JAN WESLEY — The Poet as an Unself-conscious, Luminous Presence
Following the recent news of Fred Voss’s death, I can barely summon myself from sorrow to report yet another grievous loss in the Los Angeles poetry community. Jam Wesley’s death was first reported by Mariano Zaro, who posted a photograph of them together in Barcelona in 2023.
I recall that I first met Jan when she was part of a quartet of poets who were organizing a reading series in the mid-1990s in the Santa Monica/Venice area. She was the “host” for an evening during which I was the featured poet with Ellen Sander.
Hyperdisc 1997
Jan had two volumes of poetry published, each by well-respected presses: WHAT BOOKS and MAIN STREET RAG. In assembling the manuscripts for those collections, she first sent them out to magazines such as the Iowa Review, and the acceptance of her poems by those editors (which included a Pushcart Prize nomination) demonstrated that she had put the lessons learned in getting an MFA to good use. The influence of her fellow poets in Los Angeles, however, proved to be decisive in helping her mature beyond the fundamentals that academic training provided. You can listen to how her work attained a fully resonant edginess in a reading she gave in 2023 on Harry Northup’s Poetry Hour:
Along with Mariano Zaro, Jan was a member of the Venice Collective, which included several other poets associated with either WHAT BOOKS or Cahuenga Press. You can find an anthology featuring the poems of the Venice Collective in “A SHARED CONDITION,” which is also posted on Beyond Baroque’s YouTube site.
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ONLY SO MUCH: poems by Jan Wesley (published by WHAT BOOKS)
Praise for ONLY SO MUCH:
Jan Wesley’s superb new collection of poems, Only So Much, reminds us that every book of memory is first a book of loss. With extraordinary candor-and a raw tenderness-these poems chart the emotional valences of an individual life at odds with both those false expectations and the urgent hopes of a passage from adolescence to mature adulthood. Always, memory inscribed by loss struggles with the desire for a pure present. The title of this luminous book measures how much we’re able to give to the loved ones in our lives as well as how much, from this wounding world itself, we can take. -David St. John
Entering into Only So Much is not unlike stepping into an iconic American river in which we are “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” In this gorgeous book, Jan Wesley quests and questions, following currents upstream in a long line that carries her as water does. Her subjects are memory, the body, loss, childhood, aging, and the slow movement toward reconciliation. These poems are nets that memory weaves on water. They glisten. And you cannot turn your eyes away.-Marsha de la O
Starting with the beautiful opening phrase “the light handles me like water” to the “sultry wives smok[ing] thin cigars” to “the drawn-out years of thirst and grief”, we know we’re in the deft hands of a virtuoso poet and thinker. With these poems, Wesley earns her right to enchant and caution us that “it is habit to send the canary in first”. It is on these wings that Only So Much soars. Don’t get left behind.-Lynne Thompson, City of Los Angeles Poet Laureate
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Jam had one of the warmest smiles that Linda and I ever remember receiving from another person. Her passionate feel for the flow of the life-force, in fact, seemed italicized by a smile that wasn’t meant for any camera but the memories of those who shared her abundant devotion to the realities of the Imagination. O my friends, I can’t quite believe I will never see that smile again, except in memory.
About Bill Mohr