Jim Carroll (1949-2009)

I toured with Jim Carroll in 1990. It was sort of an honor.

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.