I was somewhat baffled by the things I found on U68 back in 1984 – The Rapping Duke, for instance: a dude who rapped entirely in a John Wayne voice imitation ­– and I probably didn’t register a number of bands that I wound up getting into some years later. U68 was, I think, a video equivalent to a college radio station with an emphasis on the eclectic and a red carpet laid out for very low budget operations.  But I do remember one night the unannounced procession of three videos in a row by poets: a totally warped rap by Bob Holman, an anti-nukes song by Anne Waldman that I think is called “Uh-Oh Plutonium!”, and a really lovely rendition of “Father Death Blues” by Allen Ginsberg. They were all songs, now that I think of it, but I can’t find any trace of their existence on the web but for a reference to them in the Holman archive at NYU’s Fales Library under the heading of PTV. I do have this image in memory of Ginsberg riding what may have been the Staten Island Ferry and otherwise walking around town while the song played. I could have it wrong. But if anyone has any further information out there on the videos, I’m interested in tracking them down for a repeat viewing. There are at least two other videos available at You Tube of Ginsberg performing “Father Death Blues”, a song he wrote in the wake of his own father’s death and a piece that might be useful to look at in conjunction with his poem “White Shroud,” a longer, intensely precise reconstruction of a dream visit to see his mother some two decades-plus after she died.

So the moral of this post is: go to modern art museum on free pass, stop by punk rock exhibit, watch irrepressible S/M dance video, flashback to childhood tv experience, hear Allen Ginsberg’s voice in head, ponder depths of AG’s later work, go public.

PS – in conjunction with the comments box under John’s blues post from a few days ago, there may be something to comparing the Blind Willie McTell-Bob Dylan-Johnny Cash progression through the song “Delia” and the movement from Petrarch’s Sonnet 189 through Wyatt’s translation (“My galley charged with forgetfulness”) into Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster”. You could look it up, as they say, if interested.

I love blues music — singing the blues, listening to the blues. That’s why I was so excited to get a call from my friend Pierre Lacocque, a wicked blues harp player and the band leader of Mississippi Heat. Pierre asked me to work on lyrics for the band’s new album — and I couldn’t pass up the chance.

I had a blast working with Pierre on lyrics for the band’s last disc, Hattiesburg Blues (briefly #1 on the blues charts!). Part of what made the experience so much fun was the blues form — that insistent echo of repeating lines. Here’s an excerpt from Gone So Long:

I can hear the train
running down the track.
I can hear the train
running down the track.
Working any harder
Would give me a heart attack.

I also loved the story the songs tell (the unabashed narrative drive behind the songs). Here’s a glimpse from Forgot You Had a Home:

I tried to change you, but
You paid me no mind
You choose your job
Over family time
You forgot you had a home.
All you’ve got is a one track mind.

The title pretty much gives the story away in this one, but I like how this lyric updates the blues convention of a wandering man: here his eyes look only to work, not to another woman.

When Pierre writes music he has specific singers in mind. It’s cool — and challenging — to write from the perspective of other characters (in this case as a wronged woman), and even other singers (some singers like room at the end of phrases so they can create vocal “fills”; others like a cleaner line).

The new album is not yet titled, but the tracks have all been laid down. The CD should be ready in January.

come down when it fell. I headed over to Cathy’s where I was staying and I had the problem of arriving at her house and not wanting to say I’m sick since I had never stayed with them before. But once I hit the bed I knew it was a long fall and I was pretty much there for twenty-four hours straight.

My friends were kind considering they were going to Hawaii the next day and it would ruin everything if I brought germs into their house. By Tuesday I was semi-frisky, hopping around LA making all the dates and meetings I’d planned. I even went into a studio with Japanther and recorded three poems. The altered state I had been in was a plus cause they basically said I could record whatever I wanted and Ian played me a recorded song with plenty of fast guitar and some vocals and pointed to one area both on the computer screen and in time and said I thought maybe if you could go in there and then there were some bells and it slowed down and you could read even slower in there. So I jumped in late in one fairly new poem with a lyric: “I live in a terminal/and so do you” and it didn’t so much sound like a song as be an open moment somehow and the trickiest part was not trying to sound like a punk talking fast. Use your regular voice he kept telling me and we recorded the same two or three poems over and over again and it was kind of amazing like going to the bathroom in front of everyone since I kept stepping out of the recording room and someone would say do it again, or you went up on this line, or I could hear you turning papers.

