The New York Times visits Larry Fagin

A little bit from the New York Times's portrait of one Larry Fagin, poet and East Village doyen:

He stops at the second line of her lengthy prose poem. “No, horrible. Bad poetry. That’s the worst line you’ve ever written.” He highlights the line and slams the delete key. “Goodbye!”

“I liked it,” Ms. Kietzman says in a shrinking voice and leans back in her chair. “Well, that’s O.K.,” she says. Mr. Fagin is not done. The stuff about Ms. Kietzman’s family, he says, “has got to stop. They’re cows. They’re furniture.” Highlight, slam delete key. “Goodbye!”

Four stories above East 12th Street, down the hall from Allen Ginsberg’s old apartment, one of the East Village’s last standing bohemians soldiers on.

Mr. Fagin, 74 years old, second-generation beat, New York School veteran, friend of Ted Berrigan, publisher of Ashbery, lives with his wife, Susan Noel, also a writer, in adjoining rent-controlled apartments in the building near Avenue A.

Although Mr. Fagin — a handsome, T-shirt-and-jeans kind of guy with a square build, tousled silver hair and a cheerful air of insubordination — now collects Social Security, his chief source of income for decades has been giving private creative-writing lessons and editing and producing small magazines and chapbooks from the work of students and friends.

He reports that despite former teaching gigs at the New School and St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, neither he nor his wife have held anything resembling a straight job for any substantial period of time, though he has worked, he says, as a librarian, a reader to the blind and a “black marketer.”

“I try to be disaffiliated from bourgeois society,” Mr. Fagin said the other day, “like most good people. Because all we have are these very few, precious days.”

A commenter notes Fagin's disaffection for real estate and bourgeois society whilst remaining in a rent-stabilized apartment "fund[ed]" by taxpayers Fagin might consider his "artistic inferiors." His rent, according to the NYT, is $150 a month, and he's lived there for about 20 years. The piece also looks at the intense style of revision, noting that Fagin's own work is "brutally economical." And while it might be easy to wax bohemian about Fagin, who has been teaching out of his apartment for many years, NYT notes that he's had his time in the classroom as well:

In a classroom setting, Mr. Fagin has had mixed success. For about five years, until 2007, he was an adjunct at the New School, where he rubbed many people the wrong way, said one former student, Kathleen Kyllo.

“By the time the last class rolled around attendance was significantly lower,” she said in an e-mail. “Where students had once sat closer to him near the front of the room we were hanging back in a defensive mass.” She recalled an incident where Mr. Fagin announced to the class that her poetry was “too vaginal.”

Mr. Fagin acknowledged that he got “really mean” in the classroom. “You walk in and all these faces are staring at you and you want some reaction from them but they really have nothing to offer you. It’s like, come on you jack wagons!”

All in all, Mr. Fagin takes a blighted view of the current generation of aspiring artists, whom he likened to “pod people.”

Read Fagin's infamous Neglectorino list here, from Ron Silliman's blog posts on the topic: it does include some of these students, notably Marc Kuykendall (My Picayune Anxiety Room. Barretta Books, 2002), who shocked the East Village community when he died suddenly at the age of 26 in 2005. Fagin calls him "[t]he James Dean of neglectorinos." The list in total reflects a bit of the poet's mind and bookshelf. And read the rest of the Times piece here.