Margaryta Golovchenko : The Fool, by Jessie Jones

The Fool, Jessie Jones
Icehouse Poetry/Goose Lane Editions, 2020

 

 

 

 

When I first saw Jessie Jones’ The Fool, I (predictably) thought of the tarot card which, the book blurb on Icehouse Poetry’s website, “represents continual beginnings, not being able to see or think past the excitement and potential of a new start […and is] associated with zero — a literal loop.” The iconography of this major arcana card is likely familiar to many through its inclusion in popular culture, books and film, yet Jones’ debut collection still brings the buried question forward from somewhere in the back of the mind: what does a fool look like? Is there a definitive figure of “the fool” within the collection? Is it a state of being? A place or a moment in time? These questions might initially seem to be rudimentary and banal, pointless, even, given that the clear-cut connection has already been made by the publisher. They are also inevitable given The Fool’s landscape, a world in which “It was summer,/ then summer,/ then summer./ The only sure” and “Escape formed corridors/that led to two fires:/one now, one later.”

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.

Margaryta Golovchenko: Drolleries, by Cassidy McFadzean

Drolleries, Cassidy McFadzean

McClelland & Stewart, 2019

There is always a special sense of promise that I feel when picking up a poetry collection that is centered around a term taken from art history or visual culture more broadly. Much like the drolleries or “grotesques” — small decorative images depicting comical and whimsical hybrid creatures that can be found in the margins of illuminated scripts — for which it is names, McFadzean’s Drolleries entices its reader with the promise of an intricate world that the poet has painstakingly gathered within the pages of the book, as the speaker so aptly puts it in “Kunstkamera”: “It is the artistry/ of the still life that draws us in,/ a cover story for our flagrant staring.”A handheld cabinet of curiosities, Drolleries is filled with the everyday-turned-magical along with the downright fantastical as we have come to recognize it from mythology or even the distant past, far enough removed that it begins to feel like it’s own kind of fantasy.

It feels like a bit of a cop-out but I still think that “Nymph,” the opening poem in Drolleries, would have to be my favourite for the way it captures McFadzean’s masterful handling in transitioning from comically relatable scene of the speaker falling “ass-first in the dappled brook,/ grasping moss-covered rocks” to the promise of an unseen beyond that is revealed in the poem’s final lines, where “the tree’s outstretched hand took hold/ of my ring and wedded itself to me.” “Janus,” “Ghosting,” “Dream Interpretation,” and “Summer Palace” similarly stood out as examples of McFadzean’s control, her ability not so much to weave the impossible into the everyday but to imbue some of the places and activities we are so familiar with that we take their mundaneness for granted, like taking a shower or feeling out of place at an event, with an otherworldly quality.

Similarly, McFadzean offers a different spin on the ekphrastic poetry tradition. The many poems in Drolleries that respond to museums or artworks feel less like reimaginings of these spaces and more like conversations McFadzean has with the source material. In “The Unicorn Tapestries,” McFadzean balances an informative approach with an analytical one, listing the titles of all seven tapestries throughout the poems while attempting to create a relationship between them that historians today still cannot seem to agree upon. McFadzean’s narrative extends beyond the familiar iconography of the tapestries and it is her playful hide-and-seek-like game of listing flora and fauna that demystifies the artworks, bringing readers who have not seen the tapestries in person into their visual space and reacquainting those readers who have with the mysterious subject in a new way.  

The reader is therefore brought into McFadzean’s conversation with art and museums through an atmosphere of intimacy that McFadzean cultivates over the course of the collection in the form of a personal narrative, giving readers a glance into the life, love, struggle, and loss of the poems’ “I.” One does not need to have visited the Winter Palace in Russia to feel simultaneously moved and caught off-guard by the final lines in “Russian Ark,” to feel a certain familiarity, rather than déjà vu, with the longing and letting go that McFadzean captures when she writes:

We end our call in the rotunda

after I share the Rembrandts

through my iPhone’s shaky lens.

Sit with the Rubens a little longer

for me. I walk backwards down

the stairwell, and into the sea.

Drolleries can be best summed up in the words of McFadzean herself, from her poem “Ten of Swords”: “Poetry means never being sated.” It is a collection of endless curiosity filled with poems that do not sit still, propelled forward by their own desire to be in and with the world that, as McFadzean shows us, is still full of endless wonders waiting to be discovered around every corner and shower curtain.

Margaryta Golovchenko is a settler-immigrant, poet, critic, and academic based in Tkaronto/Toronto, Treaty 13 and Williams Treaty territory, Canada. The author of two poetry chapbooks, she is completing her MA in art history and curatorial studies at York University and can be found sharing her (mis)adventures on Twitter @Margaryta505.