Everyone had a lot of time and was listening really close. When it was over I ate food that everyone was eating that Matt dished out and felt like part of the scene. It was nice. Now I had a couple of hours to kill and was afraid to return to Cathy and Julie’s house as the germ bearer but I did and it was brief and it was possible Cathy was hiding from my sickness because I never saw her again. For days I’ve wanted to see the Keats film. I went to his room in Rome in 1986, the room where he died and looked at the little orange flowers on the ceiling that were probably the last thing he looked at. I love looking at the last thing. Rome is full of them.

Finally I was returning the rental car and in the airport and going home finally though I would be sick for many more days. I read the New York Times while I waited, normally a very grounding routine and first I noticed in the paper that one group of businessmen and world leaders looked like puppets. I just couldn’t see these as real people and that thought was astonishing. But then I was looking at another group a few pages later and the sensation struck me again that these were not real people, but odd somehow. Like toy people. And I touched my head and it seemed I had a fever and the visions I were having were not The New York Times but were me gently hallucinating.

He was the exact same age as me but when I came to town in the poetry world he already had everything – a book from a big press with a Larry Rivers cover called Living at the Movies and parts of his Basketball Diaries had been published in Paris Review while he was still a teenager. He came to the Poetry Project when he was in high school to meet the older poets – Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman who themselves were in their 20s then. It was unimaginable to me, Jim’s kind of youth. And that he was famous from then on.

Jim had a rock star moment too (I watched him singing “people who died” on you tube last night and I thought he looked maybe uncomfortable) and he was a better than fair monologist which he was doing and everyone was doing somewhat in the time that we toured. Lila Wallace sponsored the tour and the idea was that a famous poet and a younger or less famous poet would go out there together and the pleasure of doing this with Jim far out shadowed any feeling that I should be he who had such a different life from mine.

I had met him already a few times before our tour which is not to say the two of us were in some bus together. We met in city to city, from gig to gig. We read together a bunch of times was it. In San Francisco where I had read many times before and usually to mostly gay audiences I discovered that there was a massive straight scene there too. Who knew. Jim brought them out. So definitely some nights I felt a little buried by the scene he drew though other nights I felt I was “the winner” but Jim always read longer, that was one of the hallmarks of a star, to be comfortable with that. To know that people expected it. He was sweet. I mean he was obviously sharp too. But the sweetness wasn’t a performance it was true. And it’s just a great gift to give five or ten readings with another writer if you admire their work. Which I did. I kind of remember him getting on his knees in some reading at St. Mark’s Church and in that poem he said he was asking permission.

He was very tall. He kind of merged a catholic thrill and a rock n roll thrill and a poet thrill all in one shameless gesture. On our tour Jim had a very neat trick which it took me a while to uncover which was that he would be reading from some book that he had read from many times and suddenly he would look up and tell us some other detail about the same subject. It was so fresh these moments of pure performance when something simply occurred to him and he decided to share it. But when I bought the book I discovered that THOSE LINES WERE IN THERE! He simply delivered them as if they were impromptu and returned to the text with another grade of attention in place now and the reading was refreshed. A device like that explained his staying power. Still at first I struggled with whether this gesture was false or not. I was wanting to be pure. It was like watching anyone reading the same poem again and again. Or on other occasions I heard Jim tell the same story again in order to set up a poem.

There was a sense I finally got from him that this was a job and he had the chops to do it well. He did it with such ease. He did it like it was raw. Which was an amazing gift. I stepped into his wake for a few minutes this evening and on the way a group of us had wondered if he had any family. They’re Irish I suggested. How could he not have siblings. A bald middle-aged man almost magically introduced himself to us then as Jim’s brother. Though you’d never know it he laughed seeing his own grey suit and bright tie. We told him we were poets and the man said he never had any difficulty imagining Jim as a writer. But the rock and roll stuff seemed wrong. He was an altar boy you know and Jim would be shaking up on the altar. He didn’t like it at all being up there. And that’s what I saw. In the music he look kind of exposed.

