by Harvey Lillywhite
A Review of Richard Jones’ 6th Book of Poems
In mid conversation, the phrase, “apropos of nothing,” alerts others that we have something to add, off the subject, pertaining only to itself, or, as the phrase puts it, to “nothing,” which, to our casual listeners, suggests something disconnected with the immediate concerns of the conversation, something we should bracket and, as we see fit, dismiss or acknowledge, perhaps with a laugh or a groan. But of course to a poet, the word nothing is full of artistic value, fraught with teleological or at least phenomenological possibilities.
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, nothing is merely the beginning point for progress, which is good and will ultimately lead to perfection at the end of time. In the Buddhist tradition, nothing is an impossibility, a reification, a trick of dualistic thinking. Buddhism does, however, recognize sunyata, often translated as emptiness. From the standpoint of enlightenment, sunyata is the reality of all worldly existences. From the standpoint of liberation, sunyata is the skillful means that disentangle oneself from defilement and unsatisfactoriness. The realization of sunyata leads one to no attachment, no clinging.
So, this phrase, apropos of nothing, the title of Richard Jones’ sixth collection of poetry from Copper Canyon Press, opens the world for the poet to perform his magic, which, ironically, is conjured from the most mundane, down-to-earth things (an answering machine, an endodontist’s chair, a microwave oven, a spoon, a new pencil, etc.). As Jones’ poems play off concerns about life, grief, and enlightenment, their alchemy summons a mother’s kisses from a used tissue, reveals monarch wings from an empty book, and, throughout, teases a profound, genuine love from daily suffering.
In coaxing a spiritual intimacy from existential separation, the poet fully accepts his place as an English professor (he is Director of the graduate creative writing program at DePaul University in Chicago as well as co-founder and editor of the internationally circulated poetry journal, Poetry East). He is thus well-versed in the works of the past’s great artists, authors and thinkers, steeped in the brother- and sisterhood of imagination—which can in these poems become a kind of benevolent aesthetic Twilight Zone that perhaps only the world of the arts allows—and traveling at the speed of effortless metaphor. Virtually on stage with the poet are the following notables: Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Bashō, Buddha, Blake, God, Yeats, Keats, Goethe, Beethoven, Bellini, Dickens, Shelley, Laurence Sterne, Ovid, Dante, Rilke, Eliot, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Wordsworth, Rumi, Arthur Waley, Rexroth, John Clare, Hāfez, Gibran, Tagore, Neruda, Kierkegaard, Milton, Fuseli, and Brother Lawrence.
While these greats have added fiber to the poet’s bones, the poems are in no way trying to be literary. Jones is adept at creating a window on a world without calling attention to the glass. And the world the poems engage is clearly the everyday world. In fact, more interesting than the cultural giants are the cast of common characters who people the usually short, expertly crafted vignettes that, through misdirection and a kind of poetic prestidigitation, direct us to look in everyday places on “the quest for truth/…the struggle to discover meaning/in a universe men say has no meaning” (from “The Balance”).
We encounter an endodontist and his nurse, an optometrist, people “waiting in line for the number 5 bus” (from “Subwoofer”) and the driver of “a white Chevy Impala [that] rolls to a stop,/ subwoofer pulsing incessant sonic booms/ that announce its kingdom and reign/ over the intersection” (ibid), whose “concentric circles of sound/ …rattle shop windows, drown voices,/ and echo inside the human chest/ like a bully taunting our small/ very quiet hearts” (ibid).
We meet “the beautiful/ women of Xian” (from “The Other Side of the World”), who “comport themselves—/ their faces masks of discretion,/ lean bodies lonely as empty temples,/ their long straight hair—/ natural as rain or moonlight./ And in the hollow/ between their breasts—/ silence—like a green jade necklace/ hidden beneath a cotton dress” (ibid).
We see the poet’s mother, father, and two sons. We hear those who have come to offer flowers and condolences to the poet’s family after his imagined death. There’s a Spanish-speaking window washer. Also, there’s an impoverished village of people in China during World War II, beating a man to death who has stolen some of their food. We see giggling teenagers at a Holocaust Museum. Somewhere in Paris, two people have a conversation (in French?). We confront a short-order cook, a dishwasher, a delivery man, a waitress, a rabbi, a fat woman with a white poodle on her lap, a stranger in a long black coat, the owner of the diner, all arguing the merits of various poets and poems. We see a woman—“Grief gets her up in the morning,/ and death, a little boy,/ takes her by the hand/ and leads her through town” (from “The Eye”). We meet Milton’s two daughters. We’re introduced to a caravan of circus performers who visit the poet in six painted wagons. We also hear someone playing violin from a distant room.
