Word Portrait Of The Poet Dan Jordan
About Us: Non Grata is a print magazine aiming to revitalize reading and literature. The following piece is from our Summer issue, “Fiction from the Underground,” available for purchase now.
A reading from Karl Parkinson and Dan Jordan. Recorded at the National Library of Ireland in Dublin (the setting for the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses) on August 17, 2026.
Dan came one day in autumn, with his eyes like Richard Harris, with his eyes like Padmasahmbahva as he strode into Tibet bearing the Dharma in his enfolded arms. With his eyes like the Bull McCabe, with his eyes like his fathers. With his voice like Pat Short in Killnaskully. In his doldrums with divinations, he wore green trousers and a brown jumper, his hair-him near-fifty has streaks of grey, may we add distinguished to his epithets, and so we have done. His eyes wide and his body and mind seeking shelter. Shelter from the day full of engagements with the others, those not like him in his feeling of difference to the world and its populace, those who walk by a dead man and don’t see him, those who seek popularity at any cost, those who preach hate, those who take money very serious like, those who spit on the weak and shame the poor, those who don’t smell the fire on the horizon as he does. He lives in fear of everything: In fear of the climate, rain, sun, heat, floods in Spain. In fear of A.I. In fear of cancer. In fear of cold sores. In fear of Russia. In fear of America. In fear of his own mind. Poor Dan. Poor everyone in the great suffering. “Oh Suffering succotash” as Sylvester the cat once uttered as his owner the old woman battered his bonce with an umbrella, and oh the suffering of cartoon cats is the suffering of real old alley cats in Samsara, old alley cats like Dan, and me. He has a belly like the laughing monk Budai.
Dan in the school yard was a crying boy in a ring. Swallowing pills and drinking charcoal. Boy in a Blue bed who dreams of Cure songs. He who Pissed on the master’s grave. He who knows why the moving Virgin Mary statues of Cork weep blood from their eyes. He who writes delicate short poems about people he loves or is inspired by, heroes of the past, survivors of abuse or suicide, or madness, the dead friends of his youth. He is Dan Jordan!
So, any news brother? Says Dan.
Not much.
Not much is better than bad, well?
It is, it is, true enough.
Through enough, enough true, oohh, ohhh.
A song is made in the hallway of my home. A song with The Poet, a dance, into the sitting room, a song and dance man, named Dan Jordan! Me amigo. El Hombre Boombox, is what the street children of Chile would call him should they ever come upon him in his poetic travels. Dan Jordan is Rothko’s Seagram Murals. He is deep red, dark black like Clonakillty blood pudding. Dan Jordan is the stomach, Dan Jordan and me are brothers of the word, brothers of the ancient night, brothers of the tongue, like Jack and Neal, like Dean and Sal, like Shams and Rumi, like Achilles and Patroclus, like Lennon and McCartney, like Li Po and Tu Fu, like Ronnie and Reggie, like Ezra and Eliot, like Monkey and Pigsy, like Porthos and Aramis, like Sancho and the Don, like Melville and Hawthorn, like Holmes and Watson, like Mario and Luigi, like Harpo and Groucho, like Power Man and Iron Fist, like Kirk and Spock, like Jesus and James, like Vincent and Theo, like Monet and Clemente, like Buddha and Ananda...
*
Dan was once described as having eight brothers in one person, by a former student of his.
Here’s the eight brothers that I have uncovered or rather that have revealed themselves to me or should I say to us:
The sensitive poet who writes delicate short poems about people he loves or is inspired by, mostly they are heroes of the past or survivors of abuse or suicide, or madness.
The rebellious weed smoking pill popping punk listening teenager who shuts himself up in his room, or breaks out of his confines to go and get mad outta it.
The socialist activist who wants to take power from the government and give it to the people. Who wants freedom for the workers of the world.
The teacher and editor, doing his best to make others learn or bring their work to its best, a detached incisive eye, weeding out clichés and redundancies.
The melancholic death wanting, sleep deprived, boy bullied at school and at home, waking in the dark with memories of children beaten with sticks.
The Old Testament prophet of doom, warning of the coming apocalypse, his eyes flaming and his tongue blazing rhetoric, his visions of the flood and the fire filling the hearers with dread.
The domesticated modern man of letters, teaching kids in school, kissing his lovely wife at the table, his child collected from school, the mortgage paid on time.
The happy tramp. Wandering around Ireland reading poems and telling stories for all who listen, holes in his socks and stains on his pant legs, whistling tunes, smoking and eating and laying his head on whatever pillow should his head meet.
*
Belly like laughing Budai in the school yard was a crying boy in a ring/
Crimson long strokes hard across canvas whup whup whup/swallowing pills and drink charcoal/
PUMP OUT! PUMP OUT! PUMP OUT!
