Jon Cone : Four poems

 

 

FORMED FAINTLY BY PENCIL STUB   

The love you gave was like a holy nectar
but I told only the hearing impaired
now that I am of their number
I appreciate how far the news has travelled

 

 

IN MODERN ACCOUNTANCY
4^th Edition, by Williams and Keller
(New York: McMillan, 1972)

 

Hey Diane

I’ve no way of knowing
for sure
but if I were to hazard
a guess
I’d say either fire or rain or
fire and rain
and a beast having
several
heads!

Steve

 

 

DREAM

In my pocket, a white candy. Peppermint flavored.
In the morning, an urge to eat licorice.

 

 

THE IMAGINATION IS AN ANCIENT SCHOLAR
AT A DESK WITH ASTROLABE AND CANDLE
IN A BOOK-LINED CELL THE LION BY HIS FEET

The seven winds
advance
the seven birds
along
the map of
seven seas –
where beside
the compass rose
stands that stalwart fish –
LEVIATHAN!  

 

 

 

Jon Cone lives in Iowa City. He attended the University of Western Ontario and later Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has published widely, both in print and online. He formerly edited the international literary review World Letter (1991-1998).

Jon Cone and K.Lipschutz : on An Acceleration & a Calm

 

 

 

 

I am a Canadian who has lived in Iowa City for many years. When I inherited a packet of unpublished poetry by fellow expat P. M. Samson (who died at 84 in 2021), given carte blanche to do with it as I pleased, I was stunned by the sheer amount of material and so felt keenly the responsibility placed upon my shoulders.

Along came K.Lipschutz, with whom I have worked remotely for years, who needed to get out of San Francisco (something “domestic,” he cryptically alluded) and “hide out somewhere” for a month. Iowa City turned out to be that place, in the sweltering summer.

We spent days and nights and nights and days looking for the crux of the biscuit, as it were, winnowing over 500 manuscript pages down to a potent autobiographical sheaf of Samson’s work. A posthumous treasure trove.

K. then enlisted noted critic Barnard Swallow to critique each poem and – Bob’s your uncle – the result was AN ACCELERATION & A CALM, which marries Swallow’s pith and pluck with Samson’s eye-opening, stealth lyrical confessions. And is seeing the light of day thanks to above/ground press.

Beyond this brief background, we decided to step out of the way and let Samson and Swallow speak for themselves. Following are salient excerpts selected by K.

-Jon Cone, Iowa City, January 18, 2026

 

EXCERPTS FROM AN ACCELERATION & CALM

Fire drill, fire plug, fire escape.
Where’d you put the dog?  
My truck, not your truck.
Barking in the fog. 

(from KINDERGARTEN MEMOIR)

A child of the North plays pick-up sticks with the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of his inception.

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

* * * * *

It was Leibniz
who prepared me
for not understanding
Wittgenstein. 

(from DRESS FOR THE JOB YOU WERE JUST FIRED FROM)

. . . burrows overdressed into the urban wilderness of the inner life, the attempt to secure succor and shelter in the classroom while others are getting on with it at refrigerator repair school, graduation from which actually comes with the prospect of employment.

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

* * * * *

Irving Layton had a sneezing fit, rubbed his temples, cleared his throat.
Margaret Atwood answered questions with thought and care.
Marshall McLuhan did not sport a badge.
Alice Munro proved something of a flirt. 

(from O CANADA) 

The pantheon of Gargantua’s “Neighbor to the North” is, put simply, impressive. Munro trailblazed a path to the Nobel. Can Atwood be far behind?

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

* * * * *

No teeth no hair face heavily pocked
Dead at 42 from pancreatic sepsis:
the fate that launched a thousand doctoral theses
Make that a thousand and one 

(from PORTRAIT OF AN 18TH CENTURY CONSUMPTIVE)

You could find individual volumes back in the day. I never witnessed the full complement of all 17 on a single shelf, but volume 9 is on the bookshelf behind me.

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

* * * * *

I made a soup.
It was awful, inedible.
When I poured it down
the sink, the sink complained. 

(from FEBRUARY MARITAL REPORT)

The simplicity of the need for something warming breaks one’s heart. But whose? 

(from the COMMENTARY)

 

 

 

 

K.Lipschutz and Jon Cone have never met. In addition to shepherding this sheaf into print, they have produced the manuscript Conversations about Cats and the full-length play Beckett and Borges Work It On Out. Cone’s works include New Year Begun: Selected Poems (2022), Liminal: Shadow Agent, pts 1 & 2 (2021), and Family Portrait with Two Dogs Bleeding (2009). K.Lipschutz’s works include This Drawn & Quartered Moon  (Anvil Press, Vancouver, BC, 2013), The Erection of Scaffolding for the Re-Painting of Heaven by the Lowest Bidder (1985, o.p.), and Premeditations (2019).

 

 

Jon Cone : Thoughts Prompted by the Publication of AGAINST PERFECTIONISM & OTHER POEMS

 

 

 

 

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).