It would seem with all this company that these are very social poems. But they actually are not. Of the forty poems in the collection, thirty of the poems are from the first person point of view. It’s as if most of these poems were staged performances acted by a sympathetic figure you’d find somewhere between an earnest Charlie Chaplin and a devoted Buddhist monk—performances, always endearing and never flamboyant nor self-aggrandizing, that we as an audience are allowed to witness. These are private moments, often deeply self-searching, when the poet is struck, usually in two ways: first, there’s the actual precipitating situation or experience—sometimes humorous and sometimes very serious— then there’s transformation wherein the everyday event becomes an avenue for achieving awareness, often a reverent, unassuming awe, a love that approaches agape—the magician clearly in a state of amazement and wonder at his own ingenuities.
“Tea Ceremony” exemplifies this:
Tea Ceremony
I've set the microwave
to heat water for tea-
green tea with mint,
which, I confess, I take
with sugar and cream.
I know many consider
green tea with cream
and sugar uncivilized,
and that to prepare
tea so unceremoniously,
in a humming microwave,
forgoing ritual,
disparages grace and beauty.
But it's past midnight-
no one is watching.
And I am beginning to understand
the unbearable
goodness of the hour-
tea, lightened by cream
and sweetened by sugar,
an occasion of eternity.
As the poem continues, the poet is
meditating on the desire
to refine my impoverishment,
embrace emptiness,
and rid myself
of the world's dust[.]
This poem demonstrates the irony that arises in many of the poems. Enlightenment, or even a significant sense of meaning in life, we are often lead to believe, is possible only beyond “the world’s dust.” Yet it’s the dust that embodies us. If this is transcendence, it is not separation or removal. The journey is more Jungian—the way through the difficulties, not around them. Just as Jung literally played in a sandbox to regain his sanity after his disturbing meeting with Freud, in these poems, the poet, usually through his own actions, sometimes through the actions of other characters, arrives at something like deliverance through acceptance and surrender.
Emblematic of the poet’s search for meaning and his self-humor is “The Answer,” one of the book’s three sonnets:
The Answer
Tonight, looking for the answer,
I must have killed an hour
flipping through philosophy and poetry books,
every few minutes opening and reading a different title,
I anxiously searched all the places I keep books-
looking in the kitchen, the boys' rooms,
checking the laundry room and workshop,
before going outside finally to the curb
to search through books tossed
in the backseat of the car.
Snow fell straight down in the windless silence.
The keys in my left hand jingled like very small bells.
I stopped and tried to remember
what I'd come into the night looking for.
Another of the sonnets, “Immaculate,” is typical of Jones’ ability to coax from a seemingly meaningless, everyday situation an epiphany:
Immaculate
When I heard God speaking in Spanish,
I turned and saw he was a young laborer
who'd come to wash the office windows.
He must have been working all morning-
small beads of sweat glistened on his brow-
and when he bowed to his bucket of soap,
I noticed his blue shirt, damp from the heat.
He worked quickly-his rag gushing a sudsy
blessing over the glass-and though the world
of my desk is but an arm's length from the window,
he never acknowledged me, but simply went
about his business, soaping the window vigorously,
then running his squeegee swiftly over the glass,
up and down, back and forth, the sign of the cross.
Not only are many of the poems private, but they often betray a poignant sense of loneliness and existential deliverance. In “The Sparrow,” the poet says
I've been finding dead birds
in the grass in front of my house
and by the sidewalk on my way to work.
And I've begun to stop and pick them up, …
holding them as if they were messengers,
as if they might speak.
This echoes the passage in Matthew 10:29-31 where he is told, “Not a single sparrow falls to the ground without your father’s knowledge. . . . Never be afraid then—you are far more valuable than sparrows.” But here the poet is doing what “the father” has seemingly neglected to do. The poet has knowledge of the fallen birds, but he stops to pick them up, perhaps unconvinced that any of us is more valuable than sparrows. In this gesture, the poet is starkly alone.
The poem ends with a reference to silence:
Today, a sparrow in my palm
lay like the still silence
between the merest, the most trifling of thoughts.
I knelt by a tree and the sparrow fell from my fingers
like a gift not mine to carry, like the lightest stones.
This is not a silence that would be found in chapter 10 of Matthew, where the disciples are directed to go out as missionaries to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” and spread the good word, acting “wise as serpents and harmless as doves.” This is spiritual supplication that, instead of invoking God’s help, recognizes life and death as gifts and comes to accept the meaning of these gifts in silence—nothing added, nothing taken away. According to Kierkegaard, there is a difference between knowledge that is not fully integrated, a sort of outward knowledge, and the integrated knowledge, in which, in a sense, there is no difference between body and soul, theory and practice. This moment, the poet kneeling by a tree, is the heart of integrated existential knowledge that comes, when we’re alone, from silent awareness, which is the poet’s gift to carry.
