Sarah Burgoyne in Conversation with Jessie Jones
Jessie Jones grew up in the prairies, spent a decade on Vancouver Island, and now lives in Montréal. Her writing has been featured in CV2, filling Station, Lemonhound, Minola Review, PRISM International, The Puritan, Arc, B O D Y, and Poetry London (UK). She has been shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Far Horizons Award, Editor’s Choice in Arc’s 2017 Poem of the Year prize, and first runner-up in PRISM International’s 2015 Poetry Award. Nix, her first chapbook, was published by Desert Pets Press in 2017. She is one of the founders of Literistic and her first poetry collection, The Fool, is out now with icehouse poetry.
This interview was conducted between Sarah Burgoyne and Jessie Jones on April 3, 2021.
Sarah: There are so many questions I would like to ask you about your new collection The Fool which came out this year. The first, is only Fool-adjacent, and it’s how did you sleep last night?
Jessie: I slept erratically and kept twisting myself up in the sheets and blankets. At one point I woke up with my arm behind my back and under my hip and thought, at first, that there was a horrible knot in the mattress. I eventually untwisted myself and got back to sleep after much counting backward from 100.
Sarah: I am glad you mentioned ‘knots’ because that’s going to come into my questions, later on in this interview. So I ask you about sleep because it seems to come up a lot in The Fool--the speaker of these poems seems to have trouble with it, or this desire/drive to “sleep like a regular person” (19), or even “to be like / a regular person” (20) and I wonder what, to you, is a regular person and also is the speaker of these poems the same throughout--is the speaker “The Fool” and why do you think the fool has this desire? Is the fool the antithesis to “the regular”?
Jessie: I have struggled with sleep for most of my adult life, so I might idealize a full night’s sleep more than most. The “regular person” of the poem is called so a bit ironically. In the context of that poem, the “regular” is “regulated”, in sleep, in menstruation, in emotions—has achieved a kind of balance that seems impossible for the speaker at that moment. The title of that poem includes the word “Manifesto,” which always felt important, like staking a claim to some sort of balance that has yet to be achieved but is perpetually worked towards, creating boundaries to operate within.
The speaker isn’t the same throughout the book, or wasn’t meant to be in the beginning. These poems were written independent of a project, or concept (initially at least). But in the end they proved capable of being retrofitted into the different angles or aspects of a person who is trying on all sorts of personalities and interests, chasing that balance by way of accumulating...I’m not sure what. At the time I was writing them I was trying out different interests, different writing styles, trying to define myself a little more concretely, which was fun at times but ultimately a little exhausting. I found it hard to commit to a single self.
Sarah: That seems an appropriate stance for “The Fool” as a figure in the tarot deck--who, from my understanding (which is amateur), is always on the brink, so to speak. What I’ve learned is this card signifies is new beginnings, and new adventure, a sort of innocence and spontaneity but also the potential for idealism or lack of commitment--as you mention “staking a claim” to something yet to be achieved and so on the precipice in a way that can be really exhilarating (if the card is upright) or maybe reckless (if the card is upside-down). Is the tarot card this collection pulled upside-down or right-side-up?
Jessie: Both—that’s why it felt like an appropriate title in the end (and a kind of guiding principle for the poems that were written after the title fell into place). There are poems that possess that exhilaration—there’s this image that I’m thinking of from a Japanese animated film, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, where this woman is in these heavy voluminous robes sort of barreling across the countryside until she’s just a blur of sketch lines, really messy—that’s absolutely at the heart of some of the poems. But that exhilaration is impossible to maintain. It peaks and declines, and there are poems that track the race to the bottom.
Sarah: I’m thinking of the poem in which you write, “Your bare back / winking as wind splits fear / from clothing, clothing from skin / skin from thought until you reach / a speed at which you spill into parts” (43). Is this the exhilarated movement you’re getting at?
Jessie: Yeah, exactly. Actually, both of the moments I was thinking of take place on bikes (though one is moving up a hill and one is moving down). That feeling of wind ripping through your clothing as you bike at top speed is the best encapsulation of that exhilaration for me.
