Jones’ poetry, What the Welsh and Chinese
Have in Common, won the North Carolina
Poetry Chapbook Award.
In 1993, Greene gave birth to son
Tucker, SunSITE continued its rise and
Jones, never relinquishing his grandmother’s influence on his rich inner life,
earned his MFA in poetry. Greene earned
her doctorate three years later, which
prompted a brief move to the University
of Virginia in 1996. But UVA didn’t take;
Greene realized Jones’ career was in
Chapel Hill, and they returned — Jones to
his old job as a lecturer and the director of
SunSITE, and Greene for part-time legal
research. (She would later serve two terms
on the Chapel Hill Town Council, 2003-
11, making affordable housing and the
homeless the benchmarks of her tenure.)
Jones still writes and publishes his work
— most recently as part of an anthology
titled The Best American Erotic Poems:
1800-Present.
“Of course, my poem was neither
American, erotic nor from the 1800s to
the present,” he points out.
But the poem, a translated work from
14th-century Welsh poet Dafydd ap
Gwilym, does do something Jones has
loved ever since that triple-register apology
he made back in fifth grade: It takes an
apparent curse poem about a body part and
turns it into lines of praise. It takes something established, and makes it modern. It
is a mashup on multiple levels. It is, as
Judd Knott might say, a Paul Jonesism.
“Computer science and poetry are
exactly the same,” Jones says. “It’s patterns
and forms applied in some way for some
sort of effect. And for me, it’s looking for
parts and influences and then bringing
them together in some new way. Or tak-
ing two opposing ideas and putting them
together. It’s how streaming radio hap-
pened — we took a conferencing tool, put
a radio signal in and turned it into a broad-
casting medium.”
Jones has brought that remix theory to
his classes as well, introducing a reading-
and writing-free course to a group of jour-
nalism students. Instead of studying books
or papers, they studied video presentations
from global experts — TED talks, for
example — and created video responses to
them. Other times, Jones asked the students
to share their thoughts using an online ani-
mation program called Xtranormal, which
enables the user to create movies and assign
dialogue to two or more cartoon figures.
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