Survivor in a dark Blue bed dreaming/
Playing Cure songs/who understands? Only those other poets, like you!
Bang drum/Twist torso/billowing toxic fumes/Turpentine splash on the black board/Flash Jordan/Flash Jordan/ Flash/Nits in his hair/ NITS NITS NITS! Nits that weren’t really there/Piss on the master’s grave HOOHAW/No grey Tablets but the Queens Jewels and the Pink parlors and the Green and Red Refreshers and Black Hawkshares/Orange lipstick shine on charcoal eyeshadow stains/Out here on the border the DJ shakes his suicide hair and jerks like Curtis neck in the cross hair of a Bardo Sniper. The western lands fade in radio static and the moving statues of Cork weep milk for babies’ mouths.
*
I wish I was dead.
What? Why?
Because it’s useless, I’m useless, fuckin’ money man, I’m broke, I’m working five days a week at the TEFL and teaching poetry courses to supplement it.
Yeah man, I hear you, cost of living shit isisnit, but it’s a bit of a stretch to want to die because of it, no? A bit dramatic?
Maybe. I don’t know, I have a big insurance pay-out if I die, for my daughter, two hundred grand, like.
Oh yeah, sure I’ll kill you, and just leave me twenty grand in the will.
Would ya, yeah, we could do that, how would ya do it?
Bro, I was joking, ya headcase, I’m not gonna murder my own friend, or anyone, for that matter, for money.
I know. It would be great if there was a pill you could take, and it kills ya, and leaves no evidence, no trace, and it looks like ya died of natural causes, wouldn’t it?
No man, it wouldn’t. Will ya ever shut up, man, you’ve people who love ya, family, friends, the world still needs a few more poems from ya, just to keep it on its toes, huh?
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, you’re right.
Dan rolls a joint and heads out to the balcony to smoke it, he stands halfway in and halfway out the door, looking out at the sky, you can see him ruminating it all under his weary brow, blowing smoke out into the Dublin night air.
Do ya want a cuppa tea, bro? I ask him.
Yeah, sure bro, a cuppa tea, and I’ll read ya some new poems I have, I want ya to hear them, see what ya think.
Cool. Grand so.
It’s the afternoon in Dublin, springtime, Dan and I are in the sitting room in the apartment, drinking tea, and having just finished eating scrambled eggs and toasted white bread. He sat on one end of the sofa and I at the other. William Blake’s collected works in hardback open and on Dan’s lap, his eyes had that mid-day, just smoked a pinner, glassed and contemplative look to them, he turned nonchalantly and asked,
Do you reckon Blake saw the machine elves?
I’d say he definitely saw a few of them, man.
Yeah.
And just fucking slapped them.
Yeah.
Slapped them away.
And they came out of the wall like they do in trips...
Like they do in the old Salvia trips.
Never done it, to be honest.
The archangel Gabriel came to Blake once, didn’t he?
Yeah, Blake says to them, “How do I know you’re the archangel Gabriel?”
Yeah, yeah, could be the devil.
It’d be a good thing to keep that in mind when they meet a holy person, or have a vision, isn’t it?
Might be the devil.
You could be any old spirit, he says.
Yeah, might be the devil.
Yeah.
Let’s have a blast of one of the poems there, Kenny.
Sure:
I wander through each chartered street,
near where the chartered Thames does flow,
and mark in every face I meet marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man, in every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every band, the mine-forged manacles I hear.
How the chimneysweepers cry, every blackening church appalls,
And the hapless soldier sigh, runs in blood down palace walls,
but most through midnight streets I hear how the youthful harlot’s curse
blasts the newborn infant’s tear and blights with plagues the marriage hearse.
Lovely.
Yeah. Great fucking poem:
London, published in 1796 as part of Songs of Experience. It’s a decade of a total critique, you know, a little bit like the period of modernism was in the arts and a little bit like the 1960s, where there’s a sudden eruption of political struggle, which is, you know, accompanied by, influenced by, and influences back the intellectual atmosphere of the era, and really in the 1790s, we see the beginning of all of the critiques which have come to flower later on, including the left critique, this feminist critique, the anarchist critique, the anticivilisation critique, and so on, all these total critiques of the world and desires to remake the world in a new way, in a new utopian way, they begin to flower in the 1790s in a way that they hadn’t done previously, and because of that, there’s so much great art and great poetry to discuss, but at the middle of it all, really, and the one who, if you like, has the deepest appreciation of the terrible journey that humanity has embarked upon, with industrialization, the bureaucratization, the regularization, and the commercialization of life, which was evident to the Romantic poets at the very beginning. Blake doesn’t like cities, and I think he repeats that like five times, so I think we’re fair enough to say that this is not just about London; it’s about the city itself, about every city.
