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.”
Margaryta Golovchenko (she/her) is a
settler-immigrant, poet, and critic from Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and
Williams Treaty Territory. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is an
incoming Ph.D. student in the art history program at the University of Oregon.
