GARY GEDDES [20.220]

Gary Geddes 

Gary Geddes nació en Canadá en 1940. Ha publicado los libros de poesía: Poemas, 1971; Ensenada de ríos, 1972; Raízdeserpiente, 1973; Carta del amo del caballo, 1973; Guerra y otras medidas, 1976; La prueba ácida, 1980; El ejército de Terracota, 1984; Cambios de estado, 1986; Hong Kong, 1987; Salida difícil, 1989; Luz de torres en llamas, 1990; Muchacha junto al agua, 1994; El perfecto guerrero frío, 1995; Comercio activo: Poemas selectos 1970-1995, 1996; Volando ciego, 1998; Skaldance, 2004; Armazón, 2007; Nadando Ginger, 2010; ¿Qué quiere una casa?; La reanudación del juego, 2016. 

Otros de sus libros publicados: Lo perturbador del Occidente, 1986. En prosa: Cartas desde Managua: Meditaciones sobre política y arte, 1990; Hogar navegante: un viaje más allá de tiempo, lugar y memoria, 2001; Reino de las diez mil cosas: un viaje imposible de Kabul a Chiapas, 2005; Bebe la raíz amarga: una búsqueda de justicia y curación en África, 2010; Medicina fragmentada: Mensajes desde las vanguardias indígenas, 2017. En teatro: Los malditos ingleses, 1984.

Traducciones: No advertí la montaña creciendo oscura, 1986, poemas de Li Bai y Tu Fu, traducidos con la asistencia de George Liang. Libros de crítica: Novelas tardías de Conrad, 1980; Fuera de lo ordinario: Política, Poesía y Narrativa, 2009; Dando testimonio, 2016.

Antologías: Poesía y Poética del Siglo 20 (Oxford University Press, 1969, 1973, 1985, 1996, 2006); 15 Canadian Poets Times 3 (Oxford, 1971, 1977, 1988, 2001); Skookum Wawa: Escrituras del noroeste canadiense (Oxford, 1975); Divididos permanecemos (1977); El oído interno, 1983; Chinada: Memorias de la banda de siete, 1983; Vancouver: Alma de una ciudad, 1986; Compañeros: Escritos sobre Latinoamérica, 1990; El arte de la ficción breve: Una antología internacional, 1992; 70 poetas canadienses, 2014.

Ha recibido numerosos premios por su obra, entre ellos: Premio Nacional de Poesía de la Asociación de Autores Canadienses, 1981; Premio de Poesía de la Commonwealth (Región de las Américas), 1985; Premio de Poesía Archibald Lampman, 1990 y 1996; Premio de Poesía Guy Owen, 1994; Premio Pablo Neruda, 1995; Premio Gabriela Mistral, 1996.

https://www.festivaldepoesiademedellin.org/es/Festival/27/News/07.html

Traducciones de Arturo Fuentes

El lugar de Jimmy

Encontramos la vaca en una arboleda bajo el camino,

sostenida por un aliso, su apoyo,

su ubre hinchada, su aliento cansado y áspero

como un raspar. Yo podría haberme ahogado

en el ojo húmedo que giró hacia mí.

Su ternero, aunque muerto, estaba perfectamente posicionado,

patas delanteras y cabeza sobresaliendo del anillo ardiente

de la vulva.  Demasiado grandes, quizá, o las patas traseras

al romper bolsa, dispersaron fluidos.

Por mucho que tratamos no pudimos sacarla

y la carne alrededor de las patas se empezó a despegar

por la presión de la soga.  La vaca

no tenía más fuerza y se tambaleaba hacia atrás

cada vez que halábamos.  Átenla al árbol,

dije, siendo el maestro obligado a tener una respuesta, incluso aquí

en el Camino Alto, cinco millas al sur del pueblo

donde la isla amontonó la mescolanza

de sus orígenes.  Ya venía, por Dios,

lo juro, este ruano de malezas con su ser de sombra

salido por detrás, yendo en ambas direcciones

como una '52 Studebaker, venía por pulgadas

mientras nuestros pies se deslizaban en barro, mierda

y pasto húmedo.  Levantó su cabeza y trató

de ver qué locura habíamos fraguado en su camino,

emitió un gemido tan desgarrador que rompería cualquier bolsa,

su ojo húmedo retrayéndose hacia el blanco perfecto.

Torre

Las amé, a mi manera,

suficiente para gastar efectivo por un rifle

y planear mi estrategia a lo largo de la noche.

No me quejé del viento frío

ni de la agotadora escalada hasta la torre;

la larga espera y el olor fétido de las 

palomas tampoco retaron mi paciencia.

Cuando emergieron, tras un momento,

en el brillante sol de invierno al mediodía,

yo no escatimé esfuerzos para sujetar el rifle

y alinear la delicada cruz de la mira

con sus cabezas o pechos.

