Published by Fractal Edge Press
Perfect Bound, 70 pages
5½ by 8½ inches 2004
ISBN# 0-9722553-2-X
$15.00
Praise for Decades of Rehearsal
Decades of Rehearsal is a lyrical book of wisdom. Wayne Jones journeys through the theater of humanity – the blood, the steel, the skin of it all – so we may find the stuff we are made of and become active in the drama of our existence. He traverses the worlds of page and stage, and his words are prayers because – aloud or in silence – they help the soul transcend.
Robert Karimi – Artistic Director, The Guild Complex, Chicago
Wayne Allen Jones has the expertise of someone who studied English at Harvard, though his work is as fresh as someone who studied poetry in the saloons of Chicago… [He} grabs hold of dangerous subjects and handles them as confidently as a mason handling bricks.
C.J. Laity – founder of Chicagopoetry.com
About Wayne Allen Jones
Wayne Allen Jones, was born in Arizona and has degrees from Harvard, U of Michigan, and Roosevelt Univ. He won two Hopwood Awards at Michigan, earned several research grants to pursue his research on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s writings, and taught English at Harvard, UI-C, Univ. of Miami, and U of N H – Manchester. However, he financed his family and his kid’s education by working at: DEC, Compaq, and HP.
In Chicago, Wayne founded the poetry-publishing company, fractalEDGEpress, while he studied and taught clinical psychology at Roosevelt. fractalEDGEpress published 24 books in two years, and 7 in years that followed. Wayne devoted the last thirteen years of his working career to clinical psychotherapy for under-served people in Metro Chicago.
He is now retired and living in Lansing, Michigan, and pursing his passion for poetry. He became an active member of the 83 year old organization, Poets Club of Chicago, and currently serves as President, , enjoying the intensely vital Lansing poetry scene, compiling his collected works, trying to decide on how to distribute his e-book: 25 Unexplainable Black-and-White Photographs Explained, and coming back to Chicago as frequently as possible.
He is the author of three books:
Decades if Rehearsal,
Stone Works
and
The A-Poems (with Bernard McCabe)
Contents
Part I
Finding a Voice
Steel
Rope
Giving Guns
The Burden of the Cross
Part II
Canyon of the Wind
The Problem with Plain Rivers
Signal at the Crossing
A Comfortable Guitar
Show Time
Part III
The Search for Picture Rock
Part IV
Winter
Spring
Summer
Fall
Part V
Finding the Devil’s Fork
Whence the Darkness
Deer Flies
A Thin Line
Sample Poems
Finding A Voice
He slumped in his wooden chair
with a pained face like matzah
sculpted for a day of atonement:
the famous novelist, Barnard Malamud,
in residence at Kirkland House.
Gulping air as through new to gills
or flopping about outside my tank,
I had enough breath to ask him
what he thought of my poem
about waking up at night,
listening to my pee in the pot,
feeling the pin prick of insignificance,
wondering if I knew enough
to know how lost I was or how long
I would stay that way.
And through the wool
of his indulgence, his oblige,
he said something important.
The light was terrible,
the shadows deep.
I want to fold in a musty odor
of dank books – to add another sense
and break the run
of visual reference.
In harmony with the dark setting,
he half-turned from his desk,
one hand still on the typewriter.
I kept my eyes on his face,
averted from a thieving glance
at real pose in progress.
I did not look for signs of the turns,
loops, erasures, and waddings
his words were party to.
He dismissed my lines gently.
(Fitzgerald, my teachers had argued,
archly, that the sound was not
that of a drilling, but he fell shy
of an alternate phrase, just saying
to give it more time – more thought)
Malamud said, “you have to find
your own voice. That’s the most
important thing – to set yourself
apart – to create your audience.”
I felt my time expire, the bad taste
of staying too long thick on my tongue
Long or short, I had taken too many
minutes from his heady work, talking not
about the noteless page he returned
Between the throbs of embarrassment,
I felt angered by his suffering pose,
his lack of avuncular humor,
the itch inside the hair shirt of his duty,
the price for a tern in that dark cell
enduring, with grace or not, the blows
of bad writing by cloistered boys.
I walked out wincing with the sting
of his abrupt closure, of his critique
by threadbare nostrum,
however true, too obvious even for me –
a worn point so dull it has worked
its way slowly from my ear
through my brain to my heart –
after decades of rehearsal.
A Thin Line
Not even moisture on the membrane –
slime for the squeamish –
keeps the slug alive
on the short trip across
the sunlit, concrete stairs in July.
It always seems that something delicate –
the slender waist of a wasp,
dust on the wings of a moth,
the soft spot on a baby’s head –
holds the secret, marks the line
between Life and Death,
between intention and refuse.
It takes only a subtle rearrangement –
a hairline gap, front to back,
between the jaw and the neck –
to end all speech
stop a beating heart,
and call in decay.
Most times it takes even less.
It all works one minute,
trauma be damned, and then,
as though by some late hour
settlement of a labor contract,
the monitor sounds, goes flat line,
and the doctors have to decide
to take extraordinary measures,
or not – defibrillate, crack the chest,
massage the ventricles, shock the heart,
pull the reluctant soul back from the light.
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