Sarah: I feel like that up and down movement is also symphonic movement, which you reference several times in the book. You write (of birds), “Swarms contracting / like an iris as they rise in a scherzo” (34) in a poem called “Leopold Stokowski is a man of the future”--Stokowski being a conductor famous for the Fantasia soundtrack but also for forgoing the conductor’s baton in lieu of conducting with his bare hands. In the same poem you write “Knowledge is symphonic.” So my question is if knowledge is symphonic, what is its scherzo? Or what is the lively, light, playful movement in knowledge?
Jessie: I can only say what it is for me...but questions like that have an undoubtedly “scherzo” quality to me. They disrupt or cloud or sort of messy up knowledge and then extend it. Playful, seeking questions posed by, well, anyone, really, make the process of thinking much more fun. Like having a clear sense of the world rattled by a little kid asking, “But why??” over and over.
Sarah: I like what you’re saying about “messying up” knowledge as a way to extend it. It makes me think of the possibilities of alternative routes, or a paradoxical view of time--as in time does not just extend by way of extension (in a linear fashion) but can also expand and make itself into new pockets like how when you open a bellow--an old blacksmith’s tool— all of a sudden there’s this new space for air to fill— (I bring up the bellow partly because etymologically the word “fool” connects to bellow)--basically what i’m getting at is time, in your collection, appears as something that can be burrowed into or inflated, or that doesn’t necessarily follow rules. I’m thinking of the poem, “The moment before” which makes me think of time as those eels that live above the salt lake at the bottom of the ocean, and dip into its toxicity as spasm above it in gorgeous contortions--seemingly for the thrill of it. In that poem, which begins with “a flash,” and maintains this “flashing through moments in time” through its duration, “a ragged gasp, a catch, a snap of pressure in the ear, a song by Julie London bubbling through the static,” what type of moment were you getting at? Or are all moments like this if we look closely enough? Can all moments, like the bellow, be inflated? Or is this the Fool’s particular gift, to see time this way?
Jessie: I didn’t know that bellows and fools were etymologically related—is it because they’re both “full of hot air”?
Sarah: I think so. “Inflated with wind” seems to be the connecting idea… but I also think it’s more than just that (and maybe not so derogatory). To inflate is also to inhale, the first breath at the start of an adventure.
Jessie: I like that. That little breath you take to “puff yourself up” before you take a risk. The Fool (in the classic tarot card, at least) is positioned at the edge of a cliff, ready to step willingly into nothingness, which seems the ultimate risk. It requires that you believe that the ground will rise up to meet your feet, like time will continue to move forward, and that one day will follow the next. I was reading St. Augustine’s Confessions around the time I wrote “The moment before” and was thinking a lot about “presentism”—this idea that the past and future are just fictions that allow us to organize chaotic time, which I felt a little strange about. Even now, that idea makes me feel like I’m revolving in a circle—or all the moments of my life are revolving around me, wrapping me up like a maypole. I was also reading, looking at, and thinking a lot about photography, in particular multi-exposure photographs that have the ability to compress time in imagery simply by not moving the film forward to the next frame. The images just layer on top of one another until you have this blur of moments, similar to the notion that before you die your life “flashes before your eyes”. I’m not sure if one is capable of looking at life this way all the time, but I think the Fool has a particular knack for isolating the splendour of a moment, because a Fool loves a beginning. I read this as loving the present and sort of trippingly fawning after the future, without much regard for the past.
Sarah: It seems like what you’re saying is “The Fool” is always a beginner, and to maintain the stance of beginner one has to remain open. I wonder also about the figure of the “no-nonsense Eve” that appears in the poem “Transformative positivity” who is also the figure of the “beginner,” but a beginner who has made a grave error. Is to be a “no-nonsense Eve” to be one who forges ahead despite the error, to also believe that the “ground will rise up to meet your feet” or is the “no-nonsense Eve” the pre-mistake Eve, or do you believe perhaps Eve never actually made a mistake at all? The nonsense then being to deny oneself of knowledge or even just a delicious apple?
