There is a book written in 1982 about a nameless man who “hires” a woman to spend several weeks with him by the sea. While the woman is skilled in sexual matters, he has another motive: he wants to learn to love. “It isn’t a matter of will,” she tells him. A review in the French newspaper Le Monde stated, “the whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to [the author’s] unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning.” The book is entitled Malady of Death, its author, Marguerite Duras.
Jon Leon’s debut collection differs in tone and genre, yet the reverberation from Duras’s novel is echoed, most obviously, in the title of Leon’s work, The Malady of the Century, which traces the sexual and intellectual escapades of an unnamed narrator, and embodies the collective angst and wonder of a generation reared by the Internet and mass media. Like the nouveau roman, Leon writes of banalities and streaks them with disarming clichés. The action is described with cinematic gleam, snapshots in prose which describe sexual and social encounters with a pictorial sophistication often tinged by voyeurism and violence:
DEL RIO
In Chinatown we were wild heart. The dumb sickness of a death. Janácek.
Life was so senseless in the boring time. Mostly I was in a labyrinth of
icicle pills. The sheepish breasts I pressed my cock between. The way it
spurted languidly toward the Tenderloin. I was so crack.
Leon is at once a prolific and penurious. The author of Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta (Content, 2011), The Hot Tub (Mal-O-Mar, 2009), Hit Wave (Kitchen Press, 2008), Alexandra (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008), he also self-published The Artists Editions: 2006-2010, which include a number of limited edition chapbooks. Yet in an 2011 interview in a Swiss magazine, Novembre, he stated that he quit writing. When the interviewer asked him “Can an ex-poet still write poetry?” He answered, “Sure.” Characters, the titles of his previous collections (Hit Wave, Drain You), locations (California, New York, North Carolina) and hotel rooms recur consistently in Leon’s work and generate an aura of autobiography while adding an ephemeral patina to the poems. Yet the works seem only tangentially autobiographical, as if the author is deliberately attempting to create a fictive image of himself through his protagonist by interspersing public and private narratives. This complexity of representation works best in the aptly titled section of the book “Mirage” and the last portion of the collection, “White Girls,” where the narrator describes his experiences in a liberated explosion of brilliant technicolour:
To meet you at the place in the city when we haven’t eaten in many days and are suddenly aware that the light is changing and the world is changing and ever our own faces seem to have changed. Looking at each other looking
in the mirror thinking about how we look when we are looking at each other. Doing nothing because we want to do everything. Like we are in biographies of great artists. Like you just died in my arms tonight. (from “Lisbons”)
Like Duras, Leon’s poems are often narcissistic meditations on erotic love, yet beneath the surface lies a devotion to the female body which borders on objectification. The section “Right Now the Music and the Life Rule” features fifteen prose blocks which mostly begin with a woman’s name and a description: “Kelly’s tits look very natural when she is wearing only a necklace and a heart panty,” “Darla is wearing blue lipstick,” “Mischa Barton is for bebe.” This heated mix of portraits explore aspects of a world increasingly experienced by images. Reading these works reminded me of artists such as Richard Prince or Sanja Ivekovic, who use magazines and photography to dissect conceptions ingrained in society, especially by consumerism and the media. In a similar manner, Leon juxtaposes his gaze(through writing) on photos culled from fashion magazines or the Internet. These poems are not about women; they are about pictures of women and the men who look at them. Yet this does not detract from the sensuality of the writing; the poems often elicit equal repulsion and seduction, in much the same vein as a glossy soft porn full page ad in Purple Magazine:
Anonymous Missoni girl is attractive and looks like Vitti or someone.
Her hair is garage. The ruby backdrop coalesces with the auto vehicles
below my window. Pretty much this one is another 10. She is like
Antonioni at his best and is only wearing one item of clothing...
(from "Right Now the Music and the Life Rule")
Though Leon’s characters are sopping in drug-fueled soirées, champagne and penny stocks, there is an inherent aura of breakability in the men and women, an incessant longing that is often manifested in voyeurism and exaggerating depictions of virility:
Two girls I knew, one a painted and one an obese seductress, began fingering one another in my bedroom the night of the Southcoast Soiree. I had Keystone remove them from the premises. From the boudoir I could hear my name. I allowed them back into the pool party under the condition they perform atop a float in the water for all to view and possibly participate. Several of my distinguished guests penetrated the couple. I stood by and watched with benign curiosity. (from "Hit Wave")
The poems often have the home-alone quality of glorified nostalgia, sometimes switching back and forth between tenses, personas and roles as liquidly as a call girl in costume. The literary manner of these suave, concatenated poems is straightforward; the scenes are like quickies, intense and evanescent. At his best, Leon is an elegant and dirty provocateur; at his worst, like an ad writer for Urban Outfitters. He is skilled in summoning up scenes that could take place in Château Marmont or the Standard Hotel or in anybody’s fantasies: a sultry evening in a tub with five girls, smoking Cubans on the piazza, “driving around in a red car through a bunch of palm trees.” His poems, which massage the lyric form until they become creatures which are difficult to imitate, open up a space in contemporary poetry which caters to the media-fed, fashion-fueled intelligentsia, which to a certain extent, includes us all. The demands of consciousness which Leon places on his readers is high. His fidelity to high fashion and high art is one of the hallmarks of a Twenty-first century artist, contrasting with the narcissism and dazed numbness which dance simultaneously, yet elegantly, on the same page. ~JMB
Jon Leon’s debut collection differs in tone and genre, yet the reverberation from Duras’s novel is echoed, most obviously, in the title of Leon’s work, The Malady of the Century, which traces the sexual and intellectual escapades of an unnamed narrator, and embodies the collective angst and wonder of a generation reared by the Internet and mass media. Like the nouveau roman, Leon writes of banalities and streaks them with disarming clichés. The action is described with cinematic gleam, snapshots in prose which describe sexual and social encounters with a pictorial sophistication often tinged by voyeurism and violence:
DEL RIO
In Chinatown we were wild heart. The dumb sickness of a death. Janácek.
