THE NOW WAVE: JON LEON AND THE POETRY OF FOREVER
by DAN HOY

 

 

“It is not given to everyone to take a bath in the multitude; to enjoy the crowd is an art; and only that man can gorge himself with vitality, at the expense of the human race, whom, in his cradle, a fairy has inspired with love of disguise and of the mask, with hatred of the home and a passion
for voyaging.”
-- Charles Baudelaire, “Crowds”^[1]

“When I listen to Robert Palmer’s ‘Simply Irresistible’ I know that life is everywhere and the globe will be united. The substance of art is returned to the world in this pinnacle achievement. It was not just Hollywood and Vine who partied a cheer in 1988. It was the entire seven continents uproariously celebrating the sound of a lifetime.”
-- Jon Leon, from Hit Wave^[2]

 

 

In Tract^[3] and Right Now the Music and the Life Rule^[4], two of Jon Leon’s previous chapbooks, Baudelaire’s charged multitude is buggered and blown out into a universal field of rapture. Leon’s entire system of poetics is a traversing of this field, and in Hit Wave, his new chapbook from Kitchen Press, it’s made possible through an ecstatic recognition of the nothingness of which everything is made and the impossibility of anything at all. “My god I’m really here I think to myself.” He grabs hold of the particularities of time so tightly it ruptures, and all the timelessness at its core comes spilling out: “I’m not even sure what year it is sometimes though I do know what decade it is and what’s happening right now and how amazing it is being here a part of this period.”

Leon’s decade in Hit Wave and other works is an 80s thrown hard into the future, a blend of high intensity Wall Street, Miami, and Beverly Hills, but seedier and more glorious, and with a vaguely French vibe. Forever is always right now and right now is forever, and everything feels like cocaine. It’s like hearing the best euro pop song ever for the first time, all the time. The Now Wave. Take the poem “Gang Fire,” from Right Now the Music and the Life Rule:

Asia Argento looks incredibly alluring. The look on her face is like she is in another world. One where perfection and beauty exist only. She is surrounded by 12 inch records and has totally smooth skin and breasts that are barely visible in her Miss Sixty shirt. This shirt is striped with black and red horizontals. Her jeans are very dark and her boots are brown with elevated heels. Basically Asia looks like an alien she is so otherworldly hot. Her hair is framing her face like it is a masterpiece. I am listening to Jens Lekman now.

Or “Alpine Drive”, from his forthcoming book The Hot Tub:

I take a pharmaceutical with a glass of punch. For some reason I’m at a ball. 3 babes in Betsey Johnson walk by. So I bow my head. They don’t recognize me, but I know who they are. I know them from Facebook. I’m thinking net asset value as the dj continues to fuck up. I thought this was an opportunity and now I’m bored. Behind a curtain there’s a wall of pay telephones. I check my pockets and clink the curtains closed. Call a guy named Paul and eat my fist as he tells me the open market is drowning. I almost shit a troy ounce. So I walk back to the bar with my wallet in my colon and sneeze my order to the barkeep. He hands me a glass of something gothic looking. I pay the motherfucker in paper dollars.

The name Paul shows up again as the narrator of “Kasmir”, the long poem that closes out Hit Wave, and it’s hard not to think of this as some kind of nod to the Saint Paul of philosophers like Agamben and Badiou, with his ho nyn kairos (“time of the now”) and proclamation of an event whose universal importance can’t be determined by the situation that led to its occurrence (e.g. Argento’s hair providing the framework yet unable to adequately define the masterpiece of her face, with its fidelity to a beauty and perfection that’s impossible).^[5] Or the Paul-to-come implicit in Rimbaud’s poem “Morning” (from Season in Hell), the founder of a new way of life, if not Christianity: “Where shall we go beyond the shores and the mountains, to salute the birth of the new work, and the new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, and be the first to worship Christmas on Earth?”^[6]

Leon’s Paul owns two nightclubs on the beach and rides around in a dune buggy and private helicopter, and he’s audacious enough to answer Rimbaud’s call by establishing a system of worship somewhere beyond the shores of high fashion, political rupture, and the rapturous excess of capital:

Basically I’m Paul. And I run The Embassy and the newer venture Kasmir. They are nighttime establishments in a place that could be anywhere. Wherever they are it’s warm there all the time and the sun shines mostly and there’s a lot of peace in the air. I’m thinking about all this stuff. What it means. I think I understand which is why I made the clubs. I mean, the establishments. The Center. Other than this nothing matters to me.

Paul shares Whitman’s cosmic exuberance and autoeroticism, and, like Whitman, will act like a total fuckhead if it feels right.^[7] “Kasmir is illegally full,” and likewise divine excess spills out of him, lashing out and overtaking everything in the vicinity: “I feel like going on a sick ego trip so I tell 5 people in line they have to leave now.” He’s also audacious enough to cross universal subjectivity with the exclusivity of initiates, tempered by an honesty easily mistaken for ironic naiveté: “This is not a chic place. It is a private world, inhabited by only the most advanced persons of the elite age.” 

Leon takes these kinds of risks because he understands what Wallace Stevens meant by “It Must Give Pleasure” better than Stevens.^[8] Kasmir is both nightclub and poem, and a similar fusion of avant poet and decadent entrepreneur occurs explicitly in the text: “I am the author of Kasmir. It is my highest grossing art.” Like the poem, the nightclub acts as a virtual space in which life is harnessed and amplified, obliterating any context or concern for a world outside it.

When I imagine Kasmir as I did before it was an actual building or whatever it is. Whatever an old word for a magnificent building is. When I imagine that looking up at Kasmir and I see the throng and what I’ve made of them and how they needed me to make it of them and Kasmir becomes more than that grand. It becomes more than so many blurred apparitions in unison. I’m inside Kasmir it becomes plaster it becomes my spirit. I walk to my pad and board my Sikorsky. I activate the radar sea search. I glide at top speed just inches from the waves breaking along the shore just yards from Kasmir and The Embassy.

This is an apostolic subjectivity laid bare, and a poem written as if it has no relation to other poems. “I don’t know anything about nightclubbing. Kasmir is really modeled after something else. It’s not a club at all to me. It’s just me doing whatever it takes to touch me.” What Leon understands, better than anybody else alive, is that poetry is pure forever; and a poem is whatever it takes, even if, like Rimbaud, it takes abandoning poetry forever to pull it off.

 

 

 

POST-SCRIPT ON THE NOW WAVE

 

The Now Wave comes across as a cosmic, technopop sensibility, polysexual and open-armed but vicious in temperament and energy, and powered by an ungodly current of subjective and systemic violence. This violence manifests as violation and rupture, rather than mere transgression, and is akin to the divine violence traced recently by Žižek through Benjamin and others, which erupts out of nowhere and is a means without end, biblical in scope and ferocity—yet a belief in belief itself, or truth, not salvation, e.g. Robespierre’s speech “On the Trial of the King” in which he demands the execution of Louis XVI:

People do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.^[9]

The Wave has no lineage or point of origin (poetic or otherwise), only sparks along the way, and it tends to eschew meditative fence-sitting in favor of immediacy and an almost paranoiac fear of writing poems that are interesting and smart but otherwise completely irreconcilable with life as life. Its contours are most evident in poets only loosely affiliated with each other, like Leon, Lara Glenum, Ben Lerner, Ariana Reines, Katie Degentesh and others.  It’s not a movement but an energy percolating everywhere. It’s not against anything. It’s for forever.