Hello hello, how have you been?
We’ve certainly been busy, but we’re gearing up to go back into production mode. Soon we’ll put up the February edition of Odourless Radio and hope to have poemaweek up and running regularly again by mid-March (so get those submissions in!).
In the meantime, check out Nathaniel G. Moore’s in-depth article on Odourless favourite Daniel Jones over at Poetry Is Dead.
Listen/DownloadBroadcast: November 17, 2011 | 6:30 PM | CKCU 93.1FM
Featured Voices: Jeff Blackman, Bardia Sinaee
Featured Music: Bunchofuckingoofs – “Fascist Statement” and “Destroy All Automobiles” | John Coltrane – “By the Numbers”
Links: The Brave Never Write Poetry by Daniel Jones | Dirty, Drunk and Punk by Jennifer Morton | Dinosaur Porn (Ferno House, 2011) | 2011 Governor General’s Award Ceremony
Description:
According to Daniel Jones, Canada’s established poetry scene by the 1980s had become “a mutual admiration society where poetry was nothing more than the currency that brought greater currency… Canadian poetry had become a huge and corrupt bureaucracy. It was ugly, cynical and full of pettiness and hatred. I loved it.”
This week we take a look Toronto’s punk scene in the 1990s. Set against the austere musical stylings of Bunchofuckingoofs, Jeff Blackman discusses the “poet laureate of puking” Daniel Jones, whose book was recently reprinted by Coach House 26 years after David McFadden picked it out of their slush pile.
With moments left to spare, our hosts also read a couple of poems by Leigh Nash and James Nadel from the recently released poetry anthology Dinosaur Porn.
We forgot to record this week’s show on Adobe Audition so the audio quality isn’t exactly up to Odourless snuff, but please bear with us–we’ll be back on air on December 15 with audio so crisp you could spread butter on it.
From: The Brave Never Write Poetry by Daniel Jones (Coach House, 2011)
_
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.