Life was so senseless in the boring time. Mostly I was in a labyrinth of
icicle pills. The sheepish breasts I pressed my cock between. The way it
spurted languidly toward the Tenderloin. I was so crack.
Leon is at once a prolific and penurious. The author of Elizabeth Zoë Lindsay Drink Fanta (Content, 2011), The Hot Tub (Mal-O-Mar, 2009), Hit Wave (Kitchen Press, 2008), Alexandra (Cosa Nostra Editions, 2008), he also self-published The Artists Editions: 2006-2010, which include a number of limited edition chapbooks. Yet in an 2011 interview in a Swiss magazine, Novembre, he stated that he quit writing. When the interviewer asked him “Can an ex-poet still write poetry?” He answered, “Sure.” Characters, the titles of his previous collections (Hit Wave, Drain You), locations (California, New York, North Carolina) and hotel rooms recur consistently in Leon’s work and generate an aura of autobiography while adding an ephemeral patina to the poems. Yet the works seem only tangentially autobiographical, as if the author is deliberately attempting to create a fictive image of himself through his protagonist by interspersing public and private narratives. This complexity of representation works best in the aptly titled section of the book “Mirage” and the last portion of the collection, “White Girls,” where the narrator describes his experiences in a liberated explosion of brilliant technicolour:
To meet you at the place in the city when we haven’t eaten in many days and are suddenly aware that the light is changing and the world is changing and ever our own faces seem to have changed. Looking at each other looking
in the mirror thinking about how we look when we are looking at each other. Doing nothing because we want to do everything. Like we are in biographies of great artists. Like you just died in my arms tonight. (from “Lisbons”)
Like Duras, Leon’s poems are often narcissistic meditations on erotic love, yet beneath the surface lies a devotion to the female body which borders on objectification. The section “Right Now the Music and the Life Rule” features fifteen prose blocks which mostly begin with a woman’s name and a description: “Kelly’s tits look very natural when she is wearing only a necklace and a heart panty,” “Darla is wearing blue lipstick,” “Mischa Barton is for bebe.” This heated mix of portraits explore aspects of a world increasingly experienced by images. Reading these works reminded me of artists such as Richard Prince or Sanja Ivekovic, who use magazines and photography to dissect conceptions ingrained in society, especially by consumerism and the media. In a similar manner, Leon juxtaposes his gaze(through writing) on photos culled from fashion magazines or the Internet. These poems are not about women; they are about pictures of women and the men who look at them. Yet this does not detract from the sensuality of the writing; the poems often elicit equal repulsion and seduction, in much the same vein as a glossy soft porn full page ad in Purple Magazine:
Anonymous Missoni girl is attractive and looks like Vitti or someone.
Her hair is garage. The ruby backdrop coalesces with the auto vehicles
below my window. Pretty much this one is another 10. She is like
Antonioni at his best and is only wearing one item of clothing...
(from "Right Now the Music and the Life Rule")
Though Leon’s characters are sopping in drug-fueled soirées, champagne and penny stocks, there is an inherent aura of breakability in the men and women, an incessant longing that is often manifested in voyeurism and exaggerating depictions of virility:
Two girls I knew, one a painted and one an obese seductress, began fingering one another in my bedroom the night of the Southcoast Soiree. I had Keystone remove them from the premises. From the boudoir I could hear my name. I allowed them back into the pool party under the condition they perform atop a float in the water for all to view and possibly participate. Several of my distinguished guests penetrated the couple. I stood by and watched with benign curiosity. (from "Hit Wave")
The poems often have the home-alone quality of glorified nostalgia, sometimes switching back and forth between tenses, personas and roles as liquidly as a call girl in costume. The literary manner of these suave, concatenated poems is straightforward; the scenes are like quickies, intense and evanescent. At his best, Leon is an elegant and dirty provocateur; at his worst, like an ad writer for Urban Outfitters. He is skilled in summoning up scenes that could take place in Château Marmont or the Standard Hotel or in anybody’s fantasies: a sultry evening in a tub with five girls, smoking Cubans on the piazza, “driving around in a red car through a bunch of palm trees.” His poems, which massage the lyric form until they become creatures which are difficult to imitate, open up a space in contemporary poetry which caters to the media-fed, fashion-fueled intelligentsia, which to a certain extent, includes us all. The demands of consciousness which Leon places on his readers is high. His fidelity to high fashion and high art is one of the hallmarks of a Twenty-first century artist, contrasting with the narcissism and dazed numbness which dance simultaneously, yet elegantly, on the same page. ~JMB