Jessie: Well, I love a good piece of fruit, so I understand the draw. By “no-nonsense” I meant unhindered by shame. I’m ambivalent about whether she made a mistake—I love knowledge as much as fruit, so how could one pass up both at once?
Sarah: Hear, hear!
Jessie: You can make a mistake and not let the shame of it drag you down. It’s another instance of the Fool asserting themselves. It’s another opportunity to begin, in innocence, in maturity. The “transformative” part growing past the shame.
Sarah: Is shame a “technicolour killer of confidence” (30)?
Jessie: Absolutely. Nothing worse.
Sarah: I feel like this has been surfacing all along but I want to say it straight: the Fool is a wise “fool” if they’re a fool at all! That is the paradox of the figure of the fool in literature often. Do you agree?
Jessie: Yes! The Fool is out in the world, which means they’re constantly absorbing so much from their environment. I think the “riskiness” of being available, or simply being open, seems to play into the perception of the fool as lacking wisdom. Vulnerability as a fault, or weakness, rather than as a strength. This question made me think of court jesters (the stand up comics of their time) and how much strength it takes and how vulnerable you have to make yourself to try to make people laugh, especially a crowd of strangers.
Sarah: What’s your favourite joke?
Jessie: The past, present, and future walk into a bar… It was tense.
Sarah: That is a great one. A “presentist’s joke”--Augustine would laugh. If you had to have a drink with the past, present or future, who would you pick? Or, the “Perfect continuous future” who you wrote a poem about, playing on the future perfect continuous. What would the “perfect continuous future” be wearing?
Jessie: Definitely not future perfect continuous—so bossy and presumptuous. I think it would look a little Deborah Kerr in the film Black Narcissus— babely nun in a long black cloak.
Sarah: Is the future perfect continuous Catholic? Or an actor pretending to be Catholic?
Jessie: It’s certainly decadent enough to be Catholic.
Sarah: And because it’s perfect it is self-righteous? Is that why the future perfect continuous is a babely nun?
Jessie: Possibly—but I also read weariness in the perfection. Already knowing what someone “will have done” seems like a terrible power to possess.
Sarah: This leads me to a question you ask at the beginning of your book: “Where will we come from?” Not quite future perfect continuous— just plain future I think— as if the future could be plain (according to Walter Benjamin catastrophe is “things going on the way they always have”), but I’d like to ask you your own question, or a question that your book asked me as a reader: “Where will we come from?” Is this a rhetorical question as in it’s more of a statement that makes us pause to consider the future mindfully, or is it dystopian like the setting of “Midnight Sun”-- is the setting of “Midnight Sun”--a place where the lake is dead, “baked as the back / of a cracked clamshell” and where “nothing grew / or revealed meaning” and where “ifs” start to refuse (23), where we will come from? I’m not sure why I connect this question to that poem in particular, perhaps because of their proximity, but is that question a warning? Or a curiosity?
Jessie: It’s not the assured destination—the setting of “Midnight Sun”, I mean. I hope it isn’t where we’ll come from. I’m a little afraid that it might be, but I haven’t lost hope. That question (and the others in that first poem) do feel like they loom over the rest of the book, though. In that sense, that question is both a warning and a call to pause and mindfully consider where we will (want) to come from. Inherent in the question is the belief that there will be a future in which we exist, without a clear sense of whether it’s a place we will want to be.
Sarah: The future perfect desirous feels like a verb tense your book invented.
Jessie: That sounds like the state of mind I exist in all the time. For some reason, it makes me think of spinning one's tires, though, and never progressing because you’re stoned on desire (and desiring perfection). What does it evoke for you?
