Jay Jeff Jones was born in in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1946. His parents, Nelson and Lila Fay Jones, both hailed from Cherokee ancestry. Raised in and around San Francisco, Jay joined the Hell’s Angels in the early 1960, riding his Harley Davidson around the city. As a teenager, he hung around North Beach, acting with the Mime Troupe, later working as a copy boy for the San Francisco Examiner. Frank Herbert, author of “Dune,” was one of his bosses.
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Jay Jeff Jones, RIP
Playwright, Essayist, Critic, and Such a Fine and True Poet
He died Saturday, May 20, 2023. He was 77. After theater studies and acting with The Mime Troupe in San Francisco, he moved to England, where he mostly lived since. In London he worked for Transatlantic Review, the British Drama League, and Running Man Press — and later edited the quarterly New Yorkshire Writing and co-curated (with Douglas Field) exhibition “OffBeat: Jeff Nuttall and the International Underground” at the John Rylands Library in Manchester, which drew 130,000 visitors. He published poetry, essays, reviews, and fiction in many magazines and anthologies.
Jay Jeff Jones on the American ‘Poets Corner’
It’s unlikely that Sylvia Plath would have picked the graveyard of Heptonstall Church for her last resting place. Early in her marriage to Ted Hughes, she declined the suggestion that they move into some cheap and rambling old manor in the socially depressed Calder Valley where Hughes had spent part of his childhood. Asa Benveniste definitely chose the location of his own grave, having spent the final years of his life in Hebden Bridge, the valley town that adjoins Heptonstall.
‘The artist’s virtual junk stall is open all hours . . .’
![The Moors of Manchester [photo by Jay Jeff Jones, 2018] Click to enlarge.](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Moors-behind-Jays-house-560enh-1-200x200.jpg)
ET IN BOHEMIA EGO — A poem for the ages by Jay Jeff Jones (1946-2023).
Asa Benveniste: Sylvia Plath’s ‘Afterlife’ Neighbor
“If Sylvia Plath would likely not have chosen to be buried in Heptonstall, Asa Benveniste definitely chose the location of his own grave, having spent the final years of his life in Hebden Bridge, the valley town that adjoins Heptonstall.” — Jay Jeff Jones
Celebrating Sylvia Plath
A Poet’s Flame Burns Brighter Than Ever
“It’s a late winter’s afternoon on the top of Cross Hill, with Hardcastle Crags on one side and Colden Valley on the other. Down in their depth of hibernating trees and gritstone slabs, darkness isn’t coming down — it’s rising like a cold damp tide.” So begins Jay Jeff Jones’s uncommonly rich meditation on the poetic afterlife. It arrives nicely timed to an upcoming celebration of Sylvia Plath for what would have been her 90th birthday.
A Body of Work: ‘He could hear it breathing’
The pulse of Cold Turkey Press depends on a publisher* who maintains that well-made limited editions can be more influential than widely disseminated mainstream publications. But it also depends on the dissident poets and artists like Malcolm Ritchie, the late Heathcote Williams, Mark Terrill, the late Thomas Brasch, Jay Jeff Jones, David Erdos, William ‘Cody’ Maher, and others whose work he has chosen to publish.
‘Unnatural Light’ from Cold Turkey Press
‘The eyeballs of an overpaid narcissus
begin to leak all sorts of nothing
and you smell the auric waste
of the languidly famous …’
—Jay Jeff Jones
From Phantom Outlaw Editions
SHADOW WORDS: A Selection of Deformed Sonnets
“Shadow words / that beat like hammers.”
Poetry Comes First
Large Menu from Bite-Sized Books
The first volume in a projected series called The Return to Reason has been released by the British publisher Bite-Sized Books Ltd. The stated aim of the volume, titled ‘The Poem is Part of the Eye,’ is “to draw new readers towards poetry they may not be familiar with or have not previously engaged with at all.”
Heathcote Williams
Uncensored, ‘Advertisement’ for a Supermarket
![Heathcote Williams [Photo: JH, 2013]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/heathcote-williams-photo-copy-200x200.png)
‘The people who run Tesco must be Buddhists / You go in there and things are exactly as they should be / There is nothing that you could possibly want / Bits of telepathic animals neatly shrouded in heat-raised polystyrene / With Magic-Maker gravestones. / Dyed tomato mulch slobbering to itself in lead-lined tubular coffins, / Zilched by monosodium glutomate.’ — Heathcote Williams
Paul Valéry Reminds Us
‘A Poem Is Never Finished, Only Abandoned’
Mine have never been finished either. And so . . . an updated, revised, redesigned, and expanded collection in both hardcover and paperback editions is out now, with a new title: “All That Would Ever After Not Be Said.”
‘The Greatest Piece of Writing’ Kerouac Ever Saw
It’s a 16,000-word letter that Neal Cassady wrote to Jack Kerouac, who said it was his inspiration for On The Road. The letter, written in 1950, went missing and was found in an attic in Oakland, California, in 2011. Now for the first time it is being brought out in full by the London-based publisher Black Spring with an introduction by the noted Beat scholar A. Robert Lee, along with illustrations. I’m betting Lee will tell us if the letter really was the inspiration for On the Road—Kerouac, true to his calling, loved to make things up— and if he really did adopt his prose style from it. The reality is likely more nuanced than the legend.
Bombing the Culture
‘Culture, being the broad effect of art, is rotundly irrational and as such is perpetually operating against the economic workaday structure of society. The economic structure works towards stasis centered around static needs. It is centripetal. Culture forces change centered around changing appetites. It is centrifugal.’ — Jeff Nuttall
Nuttall’s ‘Bomb Culture’ Is Back
When I first read Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, I saw the title two ways — descriptive and prescriptive — “bomb culture” (the kind that made nuclear annihilation possible) and “bomb the culture” (a call for revolution). A half-century later I still see it that way. Far from being bound by its time, Nuttall’s 1968 investigation […]
#MeToo: ‘The No Holes Bard’
A bit of bawdy verse-and-drawing by Heathcote Williams. With thanks to Jay Jeff Jones, who sent it along.
‘Majestically lonely and white . . .’
Now that you’ve had a look at the moody green splendor of the moors near Manchester, England, take a look at the brilliant skyscape near Bordeaux, France (courtesy of our staff), and a favorite poem of theirs. ‘A History of Clouds’ Hans Magnus Enzensberger Appearing as they do, overnight, or out of the blue, they […]