The act of performing writing is quiet, after all. It’s very private in a way. No matter’s who’s out there. And the jokes or agreements we might have with ourselves about what’s real and what’s performed we keep to ourselves finally. He was great poet and performing artist and the difference between the two only Jim knew.

Jim Carroll—poet, novelist, musician, diarist, impresario—died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60 years old.

The tributes and reminisces have come in from various sources–from English footballers to New York musicians to everyday readers–all noting what a tremendous presence Carroll was both onstage and off.

*

The New York Times:

“’I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation,’ the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview on Sunday. ‘The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty.’

*

Tom Clark:

“Jim had by that time already begun haunting the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in the Bowery Church. He loved the poetry of Frank O’Hara, and writing under a rush of Frank’s influence, at seventeen produced his own first slim chapbook, Organic Trains. Ted Berrigan had taken Jim under his wing. Poetry not basketball was where Jim wanted to go in his life.”

*

Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney on NPR:

“He was tall and lithe, with a ghostly, otherworldly mien. Carroll was reading poems with no back-up band, no team, no amp to crank to up to 10. But he didn’t have any problems covering the stage, reaching the corners and permeating the room.”

*

Rolling Stone:

“Carroll also contributed an untitled poem to the pages of Rolling Stone, which we have reprinted here:

It’s sad this vision required such height.
I’d have preferred to be down with the others, in the stadium.
They know the terror of birds.
I am left, instead, with the deep drone…
The urgency to deliver light, as if it
were some news from the far galaxies.

[From Issue 321 — July 10, 1980]”

*

The LA Times:

“The book hit bestseller lists when it was made into a movie in 1995 starring Leonardo DiCaprio. At book signings with DiCaprio, however, ‘it was Carroll the crowds clamored for,’ Lewis MacAdams wrote in Entertainment Weekly.”

*

New Music Express:

“Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig also wrote about Carroll’s death on his Twitter page , saying: ‘I spent a lot of time listening to my dad’s 45 of ‘People Who Died’ back in the day.’”

*

English footballer Matt Lawrence in The Mirror:

“‘At 13 years of age, Jim Carroll writes better prose than 89 per cent of the novelists working today.’ – Jack Kerouac

If Jack ‘On The Road’ Kerouac describes a writer in such glowing terms, then a light should immediately flicker in your brain.

Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred pounds.”

*

American Songwriter:

“And to most, he’s not even a footnote. Though being a New York-driven artist, he did warrant an obit in today’s New York Times. But that’s not what matters here. What stands out is the way anyone who heard the vicious lashing, thrashing had it burned into their skin, the psyche: the liberation of not just kicking out the jams, but the way exactitude in an almost musical insurrection made the songs hit that much harder.”

*

And The Catholic Boy fansite has an extensive archive of performance videos and interviews.

Jim Carroll interview 1/18/91 Cleveland Ohio

The New York Post reported yesterday that the Madonna once called on Anne Sexton’s poem “Love Song” to justify her love of a former bodyguard, Jim Albright.

“In a fax dated Dec. 24, 1993, Madonna wrote to Albright: ‘I was the girl of the love letter/ the girl full of talk of dreams and destination . . . the one with her eyes half under the covers/ with her large gun-metal blue eyes/ with the thick vein in the crook of her neck.’ Sexton’s poem read: ‘I was the girl of the chain letter/ the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes . . . the one with her eyes half under her coat/ with her large gun-metal blue eyes/ with the thin vein at the bend of her neck.’

The love fax  (!!!) is one of many items up for auction at Gotta Have It Collectibles this week, though presumably the only one related to Anne Sexton (I do envision “Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator” scribbled on a Vogue-era cone bra uncovered one day).  Sexton’s name has come up with unexpected frequency already this summer, most notably when Ange Mlinko compared her to Frederick Seidel in The Nation.

An excerpt:

Hardly read anymore, it seems, outside feminist literature classes, Sexton’s Complete Poems is fatter than Plath’s Collected, and it took the violence of Ariel much further with less talent. From “Again and Again and Again”:

I have a black look I do not
like. It is a mask I try on.
I migrate toward it and its frog
sits on my lips and defecates.
It is old. It is also a pauper.
I have tried to keep it on a diet.
I give it no unction.

