Iconic poet and punk rocker, Jim Carroll, 1950

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Literary Obituaries

Books

Book Awards by Year

Book Awards by Years Awarded

6/25/2010
Writer, critic and activist Carlos Monsiváis, 1938 - 2010

6/8/2010
He is totally unreproducible — he was sui generis — Martin Gardner, 1914 - 2010

4/6/2010
Anarchist, poet, publisher and chess-player, John Rety, 1930 - 2010

4/4/2010
"Literature was another victim of the war": Miguel Delibes, 1920 - 2010

3/7/2010
Translator, critic and BBC script editor, Barbara Bray, 1924 - 2010

1/30/2010
Tributes to People's Historian Howard Zinn, 1922 - 2010

1/2/2010
At 42, she was one of the best poets of her generation, Rachel Wetzsteon, 1967 - 2009

12/27/2009
You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist in an abstraction; it exists in action: Dennis Brutus, 1924 - 2009

11/8/2009
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1908 - 2009, his works as a practical anti-racist manifesto

11/7/2009
Power exercised by man over his fellow man is always a usurpation, Francisco Ayala, 1906 - 2009

10/14/2009
The Potato that Became a Tomato, Playgiarist Raymond Federman, 1928 - 2009

9/30/2009
Milton Meltzer, 1915 – 2009

9/14/2009
Iconic poet and punk rocker, Jim Carroll, 1950 - 2009

8/9/2009
Israeli writer Amos Kenan, 1927 - 2009

7/30/2009
Angela's Ashes author Frank McCourt, 1930 - 2009

6/23/2009
Indian poet Kamal Das, 1934 - 2009

6/8/2009
Ethnic Studies Pioneer Ronald Takaki, 1939 - 2009

3/29/2009
Pioneer Historian and Scholar of African-American studies, John Hope Franklin, 1915 - 2009

2/20/2009
Sudan novelist Tayeb Salih, 1929 -2009

1/31/2009
John Updike, 1932 - 2009, David Margolick on John Updike's Adieu to Ted Williams

1/22/2009
Norwegian philosopher and founder of the Deep Ecology Movement, Arne Næss, 1912 – 2009

1/4/2009
English poet, novelist, playwright, socialist and pacifist, Adrian Mitchell, 1932 - 2008

12/28/2008
Art, Truth and Politics - Harold Pinter, 1930 - 2008

12/19/2008
Dorothy Porter, 1954 - 2008

11/17/2008
Jazz biographer Peter Levinson, 1934-2008

11/10/2008
'My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat'' – Studs Terkel, 1912 - 2008

9/15/2008
I think it's the best time to be alive ever and it's probably the best time to be a writer - David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

8/15/2008
Mahmoud Darwish, 1942 - 2008

6/17/2008
Media Guru Tony Schwartz, 1923 - 2008

5/25/2008
David Rieff on a lying to his dying mother, Susan Sontag

5/18/2008
Swing Hammer Swing! author, Jeff Torrington, 1935-2008

3/25/2008
Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008

1/22/2008
Poet and translator or Icelandic literature, Bernard Scudder, 1955 – 2007

1/13/2008
George MacDonald Fraser, inventor of Flashman, 1925 – 2008

12/30/2007
Julien Gracq, 1910 - 2007

12/20/2007
Diane Middlebrook, 1939 - 2007

12/16/2007
Gay historian Allan Bérubé dies

12/2/2007
One of the greatest scientists of our era, Seymour Benzer, dies at age 86

11/21/2007
Vernon Scannell, 1922 - 2007

11/14/2007
Norman Mailer, 1923-2007. He went down swinging.

11/6/2007
James Michie 1927 - 2007

9/19/2007
Champion of science fiction for children, Douglas Hill, 1935 - 2007

9/8/2007
Newberry Medal winner Madeleine L'Engle dies

9/2/2007
Julia Briggs, 1943 - 2007

8/30/2007
American short-story writer and activist Grace Paley dies

8/26/2007
Once the Nuremberg Trials were over and a few people judged guilty, no one wanted to talk about it. But I was driven by a desire to know what happened. - Raul Hilberg 1926 - 2007

8/5/2007
Ingmar Bergman 1918 - 2007

6/11/2007
Poet and translator Michael Hamburger, 1924 - 2007

6/3/2007
Classical scholar and archaeologist, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, dies at 62

5/16/2007
Dickens scholar Philip Collins, 1923 - 2007

9/14/2009 Iconic poet and punk rocker, Jim Carroll, 1950 - 2009

I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation. The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty. - Patti Smith on Jim Carroll from a telephone interview.

Jim Carroll, the poet and punk rocker in the outlaw tradition of Rimbaud and Burroughs who chronicled his wild youth in “The Basketball Diaries,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 60... Mr. Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to “The Basketball Diaries,” the journal he kept during high school and published in 1978, by which time his poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan... Jim Carroll music career started by accident when Ms. Smith brought him onstage to declaim his poetry with her band providing background. Encouraged by the response, he formed his own band. It caught the attention of Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, who arranged a three-record deal with Atlantic Records... The critic Stephen Holden described Mr. Carroll in The New York Times in 1982 as “not so much a singer as an incantatory rock-and-roll poet.” Like Lou Reed, he had a mesmerizing power, evident on songs like “People Who Died” from “Catholic Boy,” a poetic litany of his dead friends that became a hit on college radio and part of the soundtrack for “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.” - from the New York Times obituary by William Grimes.

It must be strange to just fall from the stage
and snap a bone that is so close to the brain
And be attended to by so many down below
I saw a doctor tie you up from so far above
And you start sinking just like light through a black floor
You’d start sliding like burned skin [sounds like "to a side door"]

But crow, when you throw yourself under
Singin's hard when you can't lose control
They don't know, to them in the dark you don't whisper nothin'
And they're' all gonna try and rip the wind from your soul

Musta been hard to be a cashier in a bookstore
And to be surrounded by the history of your true loves
And you'd get naked between the deep shelves in the back room
And have your brain get tan by sharp fluorescent light tubes
And you start spinning like the pillars in the temple
You'd start screaming just like Sister Aimee Semple

But Crow, when you throw yourself under
The streets are hard when you cannot lose control
They don't know, to them the dark don't whisper nothin'
And they're all gonna try and rip the wind from your soul . . . Crow

It was so sweet when you brought donuts to the junkies
[Hey, you'd?] give us something we'd go slip into our coffee
And we'd start reading lines from poems that didn't matter
You covered me with blankets in the Chelsea Hotel lobby
And I’d start reachin' for the scar along your belly
They'd start takin' us ‘cause winning is their hobby

But Crow, when you throw yourself under
The streets are hard when you cannot lose control
They don't know, to them the dark don't whisper nothin'’
And they're all gonna try and rip the wind from your soul . . . Crow

- Crow, a song Jim Carroll wrote about Patti Smith (from Catholic Boy by the Jim Carroll Band, 1980)

The Basketball Diaries
Jim Carroll
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Forced Entries: The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973
Jim Carroll
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Fear of Dreaming: The Selected Poems
Jim Carroll
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Void of Course
Jim Carroll
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