“I think heed evokes hand and brings us back to the previous touch… A sort of respect, a sort of holding that is touching. Which a musician understands. You hold the note to heed the sound which happens between you and the instrument.” This is a message Jo Ianni wrote me over Instagram in April of 2024. We were discussing a short poem I’d written, which closed, “what will / will soon yet / touch // as we touch / bed / between / heed.” He suggested that I switch the last two lines, doubling the touch: “heed / between.” We began messaging a few months before, when I stumbled upon his chapbook from 2022, inside inside inside (Apt. 9 Press), and we quickly found an affinity for each other’s work, sharing many influences, namely Larry Eigner. An artist who works with poetry, Jo lives and writes in Toronto—I remember stalking his profile and finding a clip of him performing what I want to call a score of voice, where it seemed he was reading from a text with all but the consonants dropped. He rarely submits his work to journals and magazines, so I feel lucky to have been able to publish three of his poems in the second volume of my audiozine SUDS: one reading was recorded in a park surrounded by squirrels—“They make a good audience,” he says. “But they are impressionable, and they startle easy...”

 

His comments on the sensorial meanings of “heed” are classic Jo and offer, I think, a gentle hand to hold as one reads his latest chapbook, Fat Luck and Fuzzy Song (Apt 9). Collecting work back to 2021, this highly playful, while also intensely humane chap turns the poem, and by its extension the book, into a sculptural object of perception, sounding with the force of an artist who truly feels language in his body.

 

At its core, Fat Luck and Fuzzy Song contains a poetics of proximity: of a poet’s attention to sensorial experiences within and between bodies (human and non-human) and an outward landscape, and of the poet as medium or clairvoyant of speech that traces the movement of human perception. “I am all knuckles,” Jo writes mid-way through the chapbook, calling our attention to one place on the body where bone pushes closest to the skin, to the surface of the body—“A light of line drawn across the room,” he continues. Like the revelatory event that is the poem, the body exists vulnerably at the intersection of the internal “I” and the environment that “I” is taken to through repeated generative interactions reaching beyond the senses through language.

 

This ecopoetic effort to resituate the self in the body and its environments, shared with other bodies, is not to the same end as New American poetry’s lyrical search for meaning in the so-called everyday—which implies a divorce between humans and nature—but a fusion with and internalization of the instability of the everyday. And it is in the fracturing of forms (bodily and literary) that Jo’s poems lend to the creation of new ecosystems where there are none: “each day / in spectacular failure / oblivious and inciteful / the world ends is / and agains.” Or as he writes playfully in a later poem titled “no ifs,” where phonetic arrangement spawns an intimate microculture of life:

 

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Vibrations—or better yet, disturbances—define most any of the encounters in Fat Luck and Fuzzy Song. Calling attention to an unsettled world, the book centers on objects or bodies that have been destabilized: “electric / wriggling / worm,” “rippled ed / ge,” “clinking / wobble,” “pulsing ant,” “colour twitch,” “shaky cart wheel,” “an equation / shaking shaking.” Even “fuzzy song” evokes the hard clipped signal of a distorted instrument’s waveform in a song. Jo is drawn to these images because their strangeness shakes them loose (literally) from the fixity of their forms. Mesmerized, he is also destabilized, and in turn produces the fragmented poetic forms we are experiencing their subjects through. Words break across the page, letters, sounds trickle down, atomized, at once obscuring and revealing meanings, all of which are resonances Jo delights in.

 

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It’s in this sense that Jo feels language, as if it were entangled somewhere between the forces of gravity and motion. The spaces that the poems take up on the page emerge as material sites of his connection to other earthly forms, equals in a network of actors of transformation in which “disturbances / bruise.” Here the act of the poem is redefined as an act of embodiment. Even the most abstract, disassociative moments in the collection bear the impression of the flesh-and-blood poet feeling the words on his lips. For instance, a poem titled “brief lives” begins, “flesh / eccentricities / guesswork // next itch / next / animal dream.” The physical resonances of language are the parts of language that we are most vulnerable to, which, for Jo, is evidence of a world that we are capable of communing with and finding harmony with. Our “itch” for phonemic sequence is as much a desire for harmony as it is for a place in the natural world, an “animal dream.” If we are able to join this poet in intimate sonic union through the page, what is stopping us from doing so with nature?

 

When Jo writes, “Trust the possible possible tomorrow,” he evokes an entropic coupling of desire and uncertainty. He jostles us, as his poems have been jostled, and turns us to a future where language and its sensorial potentialities are waiting. Such language is only possible, though, if we give up control; if we let language act upon our bodies in ways we didn’t know it could. By letting language in, we can at last just feel: “empty / self empty / words / empty empty / empty.” I am reminded of Sonic Meditations by experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, which leads subjects through concentrated experiences of sound, sometimes releasing words from their conceptual forms into purely sonic objects:

 

Choose one word. Dwell silently on this word. When you are ready, explore every sound in this work extremely slowly, repeatedly. Gradually, imperceptibly bring the word up to normal speed, then continue until you are repeating the word as fast as possible.

Continue at top speed until "it stops."

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—Pauline Oliveros, “One Word,” Sonic Meditations (Baltimore, MD: Smith Publications, 1974)

 

I can’t help but think of Jo’s work as a somatic practice of spoken song reflecting back a world that is a wilderness of form and voice beyond the artist’s control. The result, he insists—the poem—is not of the poet’s doing, but of all that leads continuously to the moment of experience; his opening lines: “Fat Luck / Night after night / a bigger impression.”

 

In the wake of reading Fat Luck and Fuzzy Song is a meditation on the limitations of language through the limitations of the senses, not the other way around. It is as if the reaches of language that Jo takes us to are also very reaches of his own body: “I’m digging I’m / digging I’m / digging / away / in this body.” Yet when he reaches the end of his journey inward, he at last turns outward, accepting the limitations of his experience—“I was born / inside out.” The chapbook ends when a tree “shakes / it’s yellow leaves,” one more vibration to call us back to the world from which our experience of ourselves originates. To use language is to be taken to and fro. Jo shows us that language has rounded edges and that if we take the time to heed it, the world may just respond. “Trust the possible possible tomorrow.”​​​

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