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  • Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet, Seaborn Jones, was the featured speaker at the Convocation at Georgia Southwestern State University last week. He also gave readings of his poetry and signed his books later at Lake Blackshear Regional Library. Keven Gilbert

    Poet Seaborn Jones speaks at GSW
February 11, 2013

Poet Seaborn Jones speaks at GSW

Keven Gilbert The Americus Times-Recorder

AMERICUS — Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet Seaborn Jones, kind and understated in his demeanor, led a special convocation held last week on the campus of Georgia Southwestern State University.

Jones read poems from his various published works, including the Pulitzer-nominated work, “Going Farther into the Woods than the Woods Go,” which was published in 2012, by Mercer University Press.

He began by reading “Orange,” a poem that the poet says he always starts with at reading events. The poem served as an introduction to Jones’ surrealistic world where humor and emotion meet.

He told the late-morning audience of his brief stint at Mercer University and his subsequent enlistment in the U.S. Marine Corps.

“My parents were dead set against me being a poet. They couldn’t even bear it,” Jones said. “They were going to take me out of school; they were going to have me put in jail; they were going to have me put in a mental institution... so, I joined the Marines.”

It was in the Marine Corps where Jones, the poet, got his first encouragement. He told his “crazy” drill instructor at Parris Island, S.C., that he wanted to be a poet. Two drill instructors responded by examining Jones as if he were a newly discovered species with curiosity and apprehension.

Jones said he legitimately feared the tattooed men, who carried sticks and  whose only aim seemed to be terrifying the new recruits. He explained that the first encounter with the drill instructors and his audacity of telling them that he wanted to be a poet, proved to be constructive. For the remaining three months at Parris Island, Jones was to work on a poem every Saturday night, while his comrades wrote letters  home.

A poet has got to have a poem,” the drill instructor told Jones, “or he’ll go crazy and if he goes crazy, I’ll go crazy and if I go crazy I’ll kill everybody in here.”

“Those were my first words of encouragement,” Jones quipped.

Another humorous story prefaced a poem called “The Workshop,” in which Jones encountered a “60-pound bird dog that was determined to have its way with me or die.”

He read other works, “My Life is a Getaway Car in Reverse,” “Telephoning Ginsberg,” “Dog,” “First Word,” and title poem from his latest work.” That poem, “Going Farther into the Woods Than the Woods Go,” is a variation on a common theme of literature — “the peaceable kingdom,” he explained. In the poem the narrator considers “joining the trees.”

Jones delivered a final poem, “I Feel So Good I’m Changing My Name To James Brown,” and fielded a few audience questions. After the convocation, Jones was available to sign copies of his new book.

Jones has been published in the “New York Quarterly,” “Southern Poetry Review,” “River Styx,” “Chattahoochee Review,” “Poetry New Zealand,” “Wilshire Review” and numerous other journals including translations of his work for European publications.

His poems have been anthologized in “80 on the 80s,” “Scorched Hands," “National Poetry Contest Winners, 1993,” and in “Java Monkey Speaks Anthology #3” (2008).

Jones has received three International Merit Awards from “Atlanta Review.” He has authored six books, including his Pulitzer-nominated work. His title, “X-Ray Movies,” received the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry (1998). He has been the recipient of the Violet Reed Haas Poetry Prize and was selected as the 1991 Alan Collins Scholar in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

A native of Macon, Jones continues to speak and read extensively throughout the United States.

 

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