It is nearly impossible for me to write poetry without an awareness of my reading of poetry. I am hopeless. I read poetry constantly. Perhaps I’m addicted. There are times when I think I’ve been ruined by poetry. I might, for example, find myself having to write a simple note to a contractor yet I’m utterly prevented from doing so. It’s hilarious or it would be, if it were happening to someone else. The amount of poetry I’ve written far exceeds my published record. Nothing unusual there. The work I’ve published is relatively small but mostly presentable. Two or three early disasters sought penance. I revisit my published work at times and wonder how did I manage to write it, how many bright unbalanced insights. The poet as he or she ages moves towards the minimal. This seems a natural development. Yet there are eruptions of garrulous exuberance, often spiritual in tone. I was never much for narrative when younger, though I longed to tell stories. Of course, I continue to try: when a story approaches me it does so by indirection or even evasion like a fugitive. Truly I admire story tellers. My father stuttered, surely an impediment to storytelling. While I don’t stutter, I have habits of hesitation that might be gifts for poetry in disguise. I think in terms of singular images, and the space between one image and the next might be comparable to the space between one stanza and the following. The poetic sequence has always appealed as a method of building something substantial from out of the atomic elements. However, the compressed lyric seems enough all on its own. William Bronk, the neglected American poet, who ran a family quarry, wrote brilliantly compact lyrics. They were like chunks of rock, granitic some of them. Robert Bringhurst, wrote poems of great clarity, mining the pre-Socratics, creating poems that seemed made of fire and air, ice and antler. And that is certainly another way to do it. I also engage in the pursuit of poems about ordinary events. Then I might read Roo Borson and suddenly see how the ordinary becomes its own mysterious form of transcendence. Then I’m inspired to write a poem, or attempt to write a poem, along the lines Borson demonstrates. Years ago in elementary school I remember reading the animal stories of Sir Charlies G.D. Roberts (1860-1943). I’m sure no one reads those anymore, perhaps with reason, but they were thrilling stories because Roberts had great empathy for the non-human which he managed to convert into powerful language. Some aspect of the poet’s enterprise was foretold in my encountering those stories. I try in all my poetry to raise up – I paraphrase – the mysterious quanta of language that seems to pulse beneath the living tradition itself. I hope most of all my efforts are sincere.
Jon Cone is a Canadian poet, editor, and writer who lives in Iowa City. He grew up in Richmond Hill, Ontario, attended University of Western Ontario, in London, where he majored in English and Philosophy. He holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Recent publications also include New Year Begun (Subpress Editions: Brooklyn, NY, 2022); Liminal: Shadow Agent, pts 1 and 2 (Greying Ghost, Salem, MA, 2022); An Ice Cream Truck Stalled at the Bottom of the World: a collection of plays/written with Rauan Klassnik (Plays Inverse, Pittsburgh, PA 2020); Cold House (espresso, Toronto, ON, 2017). His recent poetry has appeared in the journals ant5 (Eugene, OR) and Scant (Manchester, UK). His recent reviews have appeared in Rain Taxi (Minneapolis, MN). For eight years he edited the international literary review World Letter (Iowa City, 1991-1999).
