Jim Carroll hit the scene at age 15 with his collection of poems, Organic Trains, and shortly after began to appear on the St Marks Poetry Project scene in NYC around 1966. A decade later he published his book of teenage memoirs The Basketball Diaries, and decade after that, a sequel adulthood memoirs 'Forced Entries’ (with a hilarious chapter devoted to a Allen!) as well as two volumes of poetry, Living At The Movies, and The Book Of Nods. By the early 1980s he went headlong into music with three albums Catholic Boy, Dry Dreams, and I Write Your Name.
"I think, like, if you really have an intuitive gift for poetry, then you probably have an intuitive gift for music in the sense of writing lyrics. At least it was that way for me, although, I started relatively late really, doing songs, where I had enough confidence, finally, because the punk movement came along. Years before that, when I was a very young poet, people would tell me that I should have a rock band and stuff. But then, when friends of mine, like Patti Smith and stuff, started to do it, and then when people who couldn’t sing at all started to do it, then I decided to do it. (from a writing class he gave at Naropa Institute in 1986)
📸 Jim Carroll, backstage at the Public Theater, NYC, September 1984, snapped by Allen, courtesy Stanford University Libraries / Allen Ginsberg Estate)
