The Brave Never Write Poetry

Daniel Jones

• Éditeur: Coach House Books
• Année: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781770562875
• Sujet: Letteratura
• Sous-sujet: Poesia canadese

First published in 1985, The Brave Never Write Poetry, the lone collection of poems by critic/novelist Daniel Jones (1959–1994), was a cult hit. Written in a direct, plainspoken, autobiographical and at times confessional style in the tradition of Charles Bukowski and Al Purdy, these confrontational poems about sex and boredom, drugs and suicide, document Jones' depressive, alcoholic years as an enfant terrible.

THE BRAVE NEVER
WRITE POETRY

The Brave Never Write Poetry

The brave ride streetcars to jobs
early in the morning, have traffic accidents,
rob banks. The brave have children, relationships,
mortgages. The brave never write these things
down in notebooks. The brave die & they are
dead

It takes guts to watch television,
get your hair done, have a barbecue. It takes guts
to blow up the Canadian bomb factory & plead guilty
to twenty-five years

Josef Brodsky was exiled for his poetry & now he
lives in the land of the brave. They like his
poetry there. But the brave don’t read it &
in Moscow they are lined up in the streets
to buy food. It takes guts to know some happiness
& not make a poem of it

& alone in my room
I am calling someone now, anyone. Someone give me
the strength to be & not question being. Someone
give me the strength to stay out of the cafés &
libraries. Someone give me the strength not to
apply to the Canada Council for the Arts. Someone
give me the strength not to write poetry

But nothing. No one. The streets have not
exploded. The streetcars pass. The clock has
moved another inch

Ernesto Cardenal will no longer write poetry while
the U.S. makes war on his country. I read this
in Playboy magazine. Later I stare at the image
of a naked woman, her legs spread across the
centrefold & I know, as the semen runs into my hand,
that she would never write poetry

It is springtime in Toronto. I am in love.

Two Poets

A couple of afternoons a month, we
run into each other at the post
office. Silently we sort through
the contents of our boxes, looking
for the returned manuscripts, looking
for the cheques
& then the rejections:
‘Sons of bitches don’t know good
poems from their arseholes’
&:
‘So & so’s too busy diddling
his secretary to know when he gets
the real thing’
Or:
‘Goddamn academics, they should
all be lined up & shot’
Sometimes a
small magazine takes a poem or
there’s a cheque & we walk up
the street to a bar & over beer
the talk turns to the women who left,
the races that were fixed, past-due
bills & whatever the bloody Americans
are up to now
His hair is going &
his stomach & his hands shake now
when he lifts his beer
& we drink
the beer & talk until the bartender
cuts us off & we stumble uncertainly
onto the street & home to our separate
apartments, where we will sit all night,
drinking coffee & smoking cigarettes,
writing the poems that will make us
immortal.

Better Living Through Chemistry

Toronto was starting to get to me,
I was feeling hemmed in, bored,
maybe even murderous. I went to see
a shrink
‘What seems to be the
problem,’ he asked
‘Well,’ I said,
‘It’s like this: everyone I meet seems
to write poetry. They’re everywhere,
they’re suffocating me, you can’t know
how awful it is’
The shrink leaned back
In his chair & closed his eyes. After
a while he stirred & began to mumble:
‘Um …
schizophrenic paranoia … stelazine’
He wrote
out a script, shook my hand & went back
to his notebook. I looked down
as I was leaving: he was writing a poem.
I rushed to the pharmacy

I went to a
coffee house a few weeks later. There
were thirty people sitting around, drinking
herbal tea, looking bored, hunched over
notebooks & briefcases. One by one they
went up to the mike & read from pieces of
paper:

one man’s woman had left him & he
couldn’t find another;
another had experienced
some sort of existential enlightenment while
sniffing a pine cone;
one woman remembered,
with tears in her throat, the death of her
grandmother

It was all very beautiful. I
felt wonderful. I sang quiet praise to the
stelazine. There wasn’t a poet in the bunch.

A Brief Affair

I got out of bed & went into the toilet
to piss. When I got back, she was at
her desk, writing in a diary. After a
while, she went into the toilet. I opened
her diary:

31 December 1984:
Sex with Jones. He was reasonably
attentive. Quite pleasant.

We smoked a cigarette & went to sleep,
back to back. In the morning, I went
home & wrote this poem.

Our Generation

In the end it was the fear
of annihilation that did us in.
The vast majority never got over
the second war & slowly melted
into their television sets. For the rest
the process was slower. It was
the loss of hope that got us first &
then the fighting among ourselves. We
turned from our separate tracts & alone
our livers died. We no longer slept or
slept too much. Soon our nerve went &
our limbs shook perceptibly. Our eyeballs,
wild & loose in their sockets, popped
right out. Our minds fused together into
one repeated nothing. We collapsed from
the inside. We’d forgotten how to love
so there were no children. Only the roaches
were left & a few scattered poems, testaments
to our blindness.

Benzedrine

In the evenings we sit in cafés
talking artists & revolutions, of
what we could do, of what we will
never do, drinking beer to mask
the emptiness of our words
Sometimes
it is only the benzedrine that keeps
us going
& at night with lovers
we no longer want
but need
Or at windows
with poems we no longer believe in
It
is the silence that we fear
& the slow
strangulation of daytime jobs that
are not what we were taught
This is all
that we want but this is not what
we want
Perhaps only a little peace
from a terror that we cannot
comprehend
There is no terror
There is
nothing
Give it back to us now, give
it whatever it is, as beautiful, as
brutal, as meaningless
Give it back
whoever you are
billboard signs, shopping
malls, fire engines & the night.

Work

I picked up a temporary job with the League
of Canadian Poets & the night before I
was to start I borrowed twenty bucks
against my paycheque & went out to drink

The next morning I was sick &
an hour late. My desk was covered with
books that had to be bundled & mailed
out. I smoked a couple of cigarettes
& read some of the books. People were
running around talking about arts grant
deadlines & various problems with the
photocopier. I lit another cigarette &
started to bundl...