Yeah, in the same way that in Joyce, Dublin is every city in Ulysses and so on, the way that we can say we were discussing earlier, I think Alan Moore’s idea of Jerusalem taking Blake’s “Jerusalem” being the holy city.
He doesn’t have a utopian city; really, hasn’t he? He’s kind of saying London is every city; it is every horrible, you know, but he doesn’t seem to see that there’s anything else but a horrible city. The city’s a crime scene. Even though in Songs of Innocence, which comes before this and is a twin book to it, he elucidates a kind of pastoral utopian vision with the countryside, sheep, and lambs, piping boys, and all this sort of stuff. Every positive vision has a sheep, shepherd, children planting grain, no laws, freedom to roam, hills, dales, flowers. And he’s got a biting negativity, he’s got an excoriating negativity, that he reserves for industry and the city.
The dark satanic mills, the factory.
So if we go through the poem here, we’ll see Blake; he’s wandering through. He’s immediately wandering through a chartered street. Somebody owns every inch of space. So when he leaves his house, he says, walking down the street, “Someone owns that little bit.”
I’m owned. I’m bound by laws and regulations. Serving commerce. And the chartered Thames does flow.
Even the river man. Even the river is owned by somebody at this time in early capitalism.
There are charters on the river.
He ties the city to the river very early on, and I think that’s very important because cities can’t function without rivers. We build cities out of the fear of dying of thirst. So the city is something that comes out of human anxiety and human fear and denaturalizes humans.
You could not even try to have a city without rivers and waters connecting you to other cities.
Exactly, so we’ve turned the river; what he’s saying is that humans have infected the Earth with the city and laws and regulations and commercialization and capitalism and that spreads, that poisons nature itself, nature starts to be remade and retaught.
Yeah, exactly.
And now he’s saying we need to reclaim England’s green and pleasant land.
How do we get back to the green and pleasant land, I suppose?
Yeah, it’s a long way, isn’t it?
It’s a long way.
It’s what rewilding and all of that type of stuff is about, if we ever get around to it, isn’t it?
As we look out my window here, where we’re sitting, I see three cranes, you know?
What is that covering those lovely mountains?
The dark satanic mills are covering them.
Yeah exactly, obscuring our vision.
But you see, I don’t think God has ever entered this universe and possibly not ever observed anything in this universe.
So you’re a deist?
Yeah.
A real, like, sort of, Victor Hugo type deist?
Yeah.
That God, He made it all and then He said, I’ve done that now.
Yeah.
Like, there’s a, there’s a divine presence, but it’s not God.
That would be the Holy Spirit.
Yeah.
Yeah, or something like that.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Let’s say where we actually are now, because you’re saying the world now.
Right now we could go out onto this balcony
and the sun is shining there and it is very nice and there’s birds flying around I can see and they’re the same birds that have been there since the day I arrived here they’re not any different, are they?
Are they not?
They don’t look different to me they sound the same they look the same the trees look the same to me the sky looks the same, and we can look at them. Look at those two birds flying there, or you can look at those two birds now and say, well, look at the birds, man. They look happy. Yeah, they look happy, so there is an element of perception there.
I feel at that distance from it, you know what I mean? I think it’s a little bit melancholic for me, you know.
Yeah, but you’re a bit of a melancholic being, in many ways, right?
I suppose I am, at heart.
So that’s what I mean by perception, you know?
OK. But the opposite would also be perception then, surely?
True. But there’s a way to see clearly, to see the ultimate.
The Ultimate? That’s big talk, that brother, says Dan to me.
Indeed. Indeed, it is, brother. But what are poets about if it isn’t big talk?
The Ultimate... Hmmmmhhh...
Yeah, the fuckin Ultimate brother!
He who is a melancholic death wanting, sleep deprived, boy bullied at school and at home, waking in the dark with memories of children beaten with sticks. He who is a happy tramp. Wandering through Ireland reading poems and telling stories for all who listen, holes in his socks and stains on his pant legs, whistling tunes, smoking and eating and laying his head on whatever pillow should his head meet. He is Dan Jordan, the greatest Irish poet of his generation. He is my friend. Dan and me are brothers of the word and of the tongue, and of the lyric like Jack and Neal, like Shams and Rumi, like Lennon and McCartney, like Li Po and Du Fu, like Sancho and the Don, like Melville and Hawthorn, like Harpo and Groucho, like Vincent and Theo, like Buddha and Ananda. I repeat myself, for what is true sometimes needs repeating.
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