The James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan - Release Day: Marlon Brando 9/11: Beautiful Poems That Everybody Will Love

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

Don't delay, get your episode of Marlon Brando 9/11 today: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B0B92NWWDCGet the audiobook: https://www.patreon.com/jdfmccann Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan. If you'd like to listen to bonus episodes, go sign up to the Patreon. That's patreon.com. Clom? Ah, we f***ed it. Anyway, look, you'll find a way. Catamaran Home! Hello and welcome to this very special episode of the James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan. Coming out on the launch day of my debut book of poems marlon brando 9-11

beautiful poems that everybody will love you can get your copy now it's available on amazon uh go and get it you can search for marlon brando 9-11 beautiful poems that everybody will love there's a link in the description of this podcast. You can go to my website, jdfmccann.com, and you can find it there. You can go to my Instagram. I mean, there are just so many ways for you to find out how to buy the book, and I hope you do, and I hope we sell lots of copies, and then it becomes the most, you know, commercially successful book. That's what I predict, is that it becomes the most commercially successful book. That's what I predict, is that it becomes the most commercially successful book of poems of all time, with an opening weekend of as many as five sold. I think it's a pretty low bar for the most commercially successful book of poems of all time. So many wonderful things happening with the book, so many difficult things happening in my life. We're moving house at the moment. I'm recording this in the Volvo. I've pulled into a car park because there's no room at the new

house for me to record podcasts. I don't have an office anymore. That's very challenging. I have some paintings that the rest of the family don't like and won't have in the living room or their bedrooms. My wife, of course, doesn't want and won't have in the living room or their bedrooms. My wife, of course, doesn't want me having the big purple naked man with his dick out crucified on a Hungry Jack's sign in the bedroom. She finds that disturbing. Roadblock to intimacy. So, ah, lots of, you know, you move to a new house, there's lots of problems to work out. Hey, there's no dining room, there's no living room at this house. Hey, the rental crisis has meant we've moved into an entirely unsuitable

property with so many people and another baby on the way. Hey, but the important thing is Marlon Brando 9-11. You know, I don't even think I have to worry about that because the opening weekend of Marlon Brando 9-11, beautiful poemsems That Everybody Will Love, is likely to be such an enormous and frankly embarrassing success that maybe we'll be buying the boat very soon. And then all the podcasts will be recorded in the boat. Now, I should say, the Patreon members have access now to the audiobook of Marlon Brando 9-11, beautiful poems that everybody will love. So if you join the Patreon, and there's a link for that too, you can go and listen to me reading the whole book. But as a treat for everybody, I've recorded the preface in audiobook style,

and I'm going to play that now. So you get free access to the preface, you can buy your copy of the book. You can join the Patreon and get the audio book. I love you. I need you. I miss you. Here is the preface. James Donald Forbes McCann presents Marlon Brando 9-11.

Beautiful poems that everybody will love. Written by James Donald Forbes McCann. Published by James Donald Forbes McCann. Published by James Donald Forbes McCann. Read, hello, by James Donald Forbes McCann. Preface. When one thinks of a poet, one thinks of a pauper. Once, perhaps, the poet's poverty was glamorous and bohemian. An apartment in the fifth arrondissement, smoking cigarettes, loose women, hard liquor, consumption, dying young. That world has disappeared. A Saudi prince owns that apartment now. The young people are vaping and tuberculosis was stamped out long ago.

Oh, the liquor is still hard and the women are still loose, and an early death remains as tempting as it ever was. But one is not a child anymore. There is no time for that sort of thing. Today the poet lives out a simple, sad, suburban impoverishment of the soul. He teaches at a public school. He drives an inferior car. And his wife earns more than he does. But why should it be so? Why shouldn't the poet become rich? Other artists manage it.

Great painters and actors earn more in a day than most people do in a lifetime. If you have talent, even if people mistakenly think you have talent, you can make a living as a singer or a songwriter or even a singer-songwriter. This is never true of poets. never true of poets. No poet ever makes good money from his poetry. I can see no technical reason why this is the case. Popular novelists make lots of money, and there should be more money to be made in the poetry game than in novel writing. Both a novel and a book of poems cost roughly the same amount of money to buy, but the book of poems is much shorter and has lower printing costs. The net profit to the poet, or at least to the publisher,

should be far higher. Then there is the fact that poems are easier to write than novels. In terms of sheer word length and time spent typing, one could bang out a book of poems in an afternoon. Well, you could hardly bang out War and Peace in an afternoon. Your hands would fall off. Yes, certainly. Poets might choose to labour over their poems, moving commas around and that sort of thing.

