Jim Carroll: Caught in a Trap

by Frank DiCostanzo & Michael Workman
Lumpen Times 8 May 1999

Exclusive: includes the entire Jim Carroll interview!

On Saturday, May 8,
diarist, musician and poet Jim Carroll made a rare appearance at Chicago night spot the
Hothouse, 31 East Balbo, a spacious setting filled with Brazilian rhythms and flavor. He
read from his newest collection, Void Of Course (published by Penguin Poets, New
York), to many well-dressed admirers seated among dozens of roundtop tables. Before the
show got underway, I managed to innocuously eat my Philly and fries from an opportune
stage left vantage, but not without having to fend off a phalanx of pushy waitresses.

Entering the stage wearing a black leather jacket and
bluejeans, Jim Carroll was smoking a cigarette and carrying bottled water and several
books. The din of the audience dissipated as Mr. Carroll approached the microphone. He
spent the first minute slowly and methodically removing his jacket while gazing emptily
out into the audience, then giving a brief account, in that protean Noo Yawk accent, of
his recent “Today Show” interview. He explained how the questions were
purposefully ham-fisted and meant to disturb, describing the sound stage as
“surreal.” This opening narrative helped to paint the image of a 70’s poet
displaced.

Shifting his focus anecdotally, Mr. Carroll went on to
tell of his extended Amtrak journey from Milwaukee and of his conversation with a
300-pound redneck. The first coroner on the scene of Jayne Mansfield’s decapitation,
the man was carrying a French book on Satanism titled La Ba, which compares Anton
La Vey with L. Ron Hubbard. Mr. Carroll quipped, to snickers from the audience, that both
authors “knew the real money was in religion.” The redneck subsequently related
how he and his partner Shorty referred to the head as “she” and to the rest of
Ms. Mansfield’s lifeless body as “that.” Mr. Carroll went to some depth in
his reflections upon the religious and philosophical implications of such particular
labels. At this point, Mr. Carroll’s proselytizing ignited the conservative
disposition of an unruly fan who rudely belted forth with fuzzy headed fervor, “What
the fuck are you talking about!?” Apparently, the aspiring poet could not fully
digest the metaphysical nature of this preliminary dialogue. However, Mr. Carroll was able
to somewhat skillfully subdue the young brute, who finally shut up after threatening to
physically abuse several impatient audience members.

After this colorful interruption, Mr. Carroll proceeded to
read several poems, including “A Day At The Races” from Forced Entries,
“I Am Not Kurt Schwitterz” from Fear Of Dreaming and, from Void Of
Course, “Facts,” “Sick Bird” (in which he left out the word
“urine”) and “8 Fragments For Kurt Cobain.” He concluded with some
song lyrics off his newest album, Pools of Mercury, giving sprechstimme
performances of “Falling Down Laughing” and “the Beast Within.”

After the show I followed Jim backstage, where, after a
brief introduction, during which he was trying to rouse up a cup of coffee, we settled
into a discussion of Orpheus, death, the creative process, and Mr. Carroll’s unique
perspective on the current state of poetry. We focused initially on how Mr. Carroll saw
himself within a heritage thousands of years old, and on the Greek myth of Orpheus–a
Thracian poet whose music moved even inanimate objects. He was able to charm Pluto, god of
the Underworld, into releasing his dead wife Eurydice on the condition that he would not
look back during his return journey to the surface world. Orpheus, in a moment of
thoughtlessness, looked back and, consequently, lost once more his love. Mr. Carroll shook
his head in puzzlement at this comparison, and then gibed stone-facedly:

Uhm…I’ve never thought about it [the relationship
of his career to the mythology], in relationship to my myth, or to my work…well,
Orpheus, it was great that there were hummingbirds around him all the time.

The reimagined story of Orpheus and his journey to the
underworld is the subject of Salman Rushdie’s newest work, The Ground Beneath Her
Feet. During a recent speaking engagement with the Chicago Historical Society, the
author spoke about his writing process, and, while discussing the division of sense and
intellect, of inside and outside, brought up the example of a Warhol exhibit he had been
to. One piece consisted of a “learn to dance” floor arrangement, framed beneath
glass which people were being encouraged to walk over. Halfway through the dance pattern,
it became impossible to do. Rushdie went through it himself and also found it impossible.
A little girl behind him got to the point where everybody else stumbled through the
diagram and she said, “Oh, I see. You’ve got to step off it.” Stepping off
the glass and then back on, she was able to complete the pattern. Mr. Carroll fixed his
eye, carefully digesting the indirect approach I was taking to his work, and then summed
up the analogy:

Uhm, she found, uhm, she knew that
she had to go beneath the surface voice.