Y cuando empezaban a correr, después que la primera

se había posado a descansar en la blanda nieve,

nunca perdí mi frescura, pero las tomé

una por una, como un gato coleccionando gatitos.

Tierra prometida

Cuando fui a tantear el terreno

llevé espinilleras, máscara de gas,

llantas para la nieve, radar,

bazucas, aviones de reconocimiento,

talco para pies, hilo dental, rifles

FN, pasaporte falso, seguro médico 

y un suspensorio con copa de metal.

En mi camino a inspeccionar la tierra

llevé comics de Batman, un walkie-talkie,

granadas y bayonetas, un yoyo,

la memoria de la madre sacudiendo calcetines limpios

y ropa interior, un seguro de vida,

la Encyclopaedia Britannica, la bendición de

Moisés, un casete, un frasco de whisky,

un antistamínico, unas cuantas direcciones,

bongós, una revista Playboy, un equipo

para chuzadas, bolsas verdes de basura,

Kleenex, un laxante, una balsa inflable,

comida seca, luces de bengala, emplastos de maíz,

tiquetes de regreso, pilas de repuesto,

anticonceptivos, un atlas.

Supe que Medellín era el lugar correcto,

vendí el lote entero el primer día.

JIMMY'S PLACE

We found the cow in a grove below the road,

leaning against an alder for support,

her udder swollen, her breath ragged and grating

as a rasp. I could have drowned

in the liquid eye she turned to me.

Her calf, though dead, was perfectly positioned,

forelegs and head protruding from the flaming ring

of vulva. Too large, perhaps, or hind legs

broken through the sac, dispersing fluids.

Much as we tried we couldn't pry it loose

and the flesh around the legs began to give

from pressure on the rope. The cow

had no more strength and staggered back

each time we pulled. Tie her to the tree,

I said, being the schoolmaster and thinking

myself obliged to have an answer, even here

on the High Road, five miles south of town

where the island bunched in the jumble

of its origins. It was coming, by God,

I swear it, this scrub roan with her shadow self

extending out behind, going in both directions

like a '52 Studebaker, coming by inches

and our feet slipping in the mud and shit

and wet grass. She raised her head and tried

to see what madness we'd concocted in her wake,

emitted a tearing gunny-sack groan,

and her liquid eye ebbed back to perfect white.

From:   Changes of State, 1986

P.O.W.

He grew remote, acquired a language

I could not decipher. My airman, my high—

flyer, cryptic, hieratic, more complicated

than Linear B, or the Dresden Codex.

Demented not demotic, and no Rosetta Stone

to tap. I failed to crack his code, 

its glyphs and glygers, the Dead Sea 

Scroll of love I languished in. I regressed,

mute in the face of shifting vowels, lost 

consonants. Tore my hair, mouthed vows, 

cursed this vain enigma in his cuneiform. 

Dismissed, of course, as menopause, 

the rash that formed upon my belly

proof enough. And sleep, that famous 

balm, exploded in my face. Other things 

on his mind: war, unfinished business 

in Dundee. Or was it Dunsinane? I was one 

witch too many, no Orkney wood to order 

wrapped as camouflage. I'd ruined his precious

furlough; the poems he'd planned to write

were out the window. I could kiss the ass

of my Italian gardener, for all he cared,

stepping into his plane. And so I did,

as well as all his other parts. One by one,

I felt my unvoiced cells rejuvenate; the itch 

migrated south. I couldn't get enough 

of him, his crazy grin, the ridge of dirt 

beneath his nails. Even the quaint 

Catholic saints he painted on his tin roof's

corrugations performed sweet ministries

—coleslaw phonemes, pasta pictographs—

till I too, earth-bound, human, got my wings.

From:   Skaldance, 2004

SANDRA LEE SCHEUER

(Killed at Kent State University, May 4, 1970 by the Ohio National Guard) 

'You might have met her on a Saturday night,

cutting precise circles, clockwise, at the Moon-Glo

Roller Rink, or walking with quick step

between the campus and a green two-storey house, 

where the room was always tidy, the bed made, 

the books in confraternity on the shelves. 

She did not throw stones, major in philosophy

or set fire to buildings, though acquaintances say 

she hated war, had heard of Cambodia. 

In truth she wore a modicum of make-up, a brassiere,

and could no doubt more easily have married a guardsman 

than cursed or put a flower in his rifle barrel.

While the armouries burned, she studied, 

bent low over notes, speech therapy books, pages

open at sections on impairment, physiology. 

And while they milled and shouted on the commons, 

she helped a boy named Billy with his lisp, saying 

Hiss, Billy, like a snake. That�s it, SSSSSSSS,

tongue well up and back behind your teeth.

Now buzz, Billy, like a bee. Feel the air

vibrating in my windpipe as I breathe?

