Field Notes: A Sound Work by Nathanael Jones
+1 (A Prose Poem)
You realize you are nostalgic for the way we used to market the present moment back to ourselves for profit. This statement is grafted onto that same present whenever a less than obvious conflict of interest opens up the pavement. We break ground unaware of the way a body assumes the shape of a spade. Legs like weeds, our heads firmly rooted in the sand. It is a conflict where space-time tugs at the body through the most needy of our orifices: eyes, ears, nose, and mouth, begging. In begging the abstraction would drag the body along, an aging parent. Come, this is the way. Remember? Before there were music videos or phonographs this struggle played out like a drunken duet within the confines of a single, corporeal causeway of forgetting. The ground we walk on.
Author’s Note:
“Field Notes +1” is centred around recordings of vocal improvisations made in my apartment while listening to music and watching television, especially the British crime-drama Prime Suspect. Throughout the piece different ‘private performances’ can be heard over the ambient sounds in my living space, creating a call and response dynamic where the documentation method is skewed to favour my own voice. For the listener, dialogue and soundtrack music pop up in the margins of the recordings. The body struggles to find meaning outside of semantics; which is to say, the body again proves it is a language we are becoming increasingly divorced from, a riddle, a cipher we try to solve (or ignore) in our mediated lives. A prose poem dealing with these and other related themes accompanies the sound piece.”
Photo (c) Daniel Mattison
Bio of Nathanael Jones:
Born in Montreal, I hold degrees from NSCAD University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I am the author of the full-length poetry collection Aqueous (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2024) and three chapbooks, ATG (HAIR CLUB, 2016), La Poésie Caraïbe (Damask Press, 2018), and Category Five Hurricane Alexa (Gordon Hill Press, 2025). My work has been exhibited and performed across North America and the United Kingdom, and has been published in DREGINALD, Ghost Proposal, Aurochs, Heavy Feather Review, TIMBER, Action, Spectacle, and Poetry Magazine. Website: https://linktr.ee/NathanaelJones.
Banner by Robert Frede Kenter (an excerpt of Nathanael Jones Process author statement) (c) 2026
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