrative, particularly in the first section, in The Fool, which Jones balances with an equally well-crafted ambiance, a sense of ambiguity and anticipation enrobing the poem’s speaker(s) as well as the reader. The tone shifts slightly in the following two sections. Section two reads like a documentation of states of vulnerability in the process of becoming, a wrestling of control through language that proves slippery, elusive, like sleep, “another door with a knocker/you have no use for, another room/you drag boxes through.” Section three moves even further towards abstraction because the scope of who Jones is peaking to widens, the poems becoming conversations with places, movies and dances, aesthetics and affects. The emotional tension also reaches a saturation point in this section, the “Fear of missing/your own revival song rais[ing] you up for one/last song.”
Jones’ poems address the self across different states, even dimensions—emotional, temporal, spatial—resulting in a different kind of intimacy, one where the speaker’s “I” and the ambiguous “you” feel like a teasing masquerade, a dance through a labyrinth of funhouse mirrors in which there is no rest, only the exhilaration of the chase and the titillation of thinking the answer is within reach. The Fool is a peeling-back of layers down to the root of being, the pulse that is inherent in the circular cycle of questioning, searching, and finding, only to begin anew, a contemporary Ouroboros. The poems “Self-improvement” and “Ego death” from section three form a kind of pair in their shared concern with perfectionism and missed opportunities. While the rule against conflating the identity of the speaker and the narrator still applies to The Fool, I personally could not help but feel a moment of kinship in the titular “The Fool,” a poem permeated by a sense of fragility and the push-and-pull of forces that dictate what the self should be: “All day I wait for a bit of friction/to transform me. Pretty keyhole,/French-braided maiden, the cup trilling/under a finger signing o’s.”
“Fool is to worry. Fool is to wait/ for someone to tell me what I know/ already,” writes Jones in “Eclipse,” one of the few clear-cut definition-like passages that return the reader to this question of the fool’s identity. Although not inherently spiritual, The Fool expresses enough of an interest in the “after,” whether the immediately temporal or the existential. The figure of the modern-day fool, then, is one who navigates these multiple pathways in search not for the truth but for a moment of buoyancy in an otherwise turbulent present. Their personality is not marked by the characteristic understanding of foolishness but rather by a kind of stubborn optimism, “A fool quick/to extend the edge/until they are/and aren’t it.”
