Jon Stone

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Biographical note:  Jon Stone was born in Derby and currently lives in Whitechapel. He's the co-creator of pocket poetry journal Fuselit and micro-anthology publishers Sidekick Books. He was highly commended in the National Poetry Competition 2009, the same month his debut pamphlet, Scarecrows (Happenstance), was released.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844717453
ISBN:  9781844717453
Author:  Jon Stone
Title:  School of Forgery
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Apr-12
Extent:  96pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  11 mm
Weight:  144 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 12.99
Price:  USD 23.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation: A PBS Recommendation. What is the school of forgery? It's what teaches us fakery and invention in equal measure, the means by which we transform ourselves and our world. With its knock-offs, travesties, alt-pop golems, stolen text and tall stories, this book celebrates the singularly human compulsion to ‘make things up'.

Main description:  A PBS Recommendation. The school of forgery is a singular institution, whose principal teachings concern the volatile relationship between fakery and invention. Both you and I are its alumni, and so is the bandit boiled alive in a cauldron of oil. So are the perpetrators of hoaxes, the writers of pornographic dōjinshi, counterfeiters in love with their teachers and teens who dress up as birds to fight tyranny. Its professors proliferate. Its graduates excel in every field. Its campus is the world.

This book, part prospectus and part fanzine, is made from stolen or borrowed parts – centos and collages, half-rhymes and homophonics, translations and travesties. Equally inspired by manga luminaries like Naoki Urasawa, animation and adventure stories as it is by earlier poets, the natural world and human history, School of Forgery postulates the poem as knock-off, as reclaimed scrap, and most of all as through-and-through fabrication.

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Excerpt from book:  

And why do you want to work for the Secret Service?

So that I can show up at your door,
soaked as Shelley, face half-masked in blood,
seven months from now, when things get dire.
I’ll ask to use the phone, then make a thud
– semi wet sack, semi fumbled spud —
collapsing as I lunge for the receiver
and sink at once into a storm-rich fever.

And in my fever, half-formed sentences
in such a swirl of languages will spill,
like diamonds from a slit purse or the slurs
of water from an overburdened pail
or tortured faucet, from my mouth’s bashed grill.
And some of it will be intelligence.
And some of it you’ll think makes too much sense.

Since some of it will be just what you dreamt
of us, our future, dog-drunk at your post —
our long weekends abroad, the early Klimt
in a palace in a town near Bucharest,
muralling the film-projector-blessed
Sala de Teatru, where we pause
for half a reel of Rashomon, half of Jaws.

Then at a Czech zoo, watching otters stuff
their semi-feline mouths, one munching on
half a crayfish while the unmunched half
weakly plays piano upside down,
its jelly oozing silver in the sun.
And somewhere in that jelly — vital organs.
And somewhere in my babble, talk of dragons.

In seven days, I’ll finally come round.
Not knowing your bed or room, I’ll try to bolt
but you being there, you’ll intercept mid-bound
and down I’ll go, like something shoddily built.
You’ll tumble with me and we two will melt
into a single entity, half urgent
messenger of night, half secret agent.

Unpublished endorsement:  Jon Stone writes angry, beautiful poems which access parts of your mind you didn’t know you had.

Luke Kennard

Previous review quote:  A poetic style that swaggers through a number of different personae and time periods.

Poetry London

Previous review quote:  Stone is well-read, keen of ear and a very, very fine technician, but what wins me over is his divine crankiness.

Marcia Menter
Sphinx