Jacob Braun : selections from Ontarian

 

 

 

IV. (Summer)

 

 

Late summer crowds downtown to sweat out sounds
Of music — beer cans chunks of scapegoat drywall
Lodged in the city’s bruised knuckle

  

 

Debris falls as light, chaotic bass-and-snare sound test
My alarm clock — no snooze
On the barely used convertible of hot weather

 

Afternoons of soup,
Tar muck,
Heavy armpits

 

Down Guelph Line
The mushroom factory
Odour of constant growth

 

Preppers stocking pickling jars,
Jams and jerkies, canned beans,
Half-burnt candles, toothpaste   

 

 

We sweat like hot tortilla chips
And relish
The conservation in a pickle

 

 

Our wrinkled sofa,
Cushions, rug, circles
From a humid coffee mug 

 

*

Around split sun and transports in the turning lane
I crystal gaze impacts in the glass
-phalt’s long foregoing shadows

 

 

Brass and phlegm housing
Development a scowling grotesque,
Birdsong welling up its weeping tile

 

 

Walking the avuncular country line in hard hats
Men wave airy signals — perfunctory brake tap
At the empty all-way stop

 

 

 

Every monument torn down
By the recurrent haze, and the rare hours
Where the sun sours through

 

 

Loud Canada geese, branta canadensis, flap
Through the laburnum sky
Like a tattered banner, senseless

 

                                                              *

 

 

We live as much as humour allows,
Loitering around the narthex
Of the latest Confirmation

 

 

The psalm or sutra of the skies
Is not written on ruled sheets
Of hailing fat cats and dogs

 

 

A simple mist appears
To drive a coach and horses through
The Great Escarpment

 

 

The word used is key
Looking up the high definition
Numbers of habitable

 

 

The abstract
Of the meteorological report
Surreal

 

 

 

 

Summertime —
The clock
With no batteries

 

 

Jacob Braun grew up on traditional Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory in Thorold, ON. His poetry and prose have recently appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, with above/ground press and elsewhere, and the selections here are from his forthcoming debut poetry collection, Ontarian (Guernica Editions).

 

Jacob Braun : on free jazz

 

 

 

 

 

Some who listen to jazz say “listen to the notes they’re not playing” and I never know how to do that. It is like Pierre in Sartre’s famous café scene, where the man rushes into the café looking for Pierre but Pierre is not there. Suddenly there’s an absence in the café, but the absence doesn’t happen to Pierre, it only happens to the man looking for Pierre. Pierre experiences no absence. Pierre is where he is. I’m always looking for Pierre when I listen to jazz.

Instead of Pierre I thought of looking at jazz visually as intaglio. In intaglio part of a substrate is cut away to hold ink which then creates an image on paper. Absence allows the image. It is the opposite of sculpture where something comes out at you. Some jazz comes out at you but often jazz is like intaglio, carved out of the unmusical unity of notes, a cut-away you look into with your ears.

Then there’s free jazz. In free jazz all of the notes are permitted. How can I listen to the absent notes when all of the notes are permitted? How can I write the feeling of not being able to hear the absent notes? How to “outline” absence? One way would be to write a word by writing every other word except the word. I’m not sure anyone would publish that and I know no one would read it. Not with words, then, but letters—each word a series of letters intaglio’d out of the alphabet. So, to spell a word in “free jazz” I use every letter other than the letter that it is.

Now how does that all sound?

 

 

 

 

 

Jacob Braun is from Thorold, ON. He writes both experimental and traditional poetry. His debut chapbook Tryangles (Trainwreck Press, 2020) is a history of philosophy in trilingual anagrams. Other writings have appeared in The Antigonish Review, The Malahat Review, filling Station, Brittle Star and elsewhere. He is working towards his first book.