Sarah: I mean, “stoned on desire” evokes the title of an album I wish I had written in the seventies. But I think for me desire is something I need to cultivate— I think, like you, it’s a state I exist in all the time but it can go dormant because I feel like I need permission to want. Not sure why this is--perhaps the presence of babely nuns in my youth telling me what is permissible to want and shameful to want. It’s more like that desire gets a little clouded like a window on a dusty street and I just need to windex the hell out of it and not procrastinate on my chores. My chore being to remind myself to embrace my desires. (Even this is rife with Protestant work ethic.) There is a certain amount of fear that comes with “being on the brink” or climbing a ladder to a filthy window to shine it up--and this comes up in your book. What interests me in your “Lead ghost” poem (a role I think I would be suitable for after applying mineral sunscreen), is that your list of fears often stumble off their own cliffs--the sentences do not complete themselves and so the “fear of” is left hanging--forcing us as readers to fill in our own fears (and therefore “be read” by the poem), but also I wonder about the decision behind amputating those sentences. Are there phantom limbs to these sentences which all begin “Fear of…” or are the undisclosed fears never disclosed because they were never realized?
Jessie: First off, there is always time for “Stoned on Desire.” I can already see the peachily lit cover.
Secondly, I meant “lead (in “Lead ghost”) as the mineral, not the starring role, which I only realized was a possible misreading, like, a week ago. Inexpertly chosen word! Anyway, the fears in that poem compound and add weight and resistance to the speaker of that poem, but it’s weight and resistance that can’t be seen by anyone else (thankfully and not). So the fears are both not fully realized and perhaps not fully disclosed in their entirety because they auto-generate and contribute to newer, bigger fears until the speaker is crushed by the weight of them. When your mind is racing with worst-case scenarios, they don’t need to complete, they just need to begin—the rest you sort of fill in with “and then I die” or “and then I’m alone” or whatever is the worst thing you can think of in the moment.
Sarah: Yes, and which would be the biggest fear(s) of the beginner on the brink of an adventure.
Jessie: Exactly. Anything that equals failure. And failure to the beginner can express itself in a million ways—it’s as inventive as fear in the fearful mind.
Sarah: I have been thinking of your book in the shape of a dialectic, with a thesis, an antithesis and a synthesis, which might seem very boring I know, but I wonder if the antithesis of the fear of the adventurer at the start of the adventure is encapsulated in the “Self-improvement” poem on page 71. Is the compulsion toward endless self-improvement a way of coping maladaptively with fear? And then is the synthesis (and maybe I’m jumping the gun here) to multiply in the face of that, as the last line of the collection reads “I’ll multiply”?
Jessie: I’m not sure why we feel compelled toward self-improvement, or “self-optimization”, as it’s often called now, but I suspect some part of the compulsion, like many compulsions, lies in a desire to exert control. The speaker in that poem is seeking a fixed, accumulative identity, one that becomes fuller with each accumulation. A “better” person, if we want to connect it to the beginning of this discussion. The fears in “Lead ghost” are the fears at the heart of the desire to self-improve in this poem. The idea of multiplicity, the line the book ends on, is so hopeful to me because it rejects fixedness and allows for many identities, or many identities within a single identity. The “infinity mirror”, the image driving that poem, is that experience of seeing your image stretched and repeated infinitely (by folding two sides of a three-part, medicine cabinet mirror, in my case) until it disappears into darkness. That repetition and the realization that each of those parts can exist discretely in the same person, was exhilarating (there’s that word again). The idea that if you were to cut open a name, the thing that an identity coheres around, all these mini-identities—all the different versions of oneself that you’ve tried on and kept or tried on and discarded—would pour out, was thrilling. I guess what I’m saying is that I love the idea of hoarding identity and finding ways to wear them all at once. Allowing for complexity and multiplicity, rather than the reductive move of simplifying/ “optimizing” one’s life.
Sarah: So in this case, the “dots” which riddle the final poem of the book, “Infinity mirror”--which I think is the same thing as a mise-en-abyme— become like rhinestones on a fabulous garment or beads on a gorgeous necklace— each its own “solitude” that can be worn all at once in a way that is subversive, thrilling and that blows apart the fear/self-optimization binary one can oscillate within. Yes?
Jessie: I love that description, dots as adornment. I wasn’t thinking of them as such when I wrote it, but it does ring true. It was more like those multiple selves were punching their way out, first with one hole then more and more until there was an equal balance of each.
