real live poet

Cea // (Constantine Jones) is an interdisciplinary Greek-American thingmaker raised in Tennessee & housed in Brooklyn. Their practice is collaborative in nature & rooted at the intersections of HIV/AIDS futurity / archival as cultural care-work / poetry as catalyst for social instigation.

Poetry—one of our oldest communal practices—exists as a language art just as much as a visual & sonic art, one with the power to preserve & transmit culture across generations while also mobilizing culture within the present moment. To that end, we seek new currents including & beyond the printed-book technology via which to transmit the stuff of poetry back into the world.

bio & headshot

[ a note on the spelling / pronunciation of “Cea”—every time my friends would shorthand my name to just the first letter, I wouldn’t hear a capital “C”, but rather the word “sea”, hence this visual chimera of “Cea” pronounced like the body of water. The English language doesn’t want this combination of letters to produce that sound alone, although the combination is also embedded within the words “ocean” & “cetaceans” (marine mammals such as whales) again with a different sound more reminiscent of the sound “she”. Since English is the ultimate colonizer’s language, however, it feels important to force it into new sonic structures as often as possible, to disrupt its supposed sense of order even in small ways, maybe all the moreso for trans/genderqueer & colonized peoples who have long been doing the work of re-mixing their oppressors’ tongues. ]

stories & noise
a process statement

Growing up, we never said “home”—we always just called it “the House.” I’ve come to think of all my work in spatial terms, regardless of medium. Each installation, a new room grafted on to my Cloud House—a floating home, always just overhead. It follows wherever I go & there is room enough for everyone I meet. A ruin in progress, thriving in the flux. So stories & noise then is both coordinates & intention—the spaceless cross-streets of my floating home & an honest assessment of the work I aim to offer.

In a sense I’ve always been building. No training in youth except necessity, no materials except everything I wished were right there. Imagination made of me a ghost architect, putting into place the things I needed. Specifically, this started with fantasy as a genre. Large fields & legends big enough to hold so much & so much more. Earth that was (as it is) as alive as I was—Earth that was transmutable, that could be touched & called upon & communed with & commanded. Plainly, a land that registered my little feet across its back, a land that said I feel you there.

The Hobbit begins with an incredibly significant distinction:

In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

That a hole could be all these things at once & also none of them was an important early lesson for me about construction & about language & about home. Bag End of Hobbiton in the Shire of Middle-Earth was my first proof that things could be arranged however you liked for them to be, in a way that was also respectful of & congruent with the surrounding stuff it was made from. The hobbits didn't level the sea of hills & knolls to build their homes upon—they turned the hills into their homes. They lived with & within their earth.

Growing up, we had "the House." Yes, we had food to eat & gas in a car that could take us places. There were people in other cities ready to receive us should ever we call. I write this as much for you to understand as for me to remember—because why, then, this pressing need for my own materials at so young an age when all was taken care of. I could shave twelve pages off right here & say simply: "I was raised in a loving but conservative Greek-Orthodox household in the American South as a queer person without the language I needed" & hope that something in there makes sense to you. But I could also elaborate, at least for a moment, to say it's really this last part of my summation that matters most—without the language I needed. Language to do what—to define what. I did not have queer, at least not from a loving tongue. I did not have trans or nonbinary or genderfluid. I was lucky to have picked up androgynous somewhere but even that wasn't enough. I definitely had faggot. I didn't have queen or butch or fairies or fruits & so I had to go looking. I didn't have HIV—until, of course, I did.

The day of my diagnosis I was late meeting a friend at a diner on 14th St. & 7th Ave. in NYC that has since shuttered (RIP Good Stuff). We walked along the High Line after eggs & meandered through the veins of rusted scaffold & construction mesh, plastic netting & neon orange zip-ties. We watched the wind going through a big loose sheet of the stuff breathing against a building's side & tried to come up with a word for it. I went to Greece again the following summer—my first trip since my grandmother's passing. I went to see her house, a sunbleached assemblage of plaster & splinter. There was a lemon tree in the courtyard & beautiful bushes out back & feral cats taking moldy bread & milk from the saucer. I expect it's sunk back into the ground by now.

Maybe all this talk is nothing but stories & noise. But there are versions out there that we still have time to meet. Versions we can still avoid on the street. Versions & versions of an us not as houses in a neighborhood, but as rooms in One Big House, each of us unique in our structures & purposes. I've said before that a poem can be a document of hope. The same way a photograph can be a document of presence. If to document something is less about trying to preserve it & more about trying to understand it, then this is my hope not just for my own but for all poetry. Because we cannot care for what we do not notice. We will not love what we have failed to consider. If my poems could sprout girders & hold sturdy foundation, if they could say simply in words, I LOVE___, the rest is up to the reader & to me when I put down the pen in favor of some other, more generous tool.

8 . 11 . 21

Cea (Constantine Jones)