There is a good look that I wear
like a blood clot. I have
sewn it over my left breast.
I have made a vocation of it.
Lust has taken plant in it
and I have placed you and your
child at its milk tip.

The poem’s singsong, staccato sentences and cartoonish images prefigure Seidel’s to a T.

Wonder what Seidel would think of that comparison.  I’ll ask him next time I gently place some raw steak on a Ducati engine block and he magically appears out of a puff of cigar smoke and man-musk.  (Quick aside: A friend recently called Seidel “Eminem for the New Yorker set,” to which I replied that Eminem is the Eminem of the New Yorker set, but why quibble?  For pop and poetry, all I really want to know is which poet Justin Timberlake consults when he goes a-wooing.  D.A. Powell? Olena Davis? The folks behind Vowel Movers?)

But back to Sexton.  In an upcoming feature for the website, the poet CA Conrad muses: “it’s interesting how Sexton has been disappearing from the bigger academic world of poetry, and her friends Plath and Lowell and Berryman, they’re all sort of amped up now.”

Good point, Conrad.  I wonder why that is.  With all the Seidel hubub, do you think Sexton is due for a come-back?

OK, if that GIF is too annoying, just tell me, and I’ll take it down. Would be a shame, tho.

Adrian Matejka’s second book of poems, Mixology, was published as part of last year’s National Poetry Series, and I’ve finally gotten around to picking it up and checking it out. I knew Adrian very briefly when we both lived in Carbondale, Illinois, in 2001. He had a radio show on the local independent station WDBX (then 700 watts; since upgraded to 3000), and he asked me to come on the show and read some poems. I’d done this sort of thing before, on a poetry show on Madison, Wisconsin’s indy station, the venerable WORT. But Adrian’s show was a little different.

When I arrived at the studio, Adrian explained that while I read my poems, he was going to play music in the background. In other words, he was to be the DJ, and I the MC. Frankly friends I freaked. As we got into it, though, I found myself really enjoying it. I would never claim to have skillz as an MC, but fortunately Adrian’s an excellent DJ, so the end result didn’t sound half bad.

I think.

I could be wrong.

I’m probably wrong.

I’ve many times before and since thought about adding music, or still or moving imagery, or other sorts of aesthetic enhancements, to my poetry reading schtick. Doesn’t it seem like kind of a no-brainer, in this age of collage, pastiche, inter- and extra-disciplinarity? Studio artists are all over this; the Venice and Whitney biennials are always full of film, sound, text, dance, and theater in addition to painting, sculpture, and photographs. Yes, surely, yes yes yes, there are many poets who mix, collaborate, boundary-cross, draw, dance, sing. But be honest: If, when you go to a poetry reading, the reader says just a sec, I gotta fire up the laptop projector / plug in the mp3 player / unpack my sax / put on my costume / etc., don’t you cringe a little in anticipation, hoping s/he isn’t about to make a fool of him or herself? Don’t you? I do. Why do I?

Anyway, my thanks to Adrian for making me feel like Rakim for that one hour in Carbondale, long ago. Here’s a poem from Mixology. Actually, this is the version that was in Prairie Schooner. It’s a little different in the book. Is it cool that we just like post all sorts of copyrighted material on here, bosses? More mixology, I guess.

WHEELS OF STEEL

I got me two songs instead
of eyes—all swollen and blacked

out like the day after a lost fight.
Two jigsaws spinning, buzzing

the backdrop for woodshop
or emcee, bar mitzvah or afterset.

It’s Run DMC rocking without
a band, but not without me.

Two rims spinning after the car
stops. Baby, I’m the little lenses

in the bifocals if they were on pulleys.
I’m the Wizard of Oz if Oz

was a fish fry in July. Call me
Master of the Cracked Fingers.

One song spins forward, the other
back to repeat itself: Every day

I’m hustlin’. Every day I’m hustlin’.
Baby, I’m the layaway payment

on a Ferris wheel. My songs orbit
parking lots and rent parties

like the crazy lady’s eyes
when she finds out her lover man

already left. One of my songs
spins backward, while the other

plays forward like sugar mixing
in to make the grape. My songs

are the pinwheels for this parade
of moonwalks and uprocks.