As she walked in sunlight through the parking-lot

at noon, feeling the world a passing lovely place,

a young guardsman, who had his sights on her,

was going down on one knee, as if he might propose.

His declaration, unmistakable, articulate,

flowered within her, passed through her neck,

severed her trachea, taking her breath away.

Now who will burn the midnight oil for Billy,

ensure the perilous freedom of his speech;

and who will see her skating at the Moon-Glo

Roller Rink, the eight small wooden wheels 

making their countless revolutions on the floor?

From:   The Acid Test, 1980

SULLIVAN

There's a strange hush at St. Stephen's

as we wait for them to storm the College.

Nurses drift like butterflies among the injured,

offering a word, a touch, a cigarette.

When the enemy bursts through the door

I'm lying on a cot at the far end of the corridor,

my head bandaged, my leg supported in a sling.

Two soldiers proceed to bayonet the sick and wounded

in their beds, to a chorus of screams and protests.

A nurse throws herself on top of one of our boys

to protect him—it might have been the kid

from Queen's—and they are both killed

by a single thrust of the bayonet.

I suppose they were sweethearts. Pinned

at last, she does not struggle. Her hands

open and close once, like tiny wings,

and the dark stain on her white, starched uniform

spreads like a chrysanthemum, a blood-red sun.

I cut the cord supporting my leg, slip on

the nearest smock and stand foolishly at attention,

making the salute. My right index-finger

brushes the damp cotton of the bandage.

Later, the butchers are shot by their own officers;

one, apparently, had lost a brother

in the final assault.

From:   Hong Kong, 1987

THE LAST CANTO

I seldom budge

from Rapallo.

Venice is no Byzantium

these final days.

Stench from the canals

worse than the cattle ship

I sailed to Europe on. 

Mr. Nixon was half-right:

poetry did not pay,

but there was a future in it.

The age demanded

a scapegoat and a saint.

Being American

I applied for both jobs.

The world has been my whale-road,

wanderer and seafarer

among the lost manuscripts,

charting connections

few had even dreamed of.

I've gone about my business

like a pack-rat.

You have to do that,

have on hand ten times

what you can ever hope to use.

Tennyson was right

about being part of all he met,

but he hadn't met enough.

As the range broadened

my speech became barbarous,

that of a man who's lost contact

with the words of his fellows,

though he knows their hearts'

most intimate desires.

I once advised trashing the metronome

and composing with the music

of the speaking voice.

Now I say:

Exercise the mind

and school the heart;

voice will rejoice

in its tender chains

like a bridegroom.

While my former countrymen

have given up on ideas,

except in things,

whatever that means,

and play with themselves

like clergymen,

less out of need than habit,

I dream

of ideas in action

and of forma, even the canetto,

where the dance of ear

and intellect

draw dormant filings

into the pattern of a rose.

I wrote in an article

in T.P.'s Weekly in 1913:

The artist is always beginning.

Any work of art

which is not a beginning,

an invention, a discovery,

is of little worth.

I still hold that view

though at times, I admit,

I counted the cost.

I have spoken too much of usura,

or not enough.

Even the air we breathe

is rented for a price.

Forget my dicta:

direct treatment of the thing

and all that rot.

The thing, so-called,

has yet to be revealed.

I have found poems

to be wiser and more honest

than poets.

Remember the ideogram

from the Chinese,

the one representing truth

which shows a man

standing beside his word.

Nothing more.

The merchant's wife

dying alone

in her unkempt garden

by the river

praises

my irregular feet,

though she draws the line

at Social Credit.

Forget me too:

listen to the poems.

You see, I'm prescriptive

to the end, a weakness

acquired in Hailey, Idaho

and never shaken.

From:   Changes of State, 1986

-

JORDAN ABEL [20.134]

Jordan Abel

Jordan Abel es un escritor Nisga'a de BC. En la actualidad, está realizando un doctorado en la Universidad Simon Fraser, donde su investigación se centra en la intersección entre Humanidades Digitales y Estudios Literarios Indígenas. El trabajo creativo de Abel ha sido recientemente publicado en Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope), The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconciliation (Arbiter Ring), and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayword). 

Abel es el autor de Injun, Un/inhabited, and The Place of Scraps, (ganador del premio Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize y finalista del Gerald Lampert Memorial Award).

Los Nisga'a son un pueblo indígena de Canadá en la Columbia Británica.