Sarah: So the dot, when you wrote it, was more of an absence of dot--like the single-hole punchers around before duotangs went out of style.
Jessie: Yes, exactly. Punching free of the three-ring binder.
Sarah: Another thing about the dot is that it’s related etymologically (you can tell I love etymology) to the Norwegian word dot which means “lump” or “small knot” and also the Dutch word dot which means "knot,” “small bunch,” or “wisp." Because I have to subsidize my existence as a poetess with teaching English literature to teenagers in Quebec, I have learned that the end of a traditional plot, which we call the resolution usually, in French (and sometimes among pretentious English folks such as myself) is called the dénouement--literally the “untying of the knot.” The dots in “Infinity mirror” which increasingly bespeckle the poem as it goes along, to me, present a sort of refusal to conclude--as in, instead of untying the knot, or providing the dénouement/resolution, you’ve bespattered the poem with tons of knots--in a Lyn Hejinian “Rejection of Closure” way: “What is more dot of more dot of more” (85)--and you also name yourself at the end of the collection: “Solid dot bloody Jess’s row dot row” (91) which reminds me of one of the most ancient forms of poetry: the ghazal, in which the author must refer to themselves in the poem’s final stanza. A ghazal coincidentally is also related to the knot since one of its meanings is “to spin thread or yarn” and also, though maybe this is unrelated, the “wail of a wounded deer.” “Infinity mirror” for me encapsulates all of these features: the plot doesn’t just thicken, it multiplies, the “solitude” the dot is meant to signify which we learn through the Clarice Lispector epigraph which precedes the poem, is not a void but because of its multiplicity is hundreds of “mini-identities,” the wail of the wounded deer, the author’s wail according to the ghazal, is the wail of the desire for more, for the possibility of the impossible, the fulfillment of the beginner’s moment which isn’t having achieved anything exactly but rather, as you write, “creating again again.” Creation is “a symptom of the making” (20), you write, so my final question for you is is the point of writing, the point of multiplying or a means of multiplying, to create again again? What are the ingredients that go into the perfume of again?
Jessie: There is so much here to think through! I love the connection to the ghazal, which is one of the most elegant forms a poem can take. The name of the poet, which is always present in a poem, taking a more concrete form especially struck me. It shouldn’t be there, but how can it not be? The dots are a refusal to conclude, and in fact don’t. They’re still poking their little beaks out at the end. This aligns, for me, with multiplying; it’s continual, it is “creating again again”. Going back to something you were saying earlier about “giving yourself permission to want” I felt that claiming (or claiming by uttering) my name was a way to acknowledge pain or give myself permission to directly express pain and claim it as a part of myself. So, in that sense, the name signals the oncoming “wail”. In perfumery, I suppose the name would be “top note”—the first thing you smell. What comes next is a complex constellation of sometimes volatile molecules that interact in unique ways, and assert themselves and then retreat, and in the end some rough balance of all of it, greatly subdued, is left. Apparently, the single smell of a rose is made up of over 500 aroma molecules, some of which smell like literal death. So the perfume of again, is probably something like that—all the things you want/desire, all the fears of not actualizing them, and the balance of somewhere in between.
Sarah: In the words of a great poet, “A near- / perfect specimen // of death, // which is to say: / continual and colourful. // No one way” (18). Thank you for your brilliant work, Jessie Jones.
Jessie: Thank you for the brilliant, scherzoic questions!
Sarah Burgoyne is an experimental poet. Her second collection, Because the Sun, which thinks with and against Camus’ extensive notebooks and the iconic outlaw film Thelma & Louise, will be published with Coach House Books in April 2021. Her first collection Saint Twin (Mansfield: 2016) was a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize in Poetry (2016), awarded a prize from l'Académie de la vie littéraire (2017) and shortlisted for a Canadian ReLit Award. Other works have appeared in journals across Canada and the U.S., have been featured in scores by American composer J.P. Merz and have appeared with or alongside the visual art of Susanna Barlow, Jamie Macaulay and Joani Tremblay. She currently lives and writes in Montreal.