Selected Poems: Stephen Jonas

This selection from the work of one of the most interesting African American writers is long overdue. Though Jonas's work sprang from the Beat movement, the term may not be adequate to suggest his particular gifts or experience. In the mid-1940s, Jonas sidestepped the Black Mountain and New York poetry scenes and settled in Boston, producing a body of writing that is astonishing in its musicality and intellectual breadth. Self-taught and heavily influenced by Pound, Williams and the improvisational qualities of jazz, Jonas, who died in 1970, wrote collages of polyphonic fragments that evinced enormous energy and precision. In ``Exercises for the Ear,'' he wrote, ``i have come to / chew up yr language''; and so he does, ingesting the language of the street and transcribing it (with phonetic spelling) into a rhythmic free verse. The ambitious set of long poems called ``Orgasms/Dominations'' represent a sprawling investigation of everything from street life to the aesthetics of poetry. This latter subject especially dominates his work. For Jonas, true poetry was found in the ear: ``the set-up of a poem / may not always please / the eye; / but the ear can be . . . conducted along / surprising causeways.'' To be led by him is to listen to language at its best--music. (May)