It seems like a waste of time to me. Indeed, getting the commas wrong might even improve the poems. If a book of history is full of spelling mistakes, everybody will suspect that the author has done a slapdash job, but if a book of poems is full of spelling mistakes, the sophisticated reader might well say, ah, very clever. You can't pull shit like that when you're writing a book of recipes or a dictionary, but with a book of poems it is practically encouraged. So why don't poets make more money? As best I can tell the reason is because very few people want to buy their books. But why

is that? I speculate that there are two reasons for this. Reason number one because reading poems is unpopular. Reason number two, because most poems are bad. The two reasons are, no doubt, intertwined. Reading poems is unpopular because most poems are bad. Who wants to waste their time reading bad poetry? Conversely, most poems are bad because reading poems is unpopular. Who wants to hide their light under a bushel? Most poems are bad because reading poems is unpopular. Who wants to hide their light under a bushel?

But if somebody ever was to write popular poetry, the Harry Potter of poems, the fentanyl of poems, beautiful poems that everybody will love, they'd make a fortune. I shall tell you a secret. Well, it is almost a secret. It isn't quite a secret because I have told it to many people, many times. But when I tell people, they think I'm being wry and ironical. They don't think they're hearing a secret. They think they are hearing a joke that they do not understand. But they are wrong. It isn't a joke. It is a secret and a mystery. I have long been possessed of the unusual notion

that I would one day become fabulously wealthy because of my poems. I really believe it. I really believe it. I really do. I don't know why I do. I always have. After my first televised stand-up comedy performance, a woman from a casting agency sent me an email. She wanted me for the starring role in an upcoming television program.

I read the script. I thought it was boring, shallow. Now, one isn't supposed to notice that as an actor. One is supposed to find the life of the thing and make interesting choices. From a pragmatic point of view, I should have done that. I was 19. I had no money. I desperately wanted to make it. This was a real, commissioned, prominent, highly paid TV gig. Well, somewhat prominent.

It was on Foxtel. But the important thing is that here was the business of show, banging at my door, desperate to give me a lucrative and respectable career. I turned them down. Why? There was only one answer. I knew that my poems were going to make me fabulously wealthy. Months later, I dropped out of university. To say that I had a bright future as an academic would be an understatement.

I took to academia like a duck takes to bread, quickly and enthusiastically bringing comfort to the lonely and elderly. Why did I drop out? Was it because I believed that my poems were going to become a font of fabulous wealth? Yes. I understand why this might seem like an unserious belief. No external signs have ever indicated that I am capable of making any money, let alone fabulous wealth, from poetry. No periodical has ever paid for my poems. I have never won a poetry competition or even received a poetry grant. And yet I have gone through life with a quiet and unshakable confidence that eventually fabulous wealth would arrive and poems would be the cause.

This confidence has been a comfort. At my lowest point, having turned down superstardom, dropped out of university and racked up tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt, I took a job as a door-to-door foxtail salesman banging at the door of downtrodden alcoholics in regional South Australia. This sort of job might have made another person depressed. Indeed, it did make other people depressed. Other salespersons were forever weeping on the job. Turnover was high. But I was buoyed. Buoyed? Buoyed. I wrote it, I should know. But I was boyed, I was like lifted up by the belief that sooner or later, poems would rectify my situation. Of course, I never, at the time,

sat down and wrote a poem. Poems, like bowel movements, must not be forced. Then, about a month ago, with no prior warning, I wrote a book of poems. They came quickly and easily, like an old maid on a Hemsworth. Will the poems in this book make me fantastically wealthy? I do not know. It may be that those poems, the poems of fantastic wealth, are many years away. It may be that there will never be any such poems and that I am deluded. But it may be that these are the poems and that fantastic wealth is imminent

and that I am going to write the next book of poems from my catamaran. James Donald Forbes McCann, September 2022. That book, once again, is Marlon Brando, 9-11. Beautiful poems that everybody will love. I want to thank so many people. I want to thank Anna Freer for writing an introduction. I want to thank Sean Haylock for writing an introduction.

And there's a big, actually, there's a big acknowledgements section at the back. So many people shouted out there. And I'd also like to thank my dad. I included one of my dad's poems because he was moot. So there's The Light of Darkness by Daryl McCann. And that's there. We might get him to read that on a future episode of the podcast. But for now, if you'd like the audio book, you can join the Patreon.

If you'd like the physical book, you can buy it. Thank you all for your love and support. Thank you to Jamison Gilders for the cover. I think it's a wonderful cover that really encapsulates that pre-911 utopian vibe while also having the darkness and fear of the post-911 world. Thank you all so much. New episode of the James Donald Forbes and McCann Catamaran plan coming out Monday. I hope you've enjoyed this bonus episode in the preface. Goodbye.