Daniel Jones

by George J. Dance

Daniel Jones (1959 - February 14, 1994) was a Canadian punk poet and novelist who performed under the name Jones.

Daniel Jones (1959-1994). Photo by Sam Kanga. Courtesy National Post.

Life

Youth and education

Jones was born and grew up in Hamilton, Ontario.

In high school he played in a punk rock band, Middle Class Noise, with Christ Houston (later of the Forgotten Rebels).

He wrote a play, Tricentennial Jesus, which he directed and starred in, which was performed in 1977 at the Hamilton District Collegiate Drama Festival and the Ontario Collegiate Drama Festival, winning awards at both festivals.

In 1977, aged 18, he moved to Toronto, where he lived the rest of his life. He later wrote that he found himself alone, drinking too much, dirt poor, and in debt. He worked in a psychiatric hospital and at various jobs including grill cook, landscaper and administrator for various writers' groups.

Punk poet

Known only as "Jones," he became well-known on the Toronto literary scene for his alcohol-fuelled poetry readings, once performing naked from the waist down. There are stories of him stripping on stage at Toronto’s Cameron House and mooning the haiku society at Harbourfront. At the 1992 launch of his novel Obsessions, he delivered his reading with a whip in hand and literally launched his book into the audience using a sling.

"Jones once took the stage and I thought he was hamming it up," said Charlie Huisken, then owner of Toronto bookstore This Ain’t the Rosedale Library. "I thought he was pretending because he fell into the drum kit, but he read powerfully, really articulately, like he was doing a neo-Bukowski kind of thing. Until I talked to him afterwards. He was incoherent."

Throughout his life, Jones battled alcoholism and depression. "Think of the most depressed person you’ve ever met,” poet Kevin Connolly has said of him: “He was about twice that.” In early 1984, Jones spent time in the psychiatric ward of Toronto Western Hospital. He wrote the majority of his one full-length poetry collection, The Brave Never Write Poetry, on his release. The title poem of that volume contains the lines:

Someone give me the strength not to

apply to the Canada Council for the Arts. Someone

give me the strength not to write poetry

Later career

In 1985, he gave up drinking, and met and married Robyn Gillam. He also gave up writing poetry, amd began to focus on several careers: fiction writer, critic, editor, creative writing teacher and publisher. In 1989, he and Gillam founded Streetcar Editions, a small press for publishing little-known writers, of which Jones was the publisher.

He was coordinator of the Toronto Small Press Book Fair, editor-in-chief of Paragraph magazine, contributor to What! magazine, and a member of the editorial collectives of Piranha and Border/Lines. He regularly reviewed books for such literary publications as Books in Canada, Quill & Quire, Rubicon and Piranha. He also began to write and publish his own autobiographical fiction.

After battling severe depression for years, he committed suicide at the age of 34 on February 14, 1994.

Writing

Jones published 9 works, from chapbooks to full-length works. After his death, it was discovered that he had left behind a completed novel, titled 1978, which Rush Hour Press published in 1999. A collection of linked stories, The People One Knows, which had been submitted to Mercury Press before his death, was also published posthumously.

Quotations

"“It takes guts to know some happiness and not make a poem out of it" (from "The Brave Never Write Poetry")

Publications

Poetry

• The Brave Never Write Poetry. Toronto: Coach House, 1985.
  • (with introduction by Kevin Connolly). Toronto: Coach House, 2011.
• South of Queen Street. Toronto: Streetcar Editions, 1989.
• The Dead. Toronto: Pink Dog Press, 1990.
• The Job after the One before. Edmonton, AB: Greensleeve Editions, 1990.

Novels

• Obsessions: A novel in parts. Stratford, ON: Mercury Press, 1992.
• 1978 (with introduction by Kevin Connolly). Rush Hour Revisions, 1998; Three O'Clock Press, 2011.

Short fiction

• The People One Knows: Toronto stories. Stratford, ON: Mercury Press, 1994.

Edited

• Other Channels: An anthology of new Canadian poetry (edited with Shaunt Basmajian). Toronto: League of Canadian Poets, 1984.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

See also

• List of Canadian poets

References

Fonds

• Jones, Daniel, 1959-1994 at Library & Archives Canada

External links

About

• Daniel Jones is brought back to life," National Post, 2011
• "Post-Punk: The revival of Daniel Jones" at The Broken Pencil
• review of 1978 at Reading Toronto

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