Review: “Jones Very”, by Michael D. Snediker.
(Ornithopter Press, 2024.), pp. 95.
Michael D. Snediker has taken as the title of this 2024 poetry collection the name of an intriguing yet lesser-known Transcendentalist, Jones Very (1813-1880): a poet, essayist, and Greek tutor who, during a period of intense religiosity, proclaimed himself the “second coming” and was subsequently fired from Harvard and briefly committed to McLean Asylum for the Insane. Snediker’s choice is compelling, though at no point in Jones Very are we given any clues as to what the connection between these poems and this minor historical figure might be.
Professor of English at the University of Houston, Snediker is a poet/scholar whose interests in American history and literary theory routinely influence his poetry. The title of his previous volume of verse, The New York Editions, took its name from a 1907-9 reissue of Henry James’s work. In both that collection and in Jones Very we are served up epigraphs, literary allusions, and an entire quasi-academic apparatus. Somewhat amusingly, Jones Very’s “Notes” has its own epigraph, from Gerard Manley Hopkins: “I do not believe school is from schola viz. σχολή, but the Teuton word meaning assemblage, collection, as shoal, a school of whales shells (in a school of form).” The Greek σχολή derives from the Proto-Indo-European *seǵʰ-, “to hold.” Rather than holding things together, then, this array or “assemblage” of references, and the way the book formally contains them, keeps things heterogeneous, allowing Snediker to handle the facts of his training and profession without turning Jones Very into a school project.
In addition to staging this intertextual dialogue, Jones Very takes us on a voyage through natural, aesthetic, and cognitive environments, each teeming with unusual ideas and sensations. Sometimes we observe wildlife, as in “Open Hand,” where we find “A cherry tree, an elk- / like elm bending its antlered / head to a stream // in Attica.” Other times, like in “Hovering Tendency,” we go “Into the damask,” a lustrous fabric, “btwn button holes of / bellwether health & the feedbag / of its cautionary tale.” Still other times, we are in the pink folds of a “brain.” Snediker asks in “The Near Continuum,” “What pearl in this pest of brain / would dream such / green // twig formalism / more than / once[?]” With references to Very, Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Henry David Thoreau, as well as a “Shaker chair,” “pilgrims,” the Scantic River, Locust Valley, and Chappaquiddick Island, these poems seem rooted in New England; but then Victor Hugo, Saint Jerome, and Fragonard will rear their heads, or we will run into “Byzantine / scrivening” and “Flemish star oil,” and it becomes clear that in the world of Snediker’s poetics, time and space operate differently.
These swerves between continents and centuries exemplify how Jones Very is fraught with the beauty of the wrong turn, or as Snediker puts it, “amorous detour[s] sent further astream.” In these poems, errancy—the condition of being off course, astray, or lost—becomes a kind of materia poetica. In “Concord & Merrimack,” “errancies” are “appease[d],” as Snediker describes how “Five eggs on the sill & little wells dug but never filled / appease the retiring bell’s pink errancies.” In “Two Kinds of Care,” meanwhile, he evokes the figure of an “errorist,” following a prohibition of “eclogues”: “There will be no more eclogues today. Listless seaweed errorist & pillow diary.” And in “Another Gnomic Departure,” he refers to his own “error”: “For whom I wear this indigo of restless. My emerald dynamo of error.”
In other poems, Jones Very mentions an “erratum of arrows,” “bursts of mishap,” and “the red array / of accident that was the work.” Snediker elaborates on the role that errancy plays in the collection at the end of “Strega Nona”:
I wasn’t always meanwhile made of wood.
I stole down like snow in
common water.The error now is all
I own buthow the creasing
floods away,
the bluecrow bar of
our mouths.
The enjambment of “all / I own” emphasizes Snediker’s surprising suggestion that “The error” is a thing to be possessed, rather than a mere embarrassment to suffer. Such references to “errancies,” an “errorist,” “error,” an “erratum,” “mishap,” and “accident,” suggest—to borrow language from Snediker’s chapter on Hart Crane in Queer Optimism (2009)—a “spoor of intent, an entry into meaning, within poems which otherwise seem unabatingly opaque.” With each reference, “it seems all the more evident” that Snediker “is up to something.”
A key to Jones Very lies in the fact that the word “error” is not simply a synonym for “mistake.” From the Latin errāre, “to wander,” an “error” can also refer to mental or physical meandering. “Error” can mean, as the OED notes, a “wandering of the feelings,” or the “action of roaming or wandering; hence a devious or winding course, a roving, winding.” Alfred, Lord Tennyson, for instance, writes of “The damsel’s headlong error thro’ the wood” in Gareth and Lynette (1872). One thinks of the journeys of Jones Very—the speaker’s winding path through Attica, “the damask,” and “this pest of brain[.]”
This older sense of errancy sheds light on the playful, powerful disjunction that often makes Jones Very seem, as Snediker says of Crane’s poetry, “unabatingly opaque.” We often feel lost in these poems, roaming through our own uncertainty. What does Snediker mean when he describes “how the creasing / floods away, / the blue // crow bar of / our mouths”? I don’t entirely know, to be frank—but I think that’s okay. Snediker invites us to wander, ramble, and rove through a land of words and images, rather than hunt around for any clear propositions. The point is to enjoy the transformation of the chirping “blue // crow” into a handy “blue // crow bar,” and then into the peculiarly abstract “blue // crow bar of / our mouths.”
Snediker may look to Jones Very as an exemplary poet-as-errorist: committed to his own vision, but considered “mad” by the society he inhabited. “Virtue shall find in genius her erring, though innocent child,” wrote Very in an 1839 essay on Shakespeare, “and genius shall follow in love her maternal guidance.” That combination of qualities, “erring” and “innocent,” aptly characterizes Jones Very itself. Snediker refuses legibility, not to confuse or frustrate us, but because he is interested in exploring how we can use language as a musical instrument, rather than simply as a tool for delivering information. Jones Very is a kind of jazz, and as Duke Ellington said of jazz, “when it sounds good, it is good.”