Mr. Carroll was perceptibly resolving the seemingly disparate elements of my preliminary
questions into a conversant, and therefore more personable, means of expressing what I was
struggling to get at, namely, how he uniquely perceives the world in which he must exist.
His thoughts appeared to coagulate as he settled back and, listening intently, sipped his
coffee while we turned to his notions of poetry and music, as performance, and of
the possibilities for the further integration of these two mediums. In typical Jim Carroll
fashion, he managed to respond with skillful abstraction:

Uhm, I always found my own songs and poems to
be two quite different mediums, you know. Aesthetically they’d be the same, but
technically they’re quite different, you know. I didn’t like it when people
would write that I wrote poems with music, you know, cuz they weren’t…and as for
the future, I…you know, uhm with the Pools Of Mercury album I decided, well
with Praying Mantis I just, it was kind of defiant, I just needed to do no music at
all. You know, and uhm, you didn’t need music to you know, to have poetry just like
have its own rhythm, you know, the way it should work on the page but, with the Pools
Of Mercury album, I wanted to, you know, like, uhm I mean you could just do so many
things with music and stuff, and of course it goes back to the Meistersingers and the
troubadours and the whole Provençal tradition and stuff, and uhm, I think that with
computers, digitally, you can do so much, you know, you can move stuff around and stuff,
technically, you know, to fit a drum beat you can change the phrasing of the
writer—that’s a problem. You know, I think it should always be done low-tech,
you know, cuz at times we just change my phrasing…I didn’t have to read it over,
you know, if you could draw out a word, you know, or put more of a pause between two
words, you know, and that’s a kind of dangerous thing, but uhm, fucking computer
programs are going to ruin art in one way or another until we realize we’re doing
that, and then we’ll revolt against them,…uhm, so I think until then, until we
decide to, you know, stop using digital technology and just go back to an analog
technology where you participate with the person’s technology—or with the
other person’s consciousness and they participate with yours, you know. It’s not
such a broad thing, techno-oriented. Then, you know, rock ‘n roll’s gonna be
rock ‘n roll and spoken word’ll be spoken word. And if you unite the two
together, it’ll sound interesting as a music and the musicians you work with and
stuff, you know. Otherwise you’re going to have to write words that are meant to be,
you know, done with music, uhm, which is somewhere between a song and a poem, because any
poem worth its salt has to work on the page, you know. And so uhm, I don’t think that
way…I mean, I read the poems which I knew were lyrical and read well—from this
new book, from Void Of Course—but I knew that I had read some of them already,
so it was a book that uhm, reading the poems that I knew read well, and then put music to
them. And if you’re going to do that, you might as well just write songs themselves
you know, and sing them. No matter how limited your technical voice is, you know, you
could always sing them in one state or another. But uhm, somebody’ll probably come
along and find some way to make, you know, one thing. I think it’s going to happen
by, you know, one person will do one spoken word piece with music that’ll bust out
and floor everybody, you know. But to sustain a whole album of it, I doubt if it’ll
happen. You know, I don’t think people are ready for that.

Pausing momentarily to take in this
delightfully circuitous reply, I then refocused and, picking up the reference to Void
Of Course, piped in: “I find it interesting you just said that you had written it
pretty fast, and yet the period spanned about four years, is that right?”

“Well, it spanned about four
years—according to the book—but that’s only because, uhm, the Kurt Cobain
poem was written in 1994 and maybe two other poems. The Cobain poem was written after he
died in 1994, you know, and that was really the oldest poem in it, uhm…the rest of
them I had…all written like in the year and a half before I, uhm, handed in the
manuscript. And actually, when after I handed in the manuscript to my editor, there’s
probably ten other poems in there that I gave him that I was working on, uhm, finishing
second drafts of, while we were editing it. There was like fifty pages of stuff we took
out; it was just a very prodigious period of writing poems for me, for the first time.
I’m mainly working on these novels. But…when poems came, you might as well just
go with them, so I did. You know, it was a life situation, a personal situation that kind
of, uhm, made all this happen…and it was my most…profligate period of writing
poetry since I was, you know, a young poet at St. Mark’s.

