One Art

BY PROF. VAROL AKMAN

Jim Carroll (1949-2009)

"When I was about 9 years old, man, I realized that the real thing was not only to do what you were doing totally great, but to look totally great while you were doing it."

 

Commended by Jack Kerouac for writing "better prose than 89 percent of the novelists working today," James Dennis Carroll was born in 1949 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was the son of an Irish American bartender. He attended Catholic schools where his teachers encouraged him to keep a journal. However, his talent as an athlete attracted greater attention, getting him a basketball scholarship to Trinity, an exclusive high school on the Upper West Side. There he excelled as a star player on the school squad, while publishing his earliest verse in a limited-edition booklet, Organic Trains (1967). With a successor volume, 4 Ups and 1 Down (1970), Carroll won himself a cult following. Living at the Movies (1973) brought further praise and a wider audience.

Ted Berrigan, writing in Culture Hero (1969), declared that Carroll was "the first truly new American poet." Soon after, The Paris Review published extracts from what would become The Basketball Diaries. This extraordinary memoir begins on an ordinary note ("Today was my first Biddy League game and my first day in any organized basketball league"), but by the end of the book, Carroll is a heroin addict. The Diaries became very popular, especially among college students. In the 1995 film version of The Diaries, Leonardo DiCaprio played the central, autobiographical role.

Writing full time and experimenting with drugs, Carroll dropped out of Columbia University. He joined the New York art scene, working for Andy Warhol and contributing to his films. Later he lived with the couple Patti Smith ("I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation") and Robert Mapplethorpe. He wrote about those hectic times in Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries, 1971-1973.

In 1973, Carroll left New York to break away from drugs. He settled in Bolinas, Calif. In 1978, Smith visited on tour with her band, and Carroll accompanied her to San Diego. When she appeared on stage and introduced Carroll, he read his lyrics to the accompaniment of her band. Encouraged by Smith, he formed The Jim Carroll Band. When Carroll returned to New York to sign contracts for the re-publication of The Diaries, he brought some recordings of his band. With Keith Richards lending a hand, they signed a contract with Atlantic Records and in 1980 released their debut album, Catholic Boy. The hit song of the album was "People Who Died":

Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died

In a review, Newsweek wrote: "Not since Lou Reed wrote 'Walk on the Wild Side' has a rock singer so vividly evoked the casual brutality of New York City as has Jim Carroll." The song also appeared in the soundtrack of the 1982 box-office phenomenon E.T.

Carroll died in 2009 in his home in Manhattan. His headstone reads: "When the spirit grows too large for the body, both are called home."

The following poem is from his latest collection, Void of Course (1998). I think it needs no introduction. You can hear Carroll reciting it at
http://wn.com/jim_carroll_reciting_8_fragments_for_kurt_cobain_on_mtv's_spoken_word_unplugged

8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain

1 /
Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover
And it resents fame
With bitter vengeance

Pills and powders only placate it awhile
Then it puts you in a place where the planet's poles reverse
Where the currents of electricity shift

Your Body becomes a magnet and pulls to it despair and rotten teeth,
Cheez Whiz and guns

Whose triggers are shaped tenderly into a false lust
In timeless illusion

2 /
The guitar claws kept tightening, I guess, on your heart stem.
The loops of feedback and distortion, threaded right thru
Lucifer's wisdom teeth, and never stopped their reverberating
In your mind

And from the stage
All the faces out front seemed so hungry
With an unbearably wholesome misunderstanding

From where they sat, you seemed so far up there
High and live and diving

And instead you were swamp crawling
Down, deeper
Until you tasted the Earth's own blood
And chatted with the buzzing-eyed insects that heroin breeds
…