#daniel kane

“Do You Have a Band? Does not deny that there are resonances between the band Television and French symbolism, the rhetoric of punk rock and Situationist International slogans. But what about the work of poets who actually shared New York City’s Lower East Side streets, mimeographed pages, and stages with the pioneering figures of punk? How did downtown writing and poetics of the 1960s and 1970s make their way into rockers’ music and approach to art? Musicians in bands from Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg’s Fugs through the Jim Carroll Band were as influenced by and productively critical of the writers living all around them as they were by and of authors from the distant and not-so-distant past.”

Each chapter focuses on a key figure or figures in the overlapping terrain between proto-punk or punk and the poetry scene – Ed Sanders and the Fugs, Lou Reed, Richard Hell, Patti Smith, John Giorno, Eileen Myles, Dennis Cooper — with cameo appearances from the likes of Kathy Acker, John Ashberry, Ted Berrigan, CBGB owner Hilly Kristal, Lydia Lunch, Robert Mapplethorpe (whose question to Eileen Myles provides the book’s title), Bernadette Mayer, Thurston Moore, Alice Notley, Frank O’Hara, Anne Waldman, Andy Warhol and many others. The afterward focuses on what may be the most direct link between (second generation) New York School poetry and punk rock, Jim Carroll’s classic anthem “People Who Died,” inspired by his friend Ted Berrigan’s poem of the same name. There are quite a lot of funny moments illustrating the interpersonal tensions and aggravations present on any creative scene. Andy Warhol asks John Giorno, “oh, John, why does it have to be so boring,” at a poetry reading by Frank O’Hara and others in a crowded gallery. There was no microphone and half the audience couldn’t hear a word of it. Eileen Myles tells about a chaotic poetry reading she and friends gave in a laundromat. Richard Hell confesses the shameful truth – he was a Dylan Thomas fan – and then goes on to compare Thomas’ poetry to a Led Zeppelin arena show. Me, I love Dylan Thomas, unapologetically.  But then I wish I’d gotten the chance to see a Led Zeppelin arena show too, so… Anyhow, I don’t have to choose between him and Frank O’Hara and neither do you, dear reader. I don’t care what anybody says. Resist the false binary wherever you find it. It was interesting to get a better sense of the dynamic between another Dylan Thomas fan, Patti Smith, and poet Anne Waldman, who was at the center of the St. Marks scene at the time. I’d wondered about that occasionally, if they got along, how they got along. That seemed like ripe territory for a diva battle of epic proportions, so it was interesting to read about Smith’s letter to Waldman describing what she liked and did not like about the Poetry Project. In a sense, Do You Have a Band? may be seen as the third volume in a trilogy following Kane’s previous informative books All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s and What Is Poetry: Conversations With the American Avante-Garde. Recommended reading for anyone interested in learning more about the various interconnections between poets, musicians, and artists in New York in the sixties and seventies.  

https://bookshop.org/a/8227/9780231162975

Kiedy wychodzi 😭