Ed Park peered into the strange world of David Berman’s drawings for last week’s cover story.  Park argued that the drawings collected in the newly released  Portable February are cut from the same quirky cloth as Berman’s poetry and music.  One ‘rawing that particularly caught the writer’s attention: a billboard/projection stating, “Somehow I had offered to deliver bad news to a maniac.”

“You can even imagine Berman’s deadpan, dead-on singing voice delivering that non-punchline punchline on one of his albums with his band, the Silver Jews,” Park says.

Ah yes. The now-defunct Joos.   That monotonic punchline machine that is Berman’s singing voice, delivering zingers over some jangly jangles.  It’s amazing how much of my life has been spent humming the following:

In 1984 I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.

-”Random Rules”

On the last day of your life don’t forget to die.

-”Advice to the Graduate”

We’re trapped inside this song where the nights are so long!

-”New Orleans”

Sentimental as a cat’s grave.  Fuckin’ body broke my eyes.

-”I’m Gonna Love the Hell Out of You”

All houses dream in blueprints.

-”Pretty Eyes”

When the sun sets on the ghetto all the broken stuff gets cold.

-”Smith and Jones”

It is autumn and my camouflage is dying.

-”The Wild Kindness”

The sky is low and gray like a Japanese table

-”Time Will Break the World”

What about the stuff we quote believe?

-”San Francisco B.C.”

What looks like sleep is really hot pursuit.

-”My Pillow is the Threshold”

Admittedly, I wake up nearly every mornign with Public Enemy’s “911 is a Joke” rattling around in my brain, so I may be a tuneless obsessive.  But sometimes I feel like these particular tunes have a code embedded in them I’m stupidly susceptible to.  I mean, they’re so goofy, but I can’t help but love them!

Father’s day came and went, and I’ve been wanting to say something about my dad, and all my poetic fathers, after all the talk about mothers. I want to thank my dad for a lot of things. For reading “The Night Before Christmas” aloud every year until I got addicted to triple meters. For telling me women couldn’t write epic so obnoxiously that I had to write one. For bombarding me with so many books about Dickinson that I ended up writing an essay called “My Father Dickinson.” For dragging me to Horace Gregory and Marya Zaturenska’s house where I was more-or-less inoculated against poetry gossip and exposed to the first library I ever saw that was entirely poetry. For taking me to Assissi and Lourdes and Delphi and Santa Sophia and Jerusalem. For typing out one of my earlyish poems on his old Royal typewriter that smelled of oil so that he could appreciate it better. For having an old Royal typewriter that smelled of oil, and keeping his thousands of draft manuscript sheets about Wittgenstein in neat stacks, and typing again on their backs. For his desk drawers (but I have written about those elsewhere).

For all the fathers he, in turn, gave me: For showing me D.H. Lawrence’s house and Shakespeare’s birthplace. For talking the merits of Eliot vs. Stevens or Stevens vs. Crane or Crane vs. Yeats over decades worth of cups of coffee. For his library shelves dripping with yards of Blake and Valery and D.H. Lawrence and Dogen. For intoning Hart Crane’s “Voyages: II” in tones I can never forget. For xeroxing an entire out-of-print book of Paul Engle’s poetry, cutting and pasting each page to fit the pages of an artist’s blank book, and mailing it to me just after I moved near Iowa City. For listening to LP records of actors reciting Vaughan and Crashaw and Traherne on the couch with his eyes closed for hours, especially in the months before his death, and for thinking a lot about Milton in the weeks before.

For telling me that e.e. cummings had been a very nice and ordinary seeming gentleman when he drove him home once from some event. For having once sat across from Thomas Mann on a train. For tracking down for me every obscure prosody volume I ever needed, even in the days before the internet. For mentioning “Lydia Sigourney, the Sweet Singer of Hartford” so often that I got curious. For saying John Ashbery should “just spit it out in Daddy’s hand.” For going to the Auden lectures where he met my mother.

For finally publishing his book of poetry, Flying Over Ocean City, just in time to see it on his deathbed. For including in it poems about balloons and philosophers, and one that opened, “Athena’s owls are little and friendly / and wise because they’ve made peace with the night.” For looking at a copy of my first chapbook around the same time, and telling me, “These are real poems, so I know people will look after you. I won’t worry about you. You’ll be allright.”