Supporting these supernal themes in all of the poems in Apropos of Nothing, Jones’ poetic technique is masterful without ever calling attention to itself. Though written in free verse, the poems are highly musical. For instance, the phrase, “…his rag gushing a sudsy/ blessing over the glass…” pits the high vowel sounds of “rag” and “glass” against the low vowel sounds of “gushing” and “sudsy.” And the triple guttural “g” consonants mingle with the liquid “l” consonants and the barely sibilant “s” sounds stretched throughout the phrase. This phrase demonstrates Jones’ sensitivity to the physical gesture inherent in each word. Here the “rag gushing a sudsy blessing over the glass” seems to capture the actual movement of the window washer who’s outside hurrying through his work. Jones is expert at matching sound to sense.
In the book’s opening poem, “Heft,” he captures the tactile quality of sounds:
Heft
I hold the words broken bones
in my hand; I hold the words
rib cage, the word heart.
I lift every word
like a stone or a feather.
The poem’s concluding stanza repeats this effort:
Spirit
flits like a tongue of flame,
as insubstantial in the hand
as its brother, death,
which weighs exactly the same as life.
The idea of literally handling words belies the poet’s sensitivity to their sonic bodies, as insubstantial and real as the meaning and sense of significance he’s compelled to uncover. The way the “l” and “f” sounds, for instance, in life are picked up previously in flits and flames stitches the conceit together, animates the word life as if it were on fire, and helps to make this particular almost visionary moment whole.
His lines are usually short, highlighting and putting great pressure on the individual words. His style is “spare,” in every good sense of that term, if not transparent, in keeping with the way Imagists asked poets “to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.” In “The Messages,” complaining that the messages left on his answering machine are so insipid and longing to find messages with “strange revelations” and “sweet epiphanies,” the poet yearns to hear “a soliloquy/ from Thomas Mann/ on the religious fervor/ of those laboring/ on the edge of exhaustion.” To describe such a soliloquy, he picks words carefully: “fierce, obdurate German words/ freighted with what it means/ to renounce all sympathy/ with the waiting abyss.” In “Lorgnette,” the poet wants a lorgnette he can carry for reading instead of the many pairs of glasses he’s worn and lost. He describes how he’s left to read “like a nearsighted novitiate,/ bending low,/ close enough to kiss/ the blue-gold page/ of an illuminated manuscript.”
Such musical effects, short lines, and carefully chosen phrases help to heighten, to make special, the everyday situations of going to the dentist, listening to the answering machine, getting new glasses, or the dozens of other everyday events we witness. But what is most compelling about these poems is the way these common events turn into moments of wisdom. After invoking Blake’s sick rose, the poet is being heavily worked over in the endodontist’s chair in “The First Nobel Truth,” which concludes
the doctor sees I'm plainly suffering,
asks how I am. "I'm burning away
to nothingness." "Good," he says,
"very good." Then he asks if there is pain.
"Yes," I say, "exquisite and clarifying."
The main point, never explicitly divulged, comes naturally from the situation. We know from surrounding poems that this pain and suffering are more than the effects of dentistry. This is, simply put, life. And it’s through this experience that meaning, clarity, comes.
In “Lorgnette,” the humorous premise of a man who wishes to forego regular glasses for a fancy lorgnette, concludes with a visit to the optometrist where the poet will
…sit in the chair in the dark room
reading lines of small letters
projected on the wall.
The doctor will lean close
and swing before my face
the galaxy of his marvelous machine,
clicking lens after lens in front of two wide eyes,
asking,
Is this clear? Is this?
The clarity imagined here is of course more than clear eyesight. It’s the ability, “the holy desire to see,/ to know/ the world God made.”
We see in “The Spoon” the poet’s ultimate vision of what he does in the world. The poem begins matter-of-factly, “Some days I think I need nothing/ more in life than a spoon.” This is a normal spoon at the start of the poem. He says, “With a spoon I can eat oatmeal/ or take the medicine doctors prescribe.” But by poem’s end, he says, “I can dig a tunnel to freedom/ spoonful by spoonful of dirt,/ or waste life catching moonlight/ and flinging it into the blackest night.” Without drama, the night has become the proverbial “dark night of the soul.” And while the poet confronts the night with humor, he catches moonlight (we imagine him making his poems) and flings them into that night.
By the end of the collection, in the prose poem “The Obstacle,” as the poet in his garden is reading Brother Lawrence he “…looked around/ the garden for God to worship in his presence, as Brother Lawrence/ did in France in the monastery four hundred years ago. I put the/book down and stopped praying—Brother Lawrence warned that even prayer could take one away from God.” Against the stray details of the previous 39 poems, of living the English professor’s life with a wife and a couple of sons, the poet seems to overcome the need for transcendence and realize the redemption of simply paying close attention, the transformation wrought by love, and the wonder of what is, apropos of nothing.