Poetry
Ode to Civics
Recorded during the time that the Anacostia Community Museum In Washington DC featured Woodson in its celebration during Jazz Appreciation and National Poetry Month in 2024
Key in the song of life
A collection of Jon Woodsons poems made by his friends and family for Christmas 2023
Text copywrite 2020, 2021, 202
The odes by Pablo Neruda constitute a new poetic form that like the sonnet can be explored endlessly and experimented with expansively.
Jon Woodson's Irregular Odes seamlessly weave seemingly different subject matter together (e.g., ancestry, neutrinos, cookies, civics).
Inspired by Umberto Crenca's "Divine Providence" series of Providence, Rhode Island street scenes, Jon Woodson's “Providence Sonnets, 1-33, The Persecutions” venture far beyond literal descriptions (ekphrasis). The sonnets shuffle history, anecdote, art, literature, and philosophy, like a pack of Tarot cards laid out to depict the past, present, and future in a kaleidoscope of simultaneous images and voices.
Jon Woodson’s Worry Dolls is a motley assemblage of poems centered on the striving of those with inferior feelings to be superior—and the attendant anxiety produced by these efforts. The poems range from list poems to pantoums. The techniques include parody, hyperbole, and absurdity and the effect is largely comic and satiric. Worry dolls are the anxiety-reducing artifacts of a folk culture. They work as well as these poems do in allowing an outlet for the expression of the irrational.
Demon Bowl, also known as an incantation bowl, devil-trap bowl, or magic bowl, is a form of protective magic. Produced in the Middle East during the late antiquity from 6th to 8th century AD, particularly in Upper Mesopotamia and Syria, the bowls were usually inscribed in a spiral, beginning from the rim and moving toward the center. The ancient bowls were made of terra-cotta, a porous, low-fired clay. Most are inscribed in the Aramaic languages. The bowls were buried face down and were meant to capture demons. They were commonly placed under the threshold, courtyards, in the corner of the homes of the recently deceased and in cemeteries. The bowls survived because they were buried.My demon bowls are stoneware, wheel-thrown pottery. They are lead-free, chip-resistant, utilitarian kitchen ware, suitable for either daily use or decoration. They follow traditional designs in being decorated with images of the demon Lilith, a biblical figure, bound in chains. The inscriptions are excerpts from contemporary poems by Jon Woodson.