Foto por Sam Kanga / Handout
DANIEL JONES
Daniel Jones nació en Canadá, en el distrito obrero de Hamilton, en 1959. En 1977 se trasladó a Toronto para estudiar en la universidad y fue merecedor de dos premios Norma Epstein en poesía antes de abandonar sus estudios y convertirse en escritor y editor. Su única colección de poemas, The Brave Never Write Poetry (1985), del que provienen los poemas aquí incluidos, apareció cuando su autor contaba apenas con 26 años de edad. Jones fue colaborador de varias publicaciones canadienses como Piranha, What!, y Paragraph, de la cual fue editor en jefe. Escribió las novelas Obsessions: A Novel in Parts (1992), y la póstuma 1978 (1998), sobre el fin de la escena punk en Toronto.
Daniel Jones se suicidó el 13 de febrero de 1994, a la edad de 33 años, dejó atrás una colección publicada de poesía, una novela publicada, y un puñado de pliegos. Su legado, sin embargo, todavía estaba siendo escrito. Un libro de historias enlazadas, The People One Knows, se publicó poco después de su muerte, mientras que su novela de 1978 se publicó póstumamente en 1998. Estos libros, y todo lo demás que Jones escribió, con el tiempo se agotó, y estaba en peligro de ser olvidado.
Estas versiones están a cargo del poeta costarricense G.A. Chaves.
http://circulodepoesia.com/2017/03/poesia-canadiense-daniel-jones/
Los valientes nunca escriben poesía
Los valientes toman un tranvía a sus trabajos
temprano en la mañana, tienen accidentes de tránsito,
roban bancos. Los valientes tienen hijos, relaciones,
hipotecas. Los valientes nunca escriben estas cosas
en sus cuadernos. Los valientes mueren & quedan
muertos
Hay que tener cojones para ver televisión,
arreglarse el cabello, hacer una barbacoa. Hay que tener cojones
para volarse la fábrica de bombas de Canadá & declararse culpable
arriesgando veinticinco años
Josef Brodsky estuvo en el exilio por su poesía & ahora él
vive en la tierra de los valientes. Ahí a la gente
le gusta su poesía. Pero los valientes no la leen &
en Moscú hay gente haciendo cola en las calles
para comprar comida. Hay que tener cojones para conocer algo de felicidad
& no escribir un poema al respecto
& solo en mi habitación
clamo ahora a alguien, a quien sea. Deme alguien
la fortaleza para ser & no cuestionar el ser. Alguien
deme la fortaleza para no asomarme a los cafés &
a las bibliotecas. Deme alguien la fortaleza para no enviar solicitudes
al Consejo Canadiense para las Artes. Alguien
deme la fortaleza para no escribir poesía
Pero nada. Nadie. Las calles no han
reventado. Los tranvías pasan. El reloj se ha
movido otra pulgada
Ernesto Cardenal no escribirá poemas mientras
los EE.UU. hagan guerra en su país. Esto lo leo
en la revista Playboy. Al rato miro la imagen
de una mujer desnuda, sus piernas abiertas sobre
el desplegable & comprendo, mientras corre el semen por mi mano,
que ella nunca escribiría poesía
Es primavera en Toronto. Estoy enamorado.
Mejor calidad de vida gracias a la química
Toronto ya empezaba a cansarme,
me sentía asediado, aburrido,
tal vez hasta homicida. Fui a ver
a un loquero
“¿Y como qué sería
el problema?”, me preguntó
“Bueno”, dije yo,
“la cosa es esta: toda la gente que conozco parece
escribir poesía. Están en todo lado,
me sofocan, no se imagina lo
terrible que es eso”.
El loquero se recostó
en su silla & cerró sus ojos. Luego
de un rato se sacudió & empezó a murmurar:
“Um…
paranoia esquizofrénica… stelazine”.
Firmó
una prescripción, me dio la mano & volvió
a su cuaderno. Al levantarme para irme
lo miré de reojo: estaba escribiendo un poema.
Corrí a la farmacia.
Fui a un café
un par de semanas después. Había
unas treinta personas sentadas, bebiendo
té herbal, con cara de aburridas, dobladas sobre
cuadernos & maletines. Una a una fueron
hasta el micrófono & leyeron de sus trozos
de papel:
la mujer de un tipo lo había dejado & él
no podía encontrar a otra;
alguien más había experimentado
algún tipo de iluminación existencial mientras
olía una bellota;
una mujer rememoró,
con lágrimas en sus ojos, la muerte
de su abuela.
Todo fue muy hermoso. Yo
me sentía de maravilla. Entoné una suave alabanza
a la stelazine. No había ni un poeta entre el gentío.
