Stephen Jonas (1921 – February 10, 1970) was an influential if underground figure of the New American Poetry. A gay, African-American poet of self-obscured origins, heavily influenced by Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Charles Olson. The Boston-based Jonas was a pioneer of the serial poem and an erudite mentor to such acknowledged masters as Jack Spicer and John Wieners, even as he lived a shadowy existence among drug addicts, thieves, and hustlers. Jonas became friends with a circle of Boston poets including Jack Spicer, John Wieners, Robin Blaser, and Joe Dunn.
John Wieners befriended Stephen Jonas, from the Beacon Hill gay scene. The mixed-race Jonas was tall and muscular, with a face that could exhibit a range of emotions and feelings from "sympathetic interest to screaming terror". Jonas purposely obscured his origins, telling people he was from New York, but he was born Rufus Jones in Atlanta, Georgia. Living on the back of Beacon Hill with a military disability pension, Jonas was a self-taught poet. He had spent time in New York before moving to Boston. He led a hard scrabble life, with only a disability pension for support, illegally tapping power lines to get electricity and dumpster diving at Haymarker and Quincy Market for food. He was also generous, feeding one and all despite his own poverty, sheltering friends who were homeless, and sharing what little he had.
Wieners met Jack Spicer when he returned from Black Mountain College in 1955. Spicer was working at the Copley Library and skeptical that anyone was writing decent poetry in Boston. But he soon became fascinated by Stephen Jonas' work. In the summer of 1956, this group of poets (most of whom were gay) was living on the back of Beacon Hill where they produced a newsletter devoted to their writing. In September they gave a public reading but only 8 people showed up. Disgusted, Spicer left Boston in November. Once in San Francisco, he published Jonas' poetry and Wieners included one of Spicer's poems in his fist issue of Measure.
In 1957, Jonas became involved in a larceny ring that ordered books and records from mail order clubs using fake names and then sold them. He was arrested and convicted of 47 counts of mail fraud and served four months in the federal prison in Danbury, CT. Released in 1958, he made friends with a group of new poets. Unfortunately, Jonas' mental health, never great, began to deteriorate as he combined prescribed psychiatic medications with street drugs. Yet his fame was spreading and a book of his poetry was published.
As the 1960s drew to a close, Jonas continued to deteriorate. He lost all his teeth and his binges on amphetamines increased. Though he hosted poetry evenings in his apartment, he wrote less and less. In 1968, Jonas declared the Beacon Hill bohemian scene over, full of people merely posing as artists and he believed Prescott Townsend was the last of the old breed. He died on February 10, 1970.
Jonas’s work is available in Selected Poems (1994), edited by Joseph Torra, which contains both “Exercises for Ear” and the set of long poems “Orgasms/Dominations.” Jonas is also one of four poets featured in T.J. Anderson III’s study of jazz poetry, Notes to Make the Sound Come Right: Four Innovators of Jazz Poetry (2004).
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