This is James Donald Forbes McCann's first book of poems.Is it the best book of poems ever written? Certainly, some of these poems are very fine indeed: poems like Paul Keating and The James Brown Way. Does poetry ever get any better than those poems?You may know James Donald Forbes McCann from his stand up comedy, his articles, his podcast (The James Donald Forbes McCann Catamaran Plan). But soon, the whole world will know him for Marlon Brando 9/11: Beatutiful Poems That Everybody Will Love.FROM THE PREFACEI 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 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. 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 FOXTEL 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 by the belief that, sooner or later, poems would rectify my situation. Of course, I never, at that 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 never will 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’m going to write the next book of poems from my catamaran. Read more
