Permanent nod — elegy for Jim Carroll

There was always something regal and elegant about Jim Carroll, something that belied his drug-addicted youth, that seemed to set him apart from his time.

Carroll died Friday — a shock, really, given that he was just 60 and had produced some great recent writing.

I met him once, briefly, after a poetry reading he gave at Rutgers. I got there at the end and he signed the flier — a slip of paper I still have tucked away in a photo album with the other autographs I’d collected during my younger days.

I first read Carroll’s work in 1980, when I was at Penn. State. I was at sea, so to speak, lacking real direction but developing what might be described as a bohemian bent. I was into rock — mostly punk and what is now called classic rock — and was just discovering that literature, and poetry in particular, was something worth reading outside of class.

I gobbled up books — Kerouac and Ginsberg, Hemingway, a collection of postmodern Americans and Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries. The Diaries were an accidental find, a small pocket-sized book discovered in a bookstore as I rummaged the shelves. I’d been listening to Catholic Boy, Carroll’s first album almost continuously after first hearing its single (if you can call it that), “People Who Died,” on Vin Scelsa’s show on WNEW. The album was a revelation for me — poetic lyrics set atop those driving punk guitars — that led me toward Television, Patti Smith and many of the other New York bands of the 1970s (I’ve always been more of a New York punk than a London banger).

The book was raw and yet also art, a contrivance in the best sort of way. It was a young teen describing the darker side of New York City in the 1960s in a stylized voice that helped define a particular strain of writing that would follow.

I was taken by the book, as I said, and have been reading his poetry since then. I remainin awe of a poetic sensibility that was so fully developed at such a young age and that managed to grow and the spread into other art forms (I mentioned rock, but there also were the spoken word discs, the prose explorations and the diaries).

In the end, it is that divine scream of an album — Catholic Boy — that stands as his best work, and as the piece of his muse that helped ingite my own poetic explorations.

Thanks, Jim. Rest in Peace.

Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie. View all posts by hankkalet