No Vibrato Hard Transcendence, Jon Cone, above/ground press, 2026, $6.00
There’s a strand running through Jon Cone’s No Vibrato Hard Transcendence of engaging with other poets, with a tradition of his own making. These poets include Emily Dickinson, William Stafford, Jack Gilbert, James Wright and Jean Valentine, so it’s a specifically American lineage. His Dickinson poem, which has a title that’s too long to type out in full here, is the nearest thing he comes to direct imitation:
The strain- the painOther poems are less directly acts of homage. ‘Throat Singing, for William Stafford’ takes Stafford’s ‘Traveling through the Dark’ and turns it into an account of Cone’s own encounter with a dead deer, one which, though it ends similarly to Stafford’s, represents a very different kind of moral dilemma to the older poet’s. But you need to read it yourself, I won’t spoil it for you.
Of pale souls who wear
Winding sheets of rain –
Bent under the turning year –
Later in the pamphlet, we meet ‘MEMO: To Be Considered Later in the Cool of the Aleph Inn’, where the conversation with the poet it responds to is of a different order. The piece opens with a prose introduction that starts:
You utter maroon, you Billy Wordsworth! Not lonely as a cloud. No way. Clouds are pack animals.The reference is clear enough, and the criticism to the point. The rest of the text consists of a list of potential alternative similes that Billy might have used, or maybe not. Here are a few:
Wander lonely as a process serverAny of which would have made the original poem more interesting and accurate.
Wander lonely as the wildfire particulate
Wander lonely as the thick-headed levitator
Wander lonely as a receipt tossed by the curb
Wander lonely as the final horn
But I don’t wish to give the impression that Cone only writes this kind of response poems. There are a range of more or less short pieces that deal with the poet’s direct experience of the world, often with pointed wit:
POEMThere are also a number of very fine prose poems, including the extraordinary ‘Father Gustav, S.J., Recalls Seeing the Jackson Pollock Exhibit for the First Time at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1967)’. Here’s an extract from around about the middle; ideally I’d give you the whole thing, but it would be better if you got the booklet and read it that way:
I visit the gun shop
to look at death poems
And thereby distractions were prevented from entering the cell of my consciousness as if I had shut a massive iron door. I saw a forest become a thick bank of cloud transform into the surface of a sea. I saw a strange bird with long beak and legs, wings outstretched, as if dancing. I saw snakes extended through thick clouds, and black creatures with bodies smudged and weird tongues where faces would be. I saw a large flatfish with the face of a woman, and a series of ghostly apparitions floating upon bandages stained red and green and yellow. Tall grasses marched toward me going this way and that. Eight tall black trunks seemed to lead a furious parade. The colors were feverish, dirty, dull. Gray and black, orange and yellow, and beige. I did not know how to calibrate the noise the sounds made as I looked at them with my eyes.Cone is a fascinating writer who, in his own quiet way, is setting about the task of redefining what an individual poetic voice might be like. Go read him.
