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  • How dare you? A conversation with JonArno Lawson on nonsense
  • Michael Heyman and JonArno Lawson

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[End Page 72]

JonArno Lawson is the KoKoPryminjet of Arlington Avenue. He has a brick driveway, and a passion for cheaply acquired hand-painted practical-use ceramics. His books are many, though some have been pulped. Many of them contain literary nonsense of one kind or another. He is a fan of sweet potato pierogy — especially those curated on beds of beet-cooked cabbage, as they do at the Blomidon Inn, near the Minas Basin. He’s a faded beauty. His days are numbered, lettered, and coloured by hand. Some books appearing under his soul’s main pseudonym are The Man In The Moon-Fixer’s Mask, Black Stars In A White Night Sky, A Voweller’s Bestiary, Sidewalk Flowers, Enjoy it while it hurts, Down in the Bottom of the Bottom of the Box, and There Devil, Eat That. He has several times been awarded a very fine award — his very favourite award — (the Lion and the Unicorn Award for Excellence in North American Poetry). His wife deserves so much better, and he is the father of three phenomenons and forces to be reckoned with. [End Page 73]

How dare you?

MH:

I mean this most of all, and I shall ask it first. If this interview stopped with this question, I would be sated: How dare you?

JA:

When I was still quite small, I reached my zenith: I was good-looking, immensely strong, incredibly bright — probably the smartest person I knew was me.

I even had access to a very primitive form of magic that allows a person to hover slightly above the ground, and with practice, and a small leap, to travel that way for very short distances – I was only in the trial stages of improving this ability when I saw it could mean big trouble for me in the long run.

Being as smart as I happened to be, I realized that none of my gifts and abilities were going to endear me to anybody, and so I chose to don a disguise of sorts: I put on a lot of weight, started to wear glasses, developed robotic body language and a slow, monotonous way of talking, while biding my time as a bookish introvert.

Six or seven years later, when I finally felt free to throw off my disguise, I discovered that it was only partially possible to do so. Some of my powers had left me almost completely. I even had a little belly I couldn’t get rid of. You can’t imagine how I felt.

But I’m sure you can imagine my delight when I realized that I was still able to invent complicated homonyms, and say entire sentences backwards -and not only when my life depended on it.

My derring-do was intact, and I discovered not a moment too soon that I dared! I gave up everything else to inch my way around the shadow-casting edges of sound – over the bright silences I hovered, taking shorter and shorter leaps over shorter and shorter distances. Finally, I found a way to enter the future from the wrong direction. No one else was going that way, so the road was clear: when, in the end, I faced the Devil’s behind, and took a switch to it, he blushed at my cunning.

Definitions and dongulations

MH:

The poem “An Adventure Begins” in Black Stars In A White Night Sky talks about adventure involving grinning after grimacing, winning after losing, sinning after sanctitude, along with danger, boldness, and light. Is nonsense a kind of adventure?

JA:

Here you are, stuck in your repetitive, swirling self-hatred and self-love, often both at once – it’s awful. Robert Twigger described this (or something like this) in his book Walk as a never-ending talk-show that goes on in your mind. And on that talk show you defend yourself, or attack others, with commercial breaks and guest celebrities and shameful revelations. . .the terrible thing about it is that most of it seems to make sense to us, so...

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