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Remembering Jim Carroll (1949-2009)

This morning, I heard that my favourite living poet had died. I now need a new favourite living poet. Man, I’m going to miss Jim Carroll.

In 1995, I was seventeen, empty-handed and leaving the fiction section of a big-box bookstore when the neon orange spine of a book called The Basketball Diaries caught my eye. I brought it home, read it through, and didn’t have any idea what to do with it. So, for the first and only time in my life, I flipped back to the beginning and started to read it again. Some part of me knew enough not to let me put it down—maybe one of the selves in which I hadn’t yet started to believe.


1520577926_673fccf1fa_o“Yep, I’m good and sick without that fix now and my rap of being the one who can keep it all under control is in that breeze cluttered with the same raps a million times run down by a million other genius wise ass cats walking like each other’s ghosts around these same sick streets in my same sick shoes.
So then the methadone is pumping that warmth back in me by now and I’m together again, but I ain’t high worth one short nod, the high is all in the past”

By the time I got back to the end, I knew things had changed for me in a definite, if inarticulable, way. My life was nothing like the life Carroll describes in his book, and yet I felt like he and I were occupying the same space, somehow. His language and his sensibility were fully understandable to me, which was kind of scary—I hadn’t realized that other people might actually think the same sorts of things I did, let alone go around telling people about it. And that struck me as awfully significant.

The book had been reissued to tie in with the release of the movie adaptation, about which I won’t say much, other than that I tried hard to like it. What I liked best about it was the soundtrack. I bought that before I saw the movie, and I remember hearing “People Who Died” for the first time. Well, not the first time. The first time I heard it, I was four years old, and Elliott was about to bump into E.T. in the back yard. But the next time I heard it, a dozen or so years later, I sat on my bed and wept for this gaping maw of sudden awareness; I could count the number of people I had loved and lost on one hand. I was terrified (for the singer) that the song would never end. (To this day, I don’t know if it’s a song about grief, or a song about endurance. Maybe it’s both.) The soundtrack led me to Carroll’s band and then to his spoken-word album, Praying Mantis. I heard “A Child Growing Up with the Sun” before I ever read it, and that was like a gift from Jim to me. It was instantly and remains my favourite piece of Carroll’s.


“It was a running joke between myselves

The one I believed in, and each of the others.”

~ Jim Carroll, “A Child Growing Up with the Sun”

After that, I started to read anything I could get my hands on. It never, ever got tired. Every poem, every diary entry, every story, every quote—it all seemed as though he was speaking to me, or for me, or about what it was like being us. He was a guide, a teacher who led me to the likes of Phil Ochs, Ted Berrigan, John Ashbery, and Frank O’Hara. His turns of phrase crept into my vocabulary (you may yet hear me describe something as “cosmically stupid”). And I defy you to find a more truthful, sorrowful, or pristine elegy for Kurt Cobain than Carrolll’s “8 Fragments.”



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In my last year of university, I wrote my honours thesis on Carroll’s work. In this task, I was aided immensely by three things. The first was a very willing and open-minded supervisor. The second was the indomitable Dr. Cassie Carter, the foremost scholar on Carroll’s work and proprietor of www.catholicboy.com, an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the man, or the legend, or both. The last, sadly enough, was the Columbine tragedy, which, due to a graphic scene in the movie version of The Basketball Diaries, called Carroll into the spotlight. Suddenly he was on TV, he was on the radio—and with his measured drawl and gangly grace, he was defending art against the charge of being art and kids against the charge of being kids. He practically wrote that part of my thesis for me—like he was handing me the words once again.

Since then, I’ve taught and shared Jim’s work countless times. I’ve rocked out to his music, mellowed out to his spoken word, and mined his writing time and again for all the notions and nuances I missed the first time around–things I wasn’t ready for, or things I used to understand differently, or allusions to people and places and figures in popular culture that I appreciate in new ways with every passing year. I find that Carroll turns up in other places, too. It took me a while to notice it, but in the story I’ve been working on, the protagonist relies on the kindness and wisdom of a skeletal, red-headed pawn shop proprietor called Jim. Of course, my Jim will be but a poor facsimile of the brilliant poet after whom he is fashioned. But it will be a tribute nonetheless, from a child who is sad to leave off growing up with the sun.

Peace, Mr. Carroll.


“Genius is not a generous thing
In return it charges more interest than any amount of royalties can cover.” Jim Carroll
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