Wordsworth once contended, in an essay titled "Lyrical Ballads," that he knew a few things about poetry and was kind enough to share them. The cannon has since justified his claims insofar as it authorizes him to have had them. But what he contended was that poetry was essentially:
the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings...recollected in tranquility...(575)
This suggestion, though not the backbone of the poetic institution in the 21st century is, I think, regarded as something of an underlying truth. After all, it's a widely held belief among poets that poems are somewhat trickier or elusive, if not explicitly more difficult, than prose. The concerns of meter, lineation, or rhyme are only the most basic of tools in the 'poet's toolbox' (to steal a phrase from too many creative writing professors to count) and it only gets more complicated from there. So very generally, without being trite, I think it's fair to say that poets cultivate the idea of the inspiration (or "powerful feeling") being just the beginning of their work and the craft (or "recollection in tranquility") being the other and equally significant portion. However, this creates a kind of paradigm of moving from the unformed ("powerful feeling") to the formed ("recollection"). Wordsworth thought of this:
tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. (575)
So essentially, what poets do is to take their inspiration, their feeling and transform it until they get something that feels about right (in poem form.) So the paradigm becomes a little more complex, we're not going from unformed to formed, we're going from unformed to reformed - but the purpose is to create something "kindred" to the original experience, something recognizable and familiar. Something that fits. The poems of Jonathan Papas are often not interested in fitting, they're often not even interested in moving toward being reformed into something tranquil or 'contemplated.' Rather they exist in the space of the unformed, they seek the space of experience - the hardness of it, the rawness of it. In a way, Papas is a reverse alchemist: taking the gold and trying to transmute slush.
The idea here is that Jonathan ("Jon") Papas, is after a "distillation" of a thing, an experience of it, even when that experience isn't entirely accurate. Here I use distillation to mean a poetic and linguistic reduction of an entity, the means by which the entity is reduced is conditional on the purposes for which the entity is being reduced. Basically, he cuts things up in different ways depending on why he's cutting the thing up in the first place. He often places himself firmly in the act of creation, his process is one of perpetual discovery and a concurrently childlike and godlike awe.
In his T Poems, Jon has found a solid medium through which to work his witchery. By cataloging the entire Boston metro system, he creates a world almost unrecognizable from the city on which the poems are based. In his Kendall/MIT poem entitled "KENDALL BAND" he writes:
Galileo: Italian, reformed heretic, believed in the Copernican view of the solar system, lived under the thumb of the inquisition. Superpower: Thunder. Musical manifestation: sheet of metal, shaken.
First adapting a familiar figure into a superhero, the poem's reality is bent. But the poem goes further, it not only describes the superpower that Galileo wields, but then deconstructs it, renders it in behind-the-scenes terms, "Musical manifestation: sheet of metal, shaken." What seems at first magnificent and is given an almost magical tone, is taken apart by the language of the poem and rendered nearly inert. However the "Musical manifestation[s]" of Pythagoras and Kepler are respectively: "metal tubes with warble, slowly gaining pounding momentum" and "an enormous metal ring, with one hammer, pounding nails into passenger's brains. A minor fifth." What superpowers do those descriptions represent? For Pythagoras it's the triangle and for Kepler it's the supernova.
The fucking supernova. We expect to take this seriously perhaps, but Jon is not taking this seriously. He ends the poem just after the musical manifestation of Kepler's mighty bang with the words, "a minor fifth." The distillation here circles around the idea of these scientists as larger than life figures who in the poem have taken on a deified status that in the end is either movie magic ("a metal sheet, shaken") or builds ("slowly gaining pounding momentum") to a disappointing climax ("a minor fifth."). It's typical of one of Jon's poems, the biggest, flashiest creatures don't retain their status for very long and it typifies the wave-like nature of these works. The poems move in unexpected directions, full of energy but careful to avoid cheap thrills. At least, not too cheap. There's a poem riffing on the triteness of Beyonce's lyrics, a linguistic deconstruction of a ubiquitous phrase heard on the Boston T and Walt Whitman's dream of naked white boys.
I cannot recommend reading Jon's work enough. Read it for the craft, read it for the pleasure, for the laughs, for the moments of incomprehensibility or killer wordplay, but first and foremost, read it because I cannot think of another poet who is so firmly rooted in the process of creation. He's on the edge of it now but we should all be moving a little closer to that ledge he's standing on.
-B.