Injun (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2016). Paperbound, 86 pp.

e)

ninguna plática sobre la lluvia

sólo preocupación por el humo

donde el fuego encontró un hogar

de un cuchillo que dejó caer el silencio

que algunos podrían considerar

simplemente como parte de un sueño

conducido a través de una pared de la carpa

y se le metió en los ojos

su sucio altar de comodidad

la garrapata camina en línea recta

  La traducción corre a cargo de Adalberto García López.

e)

no talk of rain that night

only concern for smoke

where fire found a home

from a knife drop silence7

that some might consider

just part of a dream

driven through tent flaps

and fared into his eyes

his stained altar of ease

straight walking the tick

a)

he played injun in gods country

where boys proved themselves clean

dumb beasts who could cut fire

out of the whitest sand

he played english across the trail

where girls turned plum wild

garlic and strained words

through the window of night

he spoke through numb lips and

breathed frontier (“injun”)

The first work I encountered by Vancouver poet Jordan Abel was blind, as part of my time judging the 24th annual Short Grain Competition for Saskatchewan’s Grain magazine in 2012 (he came in second), and the work leapt up at me in a way I’ve rarely experienced. Now some of that same work finally appears in a trade collection, his third—Injun (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2016)—after The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Un/inhabited (Talonbooks/Project Space Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]. Injun extends Abel’s remarkable series of reclamation projects (or: project) that bring such a freshness, lively energy and engagement to Canadian and North American poetry, engaged with conversations attached to Idle No More and Truth and Reconciliation, and Language/Conceptual Poetries. Anyone suggesting that conceptual writing has no heart, or that contemporary poetry has exhausted itself, really needs to start engaging with Abel’s work.

b)

he heard snatches of comment

going up from the river bank

all them injuns is people first

and besides for this buckskin

why we even shoot at them

and seems like a sign of warm

dead as a horse friendship

and time to pedal their eyes

to lean out and say the truth

all you injuns is just white keys

Abel’s book-length projects open a series of conversations on race, colonization and aboriginal depictions, utilizing settler language and blending an exhaustive research with erasure to achieve an incredible series of inquiries and subversions, twisting racist phrases, ideas and words back in on themselves. In a recent interview posted at Touch the Donkey, Abel wrote: “[…] if your writing is only resistant, only oppositional, only focused on decolonization, you kind of end up writing yourself into a corner. That resistance alone is somehow insubstantial and unsustainable. More or less, this makes a lot of sense to me, and I think it’s exceptionally important to balance out that resistance with presence. Or perhaps balance out decolonization with resurgence.” He continued:

Primarily, the texts that I’ve focused on as source texts have all been written from a settler-colonial perspective, and, I think, have pointed towards the kinds of foundational knowledges that should be resisted. My challenge, so far, has been to articulate an Indigenous presence from within those texts. TPOS is probably my most accessible example of this. From within Barbeau’s voice comes my own voice, an Indigenous voice. In that resistance and disassembly of Barbeau’s writing an Indigenous presence emerges.

Further, in an October 2014 interview conducted by Elena E. Johnson for Event magazine, Abel discussed the research and erasures that make up the individual book-length components of this ongoing project (specifically, his previous book, Un/inhabited):

Un/inhabited is a study in context. The book itself is draws from 91 Western novels that total over 10,000 pages of source text. Each piece in the book was composed by searching the source text for a specific word that related to the social and political aspects of land use, ownership and property. For example, when I searched for the word “uninhabited” in the source text, I found that there were 15 instances of that word appearing across the 10,000 page source text. I then copied and pasted those 15 sentences that contained the word “uninhabited” and collected them into a discrete unit. The result of this kind of curation is that the context surrounding the word is suddenly visible. How is this word deployed? What surrounds it? What is left over once that word is removed? Ultimately, the book accumulates towards a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land.

Abel’s project both engages and works to unsettle, attempting both an ease and unease into the ongoing shame of how aboriginals are treated and depicted in Canada through repetition, erasure and settler language. Simply through usage, Abel forces us, the occupiers, to confront our language, in an effort to reconcile, restore and heal, none of which can truly exist without real conversation. The poems in Injun exist as a single book-length erasure and reclamation project, one with the result of seeing sketched erasures alongside exploded characters that are difficult to replicate within the space of this kind of review. Lines and phrases explode across the page. At the end of Injun, he includes this short “[ PROCESS ],” that writes:

Injun was constructed entirely from a source text comprised of 91 public domain western novels with a total length of just over ten thousand pages. Using CTRL+F, I searched the source text for the word “injun,” a query that returned 509 results. After separating out each of the sentences that contained the word, I ended up with 26 print pages. I then cut up each page into a section of a long poem. Sometimes I would cut up a page into three- to five-word clusters. Sometimes I would rearrange the pieces until something sounded right. Sometimes I would just write down how the pieces fell together. Injun and the accompanying materials are the result of those methods.

c)

some fearful heap

some crooked swell

bent towards him

and produced a pair

of nickel-plated pullers

a bull winder of

dirty tenderness4

that stiffened into

that low-brow ice

that dead injun game

Posted by rob mclennan 

-

DANIEL JONES [20.055]

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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