MFA @ FLA
Friskily Bogus Introductions
Suzanne: A Study in Two Parts
Part I – Memories
Yes, Suzanne has many. Some go back to her home in Philadelphia, and some go back even further to her hunting and gathering days, to her scavenging days. And further even. Suzanne on the plains of Pennsylvania, dressed in fur, bringing down elk, separating other people’s wheat from their chaff. Suzanne in the Ice Ages, taking pictures of glaciers with her seal-skin camera. Don’t we all go back that far, some minnowed part of ourselves traveling up time’s uterine canal? That’s what most of us would like to believe. But we don’t know how old Suzanne is for the simple reason that she won’t tell us. She could be twenty by now, twenty-one. She could be a dog’s age, a reverend’s. We don’t know. We just know that she’s come to Florida for her MFA: her Masters of Fine Arts, her Masters of Finding Artists, her Masters of Flattening A Cockroach that she Found on the Nape of her Neck Early this Semester. Ageless Master Suzanne. Our fond memories of Suzanne Warren don’t go back to the Ice Ages, nor do they return to Nomadic Pennsylvania. We never attended any of her famous Eatings- with-Friends in Philly, incidentally one of the country’s most overweight cities. Why is Philly one of the overweight cities? Because the food’s good? “No,” Suzanne tells us. “It’s because people eat with friends. They eat their friends’ food. Also, groups are more likely to order appetizers.” She wanted to know why people in our Masters of F’ed-Up Appetite didn’t eat together more regularly. No one answered; we just sat there starving. We share none of these Philly memories with her. Before she entered Florida like a mixture of the grandmother and the Misfit, she was merely a zealous e-mailer, shooting rapid-fire questionnaires and demographic surveys into our monitor- fried retinas. She was Scared Suzanne, prospective tenant of the South. What was in store for her here? The endangered, yet still dangerous, Florida Panther? The Ku Klux Fiction Writer? Spanish moss drooping from trees to suck up her hair? No, just Padgett Powell. What have we seen so far of Suzanne? One evening while walking through the Duck Pond neighborhood with a friend, Suzanne pointed ahead to a toilet bowl in one of the front yards. The house owners had upgraded their back nine. As Suzanne and her friend neared the spectacle she identified the toilet seat to be one of the soft kind. Her friend then made some remark about having a soft seat in his own bathroom; he regarded it as a technological advance in gluteal ergonomics. For Suzanne, however, soft seats weren’t a matter of scientific progress, rather they were a mystical node. “Sitting on one of those seats,” she said, “is like sitting on someone else’s butt. An upside-down person.” In this moment, Suzanne was revealed to her friend. While here Suzanne has proved to be a most intrepid writer. Journeying last month into the sixty-some-degree Ichetucknee Spring water, she became harnessed in a compulsive breast stroke for a quarter of an hour, but emerged refreshed. She has thrown darts in bars, been on romantic walks, written about men and women foraging for sustenance in grocery stores. Once, during a lull in an otherwise sedate house party, she found some Mr. Bubble in the bathroom and, perhaps with the instincts of an approval-seeking pet (or more likely for reasons as secret as her age), she brought it out onto the porch where the others sat. It was a hit, and still sits there today. Mr. Bubble on the porch. Why?
Part II – Essence
Who is Suzanne Warren? Born and raised in Philadelphia, she attended Bryn Mawr College from which she graduated with a BA in English. She has worked as a waitress, as a freelance film and video critic, and as a publications assistant for a scientific journal. She is single and has neither pets nor car. Rather, she has a washer and dryer, plenty of toeless shoes, an upside-down-butt-woman sense of humor, and much support from her friends here who admire her and who are increasingly convinced of her talent. Please welcome Suzanne Warren.
– Peter Grimes, MFA 2003
Chris Jones
When the members of this year’s incoming class decided to come to the University of Florida to pursue their Masters of Fine Arts degrees, each of us was assigned a “buddy” from among the rising second-year students, to help guide us through the transition. My buddy was Chris Jones. He was the first person I met when I came here, and he was tremendously helpful in answering my questions about all aspects of life here at UF. You may find it surprising, then, when I say that I don’t know Chris Jones at all. I’m not sure that any of us does.
We know Accumulation Jones. We know Map-Maker Jones. We know Teeth Title Jones and Green Bus Jones, Unstressed Jones and Six-Shooter Jones, Felix Culpa, Cat-tail, and Catamite Jones. We are aware of that mysterious figure, CIM Jones, and of the wily Swamp Hole Jones. His poems come to us only under these many pseudonyms.
Chris’s is a coruscating brilliance that can’t be contained by one name; thus, the many pseudonyms by which we know his poetry. But what we are only now starting to realize is that the Jones figure has a resonance, a cultural and historical penetrance, in a realm larger than contemporary poetry. Few people realize, for example, that the early American religious poet Jones Very was just another nom de plume for Chris Jones. (Thankfully, he has left his fundamentalist tendencies behind, though between you and me he did once slip up by founding Bob Jones University. We can forgive him, though, because of all the good he did as the liberal labor organizer Mother Jones.)
As Inigo Jones, he was famous for his painting and for developing what became known as the English Classical style of architecture. He also made a more light-hearted contribution to the arts as Chuck Jones, the animation director for Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes. Two of the finest actors of modern Hollywood, Tommy Lee Jones and James Earl Jones, are in fact Chris Jones. And he was also a figure who inspired art: as Casey Jones, the runaway locomotive engineer, he was immortalized in folk ballads and featured in the famous song by the Grateful Dead. He was Fielding’s Tom Jones, the foundling, and the Tom Jones who sang “It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone.”
He has always been fond of football, and liked to play Defensive End. He made his contribution at this position first to the LA Rams, where in the late fifties he invented the sack, and later to the Dallas Cowboys as Ed “Too-Tall” Jones, who sat out the ‘79 season to pursue a boxing career. (He resurfaced in the late 1980s as Roy Jones Jr, compiling a record of 48 wins, 1 loss, and 38 knockouts.)
There is new speculation that only Chris’s humility has kept us from knowing an Ezra Jones, F. Scott Jones, T.S. Jones, Jones Madox Jones, Jones Carlos Jones. It is believed that he humbly asked John Berryman to truncate his name from the numerous references to Mr. Bones Jones in the Dream Songs. However, we tend to dismiss theories that he was the Leroi Jones who became Amiri Baraka. We vehemently deny reports that he is talk-show host Jenny Jones or cult leader Jim Jones. Yet we are sure that he was both the John Paul Jones who said “I have not yet begun to fight,” battling at sea during the American revolution, and the John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. He was also Jimmy Paige Jones, Robert Plant Jones, and John Bonham Jones.
This could go on for quite some time, and bizarre as it all seems, none of it should surprise us; for we now know that Chris Jones is superhuman. His father, the Intergalactic Emperor Jones, brought him to earth from the planet Arakis, where the younger Jones once looked at the moon and asked to be named for one of the craters on its face, and they called him Mouadh’ Jones after it. We stand in awe of him; we can see that he will change the face of American poetry. And how can this be? Because he is the Kwisnatz Haderach Jones. He is a new kind of man: Homo jones poeticus. He is Christopher Ian McKenzie Jones.
– Jon Stern, MFA 2004