ART: Brave words

[eye WEEKLY]

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eye WEEKLY February 15 1996
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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ART ART

BRAVE WORDS

by
JAMIE KASTNER

"And that summer I took a good long stare up the asshole of the
monster that had become Canadian PoetryE Canadian poetry had become a
huge and corrupt bureaucracy. It was ugly, cynical, full of pettiness
and hatred. I loved it. I too wanted a slice of the pie. I was going
to be A Poet." -- Daniel Jones, from the preface of The Brave Never
Write Poetry

On Valentine's eve 1994, Toronto's most famous unknown poet, Daniel
Jones, killed himself at age 34.

By snowy Valentine's Day, 500 broadsheets of Jones' poem "Things That
I Have Put Into My Asshole" were papered on downtown building fronts,
stapled into the pages of public phone books, crammed between sections
of the morning's papers. Someone called The Outsider took credit.

It was, perhaps, the largest audience Jones had ever had.

Jones had survived, by his own account, a young manhood of abuse,
alcoholism and suicide attempts to become a bright young hope of
Toronto's underground literary scene in the '80s, a subculture as
dedicated as the Beats or the Left Bank, toilers at art without the
chance of achieving even the moderate success of a known Canadian poet
like Earle Birney or Raymond Souster.

Jones turned this no-hope lot into a body of punk poetry shaped like a
middle finger. He gave this finger to Yuppies, to the literary
establishment, to self-serving artsy underdogs, to himself, to those
he hated, to those he loved. He shunned tweedy gatherings, read at
punk gigs, sometimes pissed and half-naked; there was a notorious
picture in Now of Jones reading with no pants on.

And lo and behold, he got a book deal.

Jones' self-published chapbooks first caught the attention of the
counterculture stalwarts in charge at Coach House Press in the early
'80s. They put out his punk, drunk, Bukowski-like The Brave Never
Write Poetry. The book was authored by "Jones." One name, one word.

Poet David McFadden was the book's main champion at Coach House. "In
those days, Coach House was the place to publish. A lot of people had
sent manuscripts for years and had them rejected. They didn't take
very well to Jones' work being published, and in such a beautiful
edition. And they told him so in no uncertain terms. All 10,000 poets
in Toronto kinda closed ranks against him. 'He doesn't deserve to have
a Coach House Press book out' -- that was the attitude. He hadn't
taken enough creative writing courses or something. And he was making
fun of them."

When I came to, I was sitting on a concrete shelf. It was the 52 drunk
tank again & I didn't even try to remember why. After a while a cop
unlocked the door:

'Get your stuff & get out of here,' he said

I signed for my belt and wallet. I had a dollar left & threw it on the
counter:

'Thanks for the service,' I said, 'though you should check your
clientele, the man sitting next to me was obviously drunk'

-- excerpt from "Rock & Roll"

McFadden says, "It was Nicky Drumbolis who told me there was this
great new poet around, so I checked him out and I was just blown away
by his work. Jones had published a few little chapbooks, so I helped
him put it together into one book. It was just so fresh and original,
it seemed to me to be the real thing."

Prominent among Jones' poetic fodder at the time was the literary
scene itself, which he targeted in a number of satirical poems. In
Jack And Jill In Toronto, he chronicled the lives of two Annex
archetypes:

Jill, who "plans to write a series of poems about how/ Jack controlled
and brutalized her with his thing."

And Jack, who "doesn't believe in nature and will write his poems in
the cafes."

"I don't think he ever wrote anything like that again," says McFadden.
"After that, he just went downhill. It was my impression that Jones
just couldn't handle the negative response -- he believed the bad
reviews."

It would seem that Jones, somewhere deep-down, wanted to fit in, to be
part of the scene. Over the following few years, he kicked drinking,
shifted from poetry to prose, and renounced his early work. He
published sporadically; work like 1992's Obsessions: A Novel In Parts,
took a magnifying glass to far more personal demons. By all accounts,
Jones became a respected contributor and editor at small literary
magazines like Border/Lines and Paragraph. He even taught the odd
creative writing course at York.

But he was still struggling. By the end of his life, Jones was in and
out of debt, grants and love; personal and professional complications
were pushing back the publication of his book of stories, The People
One Knows: Toronto Stories. He was, as his friend, poet Lynn Crosbie,
put it, "shit out of luck."

By the time The People One Knows hit the shelves, six months had
passed since the door to Jones' living room had been broken down to
reveal him, wrists cuffed, plastic bag over his head, tranquilizers
flooding his blood.

There was a 20-page suicide note, appointing a literary committee to
handle his unpublished work, and as co-beneficiaries of his meagre
estate he named his wife, writer and lecturer Robyn Gillam, and his
last girlfriend, Equinox editor Moira Farr.