Un breve amorío
Salí de la cama & me fui a
orinar. Al regreso, ella estaba en
su escritorio, escribiendo en un diario. Al
rato, ella fue a orinar. Abrí
su diario:
31 de diciembre de 1984:
Sexo con Jones. Fue razonablemente
atento. Bastante agradable.
Nos fumamos un cigarrillo & nos dormimos,
espalda contra espalda. Por la mañana me fui a
casa & escribí este poema.
Chamba
Tomé una chamba temporal con la Liga
Canadiense de Poetas & la noche antes
de empezar pedí veinte dólares prestados
deducibles de mi salario & salí a beber
Al día siguiente desperté enfermo &
llegué una hora tarde. Mi escritorio estaba repleto de
libros que debía empacar & enviar
por correo. Me fume un par de cigarrillos
& leí algunos de los libros. La gente no paraba
de moverse de aquí para allá hablando de becas para artistas
fechas de entrega & problemas varios con la
fotocopiadora. Yo encendí otro cigarrillo &
empecé a empacar los libros. Luego de
armar como tres paquetes bajé para ir
a la oficina de correos. De camino entré
a una taberna y pedí una chela. Me la bajé
rápido & pedí dos más
Cuando volví
a la oficina, el teléfono estaba sonando. Lo
contesté: un poeta de la U de Montreal
no iba a poder venir a una lectura:
‘no se preocupe,’ le
dije, ‘de por sí nadie iba a asistir’
Sonó otra vez el teléfono: que ella había escrito
un libro de poesía & quería saber qué
hacer con él ahora. Le di la dirección
del poeta de la U de Montreal & sugerí que se lo
hiciera llegar
La otra gente en la oficina
me miraba con extrañeza
‘Me voy a almorzar,’
dije & salí de allí
Me fui de vuelta a la taberna
& me tomé dos chelas más. Debería comer algo,
me puse a pensar, pero ya era muy tarde: salí
de la taberna & vomité sobre
la nieve fresca & unas palomas se acercaron al punto
Fue
un bonito y soleado día. Se sentía bien otra vez
tener chamba
Nuestra generación
Al final lo que nos jodió fue
el miedo a la aniquilación.
La vasta mayoría nunca superó
la segunda guerra & lentamente se derritió
frente a sus sets de televisión. Para los demás
el proceso fue aun más lento. Fue la pérdida
de esperanza lo que nos agarró al inicio &
luego las peleas entre nosotros. Les dimos la espalda
a nuestros desunidos tractos & en soledad
murieron nuestros hígados. Ya no dormíamos o
dormíamos demasiado. Pronto se fue nuestra osadía &
nuestras extremidades temblaban visiblemente. Los ojos,
locos & sueltos en sus cuencas, se nos querían
salir. Nuestras mentes se fusionaron en
una nada repetida. Colapsamos desde
adentro. Habíamos olvidado cómo amar
así que no hubo niños. Sólo quedaron
las cucarachas & unos pocos poemas dispersos, testamentos
de esta ceguera nuestra.
One Short-Short Fiction & Two Poems
by Daniel Jones - Urban Graffiti
Daniel Jones was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1959. He died by his own hand in Toronto on Valentine’s Eve, 1994. In between, he worked as a dishwasher, cook, caretaker, editor, and writer. He left behind several volumes of highly acclaimed and controversial fiction and poetry. His work continues to appear in several magazines and anthologies, the most recent of which include Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada (McLelland & Stewart, 1998) and Burning Ambitions: The Anthology of Short-Shorts (Rush Hour Revisions, 1998). He posthumously published punk novel, 1978, was recently reprinted by Three O’clock Press, and Coach House has reprinted his 1985 book, The Brave Never Write Poetry.
Death Valley Days
The TV was straight ahead. In my hand was the remote control. I was pretending it was a gun.
A person flashed across the screen. I pressed a button, shooting him dead.
Another face appeared. There were twelve buttons on the remote control. I pressed them one after the other.
Oprah Winfrey. “Bang! You’re dead.”
Family Feud. “Bang! Bang! Bang!”
Vanna White. “Bang! Gotcha.”
I had won the TV in a raffle six days ago. I had been lying on the sofa ever since. I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t bathed. Bags of potato chips and jujubes littered the floor. I had filled a Giant Slurpee with piss.
Ed Broadbent. “Bang!” I killed without discrimination.
Someone walked into the living room. It was Linda home from work. She stood glaring at me.
“Bang!” I got her right between the eyes.
Linda dropped her briefcase on the floor. “When are you going to stop this?” she asked.
