In the Absence of Language II
How will we say goodbye? You watch film after film and never notice that the music stops one moment and starts the next. I don’t think about it, you say. You turn your head away. A motor car peels through the corner of a cobblestone square; it is a brief affair—we each think the other is behind the wheel.
The patio of a large café. A table in a tea house. How we each arrive at our final destinations is poetry. I am going to talk and bit by bit avert my eyes until you are only a voice at my back; you are shouting.
Mini-interview with Nathanael Jones
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
NJ: In the summer of 2009 I was living, working, and studying in Halifax, Canada. I was a fine arts student and in a bit of a funk creatively but didn’t know it. One morning on the bus to work I was approached by a man who said he had a message from God for me. The message had several parts: a) keep a journal in which you will write everything down, b) stay in school and finish your studies, and c) write poetry. For reasons I can’t quite recall anymore I especially ignored the last part of this prophecy. A bad experience with Pablo Neruda in high school? At any rate, as I progressed though undergraduate studies sketchbooks that previously were filled with life drawings and tags were dominated by writing: first creative nonfiction, then attempts at Ballardian short stories, and finally poetry. The man on the bus was named Mark.
HFR: What are you reading?
NJ: I just finished reading M. NourbeSe Philip’s book-length erasure work Zong! It was long overdue. I really recommend it. She’s a fantastic reader of her own work as well, so like, find her on the internet.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “In the Absence of Language II”?
NJ: Sometime during the early days of the pandemic I was watching Hiroshima, Mon Amour and the first few sentences came to me. In watching the fictional relationship between the film’s protagonists play out I gained access to language I didn’t have before, language capable of helping me describe an old relationship of my own.
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
NJ: I’m currently working on a prose poetry sequence which deals with the black diaspora, specifically the concept of the Black Atlantic, installation art, marine biology, and oceanography.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
NJ: My partner recently sent me an old piece in The Guardian on Bryan Washington where he’s quoted as saying that “Many authors haven’t met poor people and that’s very clear in their writing.” This quote and the article as a whole have stuck with me.
Nathanael Jones is a Canadian writer and artist born in Montreal. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from NSCAD University and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the author of two chapbooks: ATG (HAIR CLUB, 2016) and La Poèsie Caraïbe (Damask Press, 2018). He has exhibited and performed at galleries, venues, and alternative spaces in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., and his work has been published online and in print with Aurochs, DREGINALD, Infinity’s Kitchen, Parallax (Singing Saw Press), Ghost Proposal, Present Tense Pamphlets, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, and Partial Press.
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