Living at the Movies

Living at the Movies
By Jim Carroll
Grossman / $4.50 paper

the fancied tilt of stars, sordid doves
burning in the hollow brick oven,
oceans which generalize tears. it is
known to us

Jim Carroll knows counterpoint, and his poems, back to back, and even within each other, line by line, are pushing and pulling, making for dramatic tensions. He mixes the serious with the frivolous, the mysterious with the known, making the high and lofty work on levels with Joey Heatherton and Orange Julius -- read "Love Rockets" which is pure pop presody. And then earlier, he'll cast a line straight from a French classical era of high dope and despair, a Baudelaire or Mallarme-like line: "The shower of black infants across the infected landscape..," ("August") Then too he likes to use the pastoral with the urban, and he is forever watching, watching, "like watching wind push Seaflowers"; "we are here on 53rd and 6th watching steel/turn to ivy". Yeats on Saint Mark's Place? Of course, even that; any damn source that fits -- birds and wild flowers and concrete!

and the wind is pushing like pine
cones against the angel's dying
sperm.