“Not until I’ve killed every last one.” I stuffed some peanuts into my mouth, dropping Tom Selleck with my other hand. I fired again.
“I’m undercover with Miami Vice. Bang!
“I’m the Ayatollah. Bang! Bang!
“I’m a Contra, a Vietnam vet, a crazed Maoist revolutionary blowing the heads off bourgeois pigs, I’m The Texas Remote Control Massacrer. Bang! Bang! Bang!
“I’m Bernie Goetz. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!”
I had just wiped out the cast of Sesame Street.
Linda took the remote control from my hand. She aimed it at the dead centre of the TV.
“And I’m George Bush,” Linda said, “and Margaret Thatcher, Mikhail Gorbachev, P.W. Botha and Yitzhak Shamir.”
Faces crackled. The image silently exploded into a million coloured dots of light. Then the screen went black.
Linda handed me the remote control and walked out of the room.
I sat staring at the blank tube, and then at the device in my hand, scratching the top of my head in wonder.
May Day 1986
We came to read poems of revolution and love,
but the workers couldn’t make it.
“Maybe everyone had to work,” Keith says,
to the five or six poets who have gathered.
“Or maybe they’re home resting with a beer,” says Enzo,
opening a bottle of beer.
We read the poems we have read and heard before.
This one is now dedicated to the ghosts of the Haymarket
martyrs,
another to the damned in factories and picket lines
everywhere.
The words drift among empty chairs,
echo against the dirty glass of the store front.
We can barely hear above the passing streetcars.
We, the committed poets, applaud ourselves loudly.
Outside the Queen Street hospital,
an anorectic punk bums a cigarette, and I think of Nicky,
barely twenty, hitchhiking to Chicago with his sister
and brother anarchists.
Our differences seem like wisps of tobacco smoke
in the cool May dusk.
Our typewriters are not guns, but machines.
We work hard, each for some similar end.
In the tavern Keith dances with a young poet
he has met this night.
Enzo’s head rests on the surface of the table,
his long hair wet with spilled draught.
Lost in the noise and smoke, I stare up through a window,
one with many, underneath an ever rolling moon.
After the Reading
The toilet had overflown into the back of the gallery,
and Linda was moping the floor.
Harris and I stacked chairs and emptied the ashtrays.
Enzo placed the remaining beer on the table and sat
muttering about the small audience for his reading.
“Everyone’s probably home watching the hockey game,”
he said.
Linda sat and opened a bottle of beer.
“Maybe poetry readings are obsolete,” she said.
Enzo thought about this. “That’s heavy, man,” he said,
finally.
He started to tell a story about the year
he had hung out at Rochdale.
We had heard it before, but the woman next to him said
she had lived in Rochdale that year.
“Did you know Meat Axe?” the woman asked.
Enzo was staring into his empty bottle of beer.
“Was he a friend of Butch’s?”
“He might have been,” the woman said.
“Yeah, I knew Meat Axe,” Enzo said.
He started another story about the time he had played bass
with a blues band in Yorkville twenty years ago.
“Everyone knew everyone else in the sixties,”
the woman said.
“I’ll drink to that,” Enzo said. And he did.
Across the table someone was having a conversation
with no one in particular.
He was saying how he had written poetry for ten years
but never shown his poems to anyone.
During the reading he sat in the back corner,
scribbling in a notebook.
“I feel poetry is a private act,” he said.
Enzo pounded the table with his fist,
spilling several bottles of beer.
“Poetry is a vehicle for social change,” he said.
“How are you supposed to change anything if no one shows
up?”
On the wall was a painting of the poet Mayakovsky.
Enzo pointed to that as if to illustrate his point.
Harris had been sitting quietly,
chain-smoking my cigarettes.
“I always thought the vehicle for social change was a tank,”
he said.
I felt something seeping into my shoes.
Linda looked up from the pad
in which she had been sketching the group around the table.
“Whose turn to mop?” she asked.
Closing my eyes, I heard water pouring
over the side of the toilet bowl
and splashing down onto the floor.
And then the sudden loud crash.
Enzo had fallen out of his chair.
Daniel Jones is brought back to life
Por Mark Medley
One evening late last month, the poet Kevin Connolly took the stage at Revival, a club in Toronto’s Little Italy, and proceeded to read some poems. The work was gritty, honest, and caustic. Many of those packing the venue were writers or poets themselves, so when Connolly ended his set with a short piece entitled “The Brave Never Write Poetry,” in which the speaker pleads “Someone give me the strength not to/apply to the Canada Council for the Arts. Someone/give me the strength not to write poetry” there were more than a few nervous laughs.
The funny thing is, Connolly isn’t the author of these poems. In fact, many in the crowd weren’t even alive when those words were written.
