Jacket Poetry Magazine

5 Tonalist Poets from Jacket Magazine

I have chosen five pieces from recent issues that showcase a ‘feralist and tonalist stance’, which, according to the site, emphasizes a sense of space, ‘a lot of sex and a huge number of amazing verbs.’

Generally I try to select the better or more accessible work to notice, but that’s a claim waived in this case because I do not understand the work sufficiently, or even know whether literary ‘excellence’ is among the aims.

The first piece is an excerpt from ‘More Facts’ by Normal Cole. Her poetry has received many awards, and she teaches at the University of San Francisco. The excerpt opens with the enigmatic:

false suns
shining through
ice crystals
what is known
to the senses
myself or outside
the paintings
of flowers
removing
suspicion

What false suns? How is being outside the paintings of flowers count, and how does it remove suspicion? We’re not told. The second section is equally baffling:

some
thing in suspension
that was
is far from
pretending a
circled piece of
air – the fantasy
of being
exempt

But introduces military service we are exempt form, and possibly other things, if the ‘ultramarine sky’ is included in the sequence. Possibly also the ‘age of treason’, though that may link to the following lines:

from
military service
ultramarine sky
age of treason
supports or contests
breaking news in
the killer’s space

The next section is more mundane:

the fire or
a day of
sightseeing
where did they
house the horses
anyhow?
undercoat
source of light
the plant
closed. By the
willingness to
stay – he was

But becomes gradually more impressionist, with things we can recognize as snapshots of consciousness:

distraught, pulling
his shirt, his blue
tie over his face
white orchids
clouds
hanging over
the city

Little in-jokes:

compassion
anybody’s
lover
smaller buildings
tongue in cheek
the city itself
did not change
on this day
80% of the people
missed each other

And much else:

cars beyond
bamboo fence
sound of coffee
blueprints
nobody wanted
to hear that

More than that your reviewer cannot say. The second piece is also an excerpt, from ‘Helen, A Fugue’, by E. Tracy Grinnel, and comes with instructions:

Helen, A Fugue is structured in parts, which follow a pattern of beats (in the theatrical sense): eight groups of four. Parts may be assigned to one or two voices, since they mirror one another. The beats are indicated by “stanza” breaks and these spaces should be observed as silences. Commas and caesuras should be taken very literally as pauses within beats, so that a comma or caesura (or both) at the beginning or within a beat is a rhythmic indicator to the reader. The duration of the silence indicated by commas and caesuras can be determined freely but should be consistent relative to one another, and the beats.

It may be better to quote one section in its entirety, so that readers can make their own assessments of what here seems a dissociation of consciousness:

Part IV:
tongues, I
throttle among
, my
limbs are, thumbs
phantom-fleeing, succumbing
, upon reflection
shots rung out
in lines, of image-
shapes
convictions made, of stones
, pebbles,    unturned, the urns
burn

follow my,
city, pursue

, body-figures
, cut and calloused
my, pyre

flood, swallows
, gone

messages slant from
rubble, trapped just, quartets
, as if,
the end of time
disaster’s animals
restrained, in rooms
facing
whatsoever the dark,
earth, loves
returns, from it
every front line, rendered
lost what’s, all
is, what I lay
, here
the walls shall have it all
cloaked in songs, the brawls
hereafter, the place, I
, no more identify, than love, I
the undersigned

That dissociation is seen in the next poem, by Paul Foster Johnson, though it’s good deal more intelligible. The opening lines set the scene in ‘Bronx Safe Room’:

Poverty obliges
a Bronx full of battlements.
Which contrasts outward architectural appearance with its street life:

Either the crystal city dispersed
or stayed fierce and polygonal
but probably dispersed
into apocalyptic slums.

However attractive it seemed from a distance:

Racing to the city
lent illusory plenitude
excitement with no object.

Though that superficial attraction is something everything possesses

When I engaged my mother in my diagnosis
her words radiated mystery.

Close to:

I may have synaesthesia
or a memoir eroded by stress
into so many pixels.

Or at a distance:

Crosscurrents of consumer desire
in the Harlem River
stoked from a distance.

Geraldine Monk has been publishing from the 1970s and the piece featured, ‘Decade Dance’, has a very welcome humour, opening with:

Two Thousand and Ten again.
I suppose it’s time we apologized to Mr and
Mrs Neanderthal for
dashing out their yam noodles against
their last cave of
pots and lip gloss –
I never for a minute thought
they were
Millwall fans.

And then telling us it’s the new year again:

Old moon.
Wolf moon.
Moon after Yule.
Ice Moon.
Gone January missing moon.
Though we are not quite ourselves yet:
To wake so early on the
new year
with wings
blotting shimmer with
massive move of dream
retreat through
slits of eyelids –
what on earth?
Hey Archaeopteryx!
Urvogel!
What on earth are you doing here in
my inner city?

Then follow charming vignettes

The owl disappeared itself hours ago
down the warped gullet of a
dreary decade or maybe
Minerva stole it away making space for the
first bird
and its lost flock.

Which make us think:

The supernatural is full on and fierce.

Much evocative and pleasing nonsense follows:

funerals flood us with ourselves –
our memory is now all of you.
In my best mute face I tried to read the
secret recipe for hedgehog pasties now
buried for ever under a glorious
sky

And life is really not so bad:

all in a moonless month
full of fabulous birds and their absence

A little of that humour appears in Alli Warren’s three poems, all on culinary matters. I’ll quote one in its entirety: ‘Some Greater Social Sharing’

with two eyes fixed
on one profile
doing the pre
emptive poke
fetching and carrying
the cake as functionaries
in the hay
in which we are
seized only later
on in perpetuity
we do this daily
we sink our teats
in the sauce
there’s very little
one can say exactly
except to point
in parting what
one does is blink

First posted by Colin Holcombe 8/02/2014 on TextEtc.com blog.