At his Spadina Hotel wake, mourners promptly fell into hostile camps,
either aligned with one of his "widows" or favoring a particular phase
of his work.

FRIENDS, ENEMIES, LOVERS

On the first anniversary of his death, Valentine's Day 1995, The
Outsider spraypainted "Things I Have Put Up My Asshole" on 50
buildings across the city.

This year, The Outsider has done stickers.

"Jones would be mortified," says Farr. "He hated The Brave Never Write
Poetry."

By the early '90s, Jones was transfigured. He had tacked the Daniel
back on his name, turned from poetry to fiction, from sherry to
espresso, and was a mentor to the next generation of writers at small
magazines like Paragraph, which he edited for two years.

Crosbie says, "When I knew him, he had no use for poetry. We were
never allowed to talk about The Brave Never Write Poetry. He gave me a
copy after explaining he had combed the city buying them all so no one
else could have them. He gave me a book, but I wasn't to talk about it
with him.

"That's been interpreted by certain people as being wrong-minded. As
if by becoming 'Daniel Jones' he had become this enervated, affected
writer of fiction. But that was never my sense of him. I come in on
that cusp -- he's not drinking, he's writing fiction, he's a critic
and an editor that I admire very much. I'm in no way haunted by that
spectre of a naked Jones reading drunkenly at the Cameron House."

There seems always to have been a slim line between Jones' life and
his art; from lashing out at his enemies in The Brave Never Write
Poetry to lashing out at his friends in The People One Knows. By all
accounts, he had enough personal charm that he never wanted for
material.

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.

Lauren Boyington, a writer and chef, was Jones' girlfriend during
three of his heaviest drinking years; years chronicled in early work
like "Two Poems On Espionage" and "Hate Poem For Lauren," revisited
through the haze of time and multiple rewrites in The People One
Knows.

"There were five widows at the wake," says Boyington, "me, Robyn,
Moira, Janieta [Eyre:, Karen [Oca-a:. There were spiritual widows as
well -- a lot of people felt they had a special relationship with
Jones -- they were kind of shocked to find out how many other people
felt the same way."

According to Gillam, still Jones' wife at the time of his death
although they had split during the last year, Jones always kept
friends in separate camps. "He was always going on about his other
girlfriends, he was a very manipulative person.

"He was always playing people off against each other -- his greatest
fear was that people would get together and gang up on him, which was
probably going to happen right before he died, actually. He certainly
forestalled that."

After splitting with Gillam, Jones hooked up with Farr. It was Farr
who found Jones' body. "He had locked the door of the room where he
killed himself and left a note on the door: 'Don't Come In, Call The
Police.' "

Gillam says it's a quote from Money, a Martin Amis novel Jones
admired.

Gillam and Crosbie identified Jones' body. Later, a description went
into a Crosbie poem, "Pearl."

Nicky Drumbolis' Letters press published Pissed, Jones first work of
fiction, in 1986.

"In the beginning, he worked with a random, machine-gun like approach
to expression. Then he went away from saying what was on your tongue
to saying something in a highly polished fashion, as though that in
itself were enough.

"So here he is working through these different writing models, and
meanwhile, you have about 11 years in Canada before people grow tired
of you and you have no currency in the art game any more. Jones is
coming to the end of his string: he wasn't able to get grants any
more, he'd spoken out against the stupidity of some of these people
around him, and they blackballed him.

"He was basically painting himself into a corner."

THE LONG LOOK BACK

There are numerous photos of Jones on the books he started putting out
in his early twenties. On chapbooks like Jack And Jill In Toronto,
South Of Queen Street and Two Cops Kissing a gaunt young man, blond
hair cut like W.H. Auden's, sometimes scruffy and unshaven, looks
twice his age. Later shots show eyes sunk deeper in flesh, long
forehead rimmed by black beret. Later still, the head shaved round, a
hollow Buddha looming from a black motorcycle jacket.

In Jones' own photo albums, the wild days glare from behind plastic in
kitsch yellows and orange; the lank, skinny kid with no pants on, a
bottle in one hand, book of poems in the other, American flag in the
background -- click! -- skinny ass over the toilet bowl, wad of toilet
paper in one handE

In the last story in The People One Knows, "A Torn Ligament," Jones
breaks suddenly from the narrative to describe difficulties getting an
earlier draft of the story published. He shifts into a confessional
tone that seems like an mid-story footnote to the entire book.

"I was an alcoholic for ten years. I have not had a drink in six
years. The story I am writing is not a complicated one. It has been
written before. I am a writer in my early thirties. I want to capture
on paper those years when I was still young, before I wanted to be a
writer. I want to do this because I wish I could live those years
again. I want those years back that I wasted as an alcoholic. I want
to be twenty again, not in my early thirtiesE Could the story have
turned out differently? I do not know. I do not know."

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