Touching upon his days as a young poet
fittingly led to a parallel between his experienced view of a creative process uniquely
his own, and the lingering influence exerted by his early contemporaries. “Speaking
of the word poem…why the frequency of that generic title throughout the book? Is it
an attempt to demonstrate any overarching lack of significance?”

No…it wasn’t meant to demonstrate
anything, you know. I mean, I realized afterwards that there’s a lot of poems, say,
that Frank O’Hara wrote…if you look at his collected or selected poems even,
that are just called ‘Poem,’ and they just refer to them through the first line.
Like the poem that are on the album that are called ‘Poem’ in the book, most of
them, fortunately, that we chose had titles, but we just use the first line as a title,
you know…‘Female as thunder, the air filled with thought, felony,
drainage…’ Well, that was just the way to go in that sense, and that’s the
usual way you do it—you go by the first line. I remember friends of mine telling me I
was always good at doing titles for poems, you know. With this book, I wrote it so fast
that I was writing notes or ‘Poem,’ you know, and that was it. And some poems
are titled ‘Lines,’ and that’s because I didn’t even, you know, even
think about it when I got, uhm, galleys back, you know, ‘Lines.’ Originally I
was going to go further with it or rewrite it or something, but I decided OK, that’s
OK, but I forgot to really write a title or even change ‘Lines’ to
‘Poems.’ So it was just the first time I was writing on a computer you know and
I liked that a lot. You could move the spacing around–you use the spacing to define how a
poem should be read for the people that haven’t heard you read it. You know, a short
line, it slows down the poem. A long line speeds it up. You hang out a certain word to
give it like a double entendre from the end of one paragraph–or is it the beginning of
the next? Or stanza–I’m in a prose frame of mind here. At any rate, that’s what
you’re able to do so easily with a computer. So, writing on a computer, I actually
really started to like it…you know, poetry in that sense–you know, being able to move
things and cut and paste them around so easily. Otherwise, uhm, I always liked the idea of
writing titles and stuff. John Ashbury once told me he wrote titles–when I was really
young–that he always titled the poem before he wrote it, you know, he wrote from a title,
which is very hard to imagine when you read his poems–they have nothing to do with the
title. But he comes up with a title, then writes the poem. It’s usually the opposite
for me, unless it’s very specific. You know, I spent a lot of time investing thought
in titles. But, you know, the poems stand how they are–if I want to just call them
‘Poem,’ then it’s OK.

“I just got one more question for you,
Jim,” I said, lifting my glasses straight up on my face. “just kind of an
overall…it’s a soul question: is death the ultimate reward for a lifetime of
achievement? And what is your advice, if any, for people who aspire to use poetry for
their own ends?”

Well, uhm, I
don’t see how you could use…well, yes, you could use poetry for your own ends, I
suppose. The question is: what would it get you? And then, as far as death being a reward
for a lifetime of achievement…Ahh!! No, death…death sucks, man, you know. I mean,
there are times I might think “Great,” you know, if I think I want to die, you
know, I don’t give a fuck about a lifetime of achievement, or a lifetime of failure
or anything…I just want to get the fuck away, see what’s happening over there. But
most of the time I think, you know…Ahh! I don’t want death being a reward for a
lifetime of achievement. Death is just, you know, you die man. If you thought that way, I
would have coordinated everything to have…but see, I always think, you know, my next
work is going to be my best and stuff. That’s kind of what I’m saying in that
Kurt Cobain poem, in that one section…which is kind of an impudent way to think. You
know, I remember a review in Creem Magazine once, a fantastic review of the Catholic
Boy album that they kind of glommed in–cuz the Basketball Diaries had just
come out in paperback, mass-market paperback from Bantham. With the two of them together,
they saw it as a whole renaissance and stuff. And they said in the interview if this guy
died now, his work would be, you know, his legacy would be done…I don’t believe
that, but if I did die,…I would have died a lot prettier and I would have died with a
lot more mystique happening to me, especially the way I died…the example for that is Jim
Morrison, you know. I mean, did he want to do it by design? I love Jim Morrison’s
singing and stuff, and he’s written some good lyrics. But basically I always thought
he was really a terrific singer, and he had a great sense of…he had a poet’s sense
of phrasing, certainly. But, if that was the case, you know, you got to pick the right
time to die in your career, and that’s a stupid thing to do. Like Frank O’Hara
said, “You should die for love, not for poetry.”

©1999 Frank DiCostanzo & Michael Workman