When Daniel Jones committed suicide on February 13, 1994, at the age of 33, he left behind one published collection of poetry, one published novel, and a handful of chapbooks. His legacy, however, was still being written. A book of linked stories, The People One Knows, was published shortly after his death, while his novel 1978 was posthumously published in 1998. These books, and everything else Jones wrote, eventually went out of print, and he was in danger of being forgotten by the city he chronicled.
That’s why the current resurgence of interest in his work is interesting. His seminal 1985 collection, The Brave Never Write Poetry, which he published at the tender age of 26, was just re-released by Coach House Books, while 1978 is being re-issued by Three O’Clock Press. And later this week, at a bar in Parkdale, his life and work will be celebrated by a cross-section of Toronto writers and musicians.
“It’s kind of bittersweet,” says his former girlfriend Moira Farr, author of After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor’s Tale, an excerpt of which, coincidentally, appears in the just-released Penguin Book of Memoir. “The renewal of interest in his work is great. I’m quite happy — well, I wouldn’t say happy. I don’t think it’s a happy thing when someone so talented [dies] so young, but what he left is clearly still speaking to people.”
Sarah Wayne, the publisher of Three O’Clock Press and one of those people who wasn’t alive when Jones started publishing, thinks the circumstances surrounding his death have overshadowed his writing. “I’ve always kind of felt that a lot of people took that up as the story, but I think that there’s a lot more to see in his work.”
The poems in The Brave Never Write Poetry are set in crowded bars and quiet cafes, the backseats of streetcars and unmade beds, drunk tanks and psych wards. Reading it is like stumbling over someone’s opened journal — the work is that intimate and raw. The book, says Connolly, “speaks to being young and powerless and addicted.” The collection was almost universally panned — The Globe and Mail said “Jones makes a fair bid to become the poet laureate of puking” — except by Connolly, who reviewed it in long-gone rag What!
“At the time, I just think people didn’t know what to make of it,” says Connolly, now poetry editor at Coach House. “Here’s this guy writing about throwing up and getting drunk and psycho wards as if he knew them. And, as it turns out, he did know them.”
When he was in his early 20s, Jones writes in the book’s introduction, he found himself alone, drinking too much, dirt poor, and in debt. In early 1984, he wound up “in the psycho ward of Toronto Western Hospital.” Jones wrote the majority of these peoms after he was discharged. He was sober for the rest of his life, though constantly battled depression. (“Think of the most depressed person you’ve ever met,” says Connolly. “He was about twice that.”)
Jones seems conflicted about being a poet. On one hand, he describes his work as “piles of scribblings” and sneers at the prospect of becoming a “career poet.” On the other hand, it seems to have saved him. In “A Funny Thing Happened When I Pointed A Gun To My Head” he considers blowing off his head, before deciding to write a poem instead.
“I really do think that it was art that saved him,” says Connolly. “He plays the sort of tough, Bukowski-esque, hard-drinking, world-weary poet persona, but also he has no faith in it at all. He’s constantly undermining himself, constantly undermining poetry, making fun of it — and yet it was all that he had.”
After the publication of The Brave Never Write Poetry, Jones abandoned the form and turned to fiction. In stark contrast to his emotionally-overwrought poems, Jones’ prose is sparse — so minimalist “it was almost brittle,” says Connolly. 1978 follows a cast of broken characters through the early days of Toronto’s punk scene. The reissue of 1978 is part of a surge of renewed interest in Toronto during this time: In 2009 Liz Worth published Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk in Toronto and Beyond; in March, Jennifer Morton published Dirty, Drunk and Punk, about D.I.Y. Toronto punk provocateurs Bunchof–kingoofs; while this month sees the release of Don Pyle’s Trouble in the Camera Club: A Photographic Narrative of Toronto’s Punk History 1976 – 1980. Jones has become one of the era’s patron saints.
Connolly isn’t sure what his friend would make of all this attention, but last month, on the night of the reading, Connolly found himself at the corner of Grace and College streets, standing in front of the apartment where Jones lived and ultimately died.
“Part of me wonders if he’d be mad at me for re-releasing the book, because he hated it so much,” wonders Connolly. “But I figured we were within 500 metres of where he lived and died, in a club called Revival, so if there was ever a better moment for an angry ghost, it would have been that, and nothing seemed to happen.
“So I think we’re OK.”
• The Brave Never Writer Poetry by Daniel Jones is published by Coach House Books, while 1978 is published by Three O’Clock Press. A tribute will take place Wednesday, May 18, at The Stop (at Parts & Labour) 1566 Queen St. W. at 7:30 p.m.
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