BOCKRIS: Does the fact that you don’t find any younger writers you learn from depress you?
SMITH: Their lifestyles don’t attract me. I think I’m ballsier, a better performer. I think they can learn from me.
BOCKRIS: So you feel the people you can learn from are the rock and roll scene?
SMITH: Yeah, in the sixties it was Jim Morison, Bob Dylan, now it’s still the Rolling Stones. There was Smokey Robinson. I can still get excited about Humphrey Bogart. I like people who are bigger than me. I’m not interested in meeting poets or a bunch of writers who I don’t think are bigger than life. I’m a hero worshipper, I’m not a fame fucker, but I am a hero worshipper. I’ve always been in love with heroes, that’s what seduced me into art. You know Modigliani, Jackson Pollock, de Kooning, people that were hot shit, you know. I want to know heroes, not eighth-class writers.
BOCKRIS: Let’s get into the poetry of performance. I’ve just finished as essay called “The Poet Os a Performer.” So that seems to me to be where it’s at. What does it mean to you?
SMITH: Poets have been, I think, part of it is because of Victorian England or something or how they crucified Oscar Wilde or something, but poets have become simps. There’s this new thing: the poet is a simp, the sensitive young man always away in the attic, but it wasn’t always like that. It used to be that the poet was a performer and I think the energy of Frank O’Hara started to re-inspire that. In the sixties there was all that happening stuff. Then Frank O’Hara died and it sort of petered out and then Dylan and Allen Ginsberg revitalized it, but then it got all fucked up again because instead of people learning from Dylan and Allen Ginsberg and realizing that a poet was a performer, they thought that a poet was a social protester. So it got fucked up. I ain’t into social protesting.
BOCKRIS: You obviously have a real belief in the possibility of poetry becoming a big public art again, which I really dig. But exactly how to you think that can happen?
SMITH: I’ve found it has more to do with the physical presence. Physical presentation in performing is more important than what you’re saying, quality comes through of course, but if your quality of intellect is high and your love of the audience is evident and you have a strong physical presence you can get away with anything. I mean Billy Graham is a great performer even though he is a hunk of shit. Adolph Hitler was a fantastic performer. He was a black magician. And I learned from that. You can seduce people into mass consciousness.
BOCKRIS: Don’t you think you’re directly competing with the Rolling Stones and how can you possibly win?
SMITH: It’s not that I want to win. It’s just that I think the Rolling Stones aren’t always around, you know. I think Mick Jagger is one of the greatest living performers. The other thing that gave me hope for the future of poetry is the Rolling Stones concert at Madison Square Gardens because Jagger was real tired and fucked up. It was Tuesday, he had done two concerts and he was just really on the brink of collapse but the kind of collapse that transcends into magic. He was so tired that he needed the energy of the audience. And he was not a rock and roll singer Tuesday night, he was closer to a poet than he ever has been. Because he was tired he could hardly sing. I love the music of the Rolling Stones, but what was foremost was not the music but the performance, the naked performance. And it was like his naked performance, his rhythm, his movement, his talk. He was so tired he was saying things like “very warm here warm warm warm it’s very hot here hot hot New York New York New York bang bang bang.” I mean none of that stuff is genius but it was his presence and his power to hold the audience in his palm. There was electricity. If the Rolling Stones had walked off that night and left Mick Jagger alone he was as great as any great poet that night. He could’ve spoken some of his best lyrics and had the audience just as magnetized. Maybe just with Charlie’s drum, Charlie’s drums and Mick (I’m not renouncing the others, I love Keith Richards to death). Just the drum beat rhythm and Mick’s words or refrains that are always magic could have been very powerful and could have I believe held the audience. And that excited me so much I almost blew apart because I saw almost a complete future of poetry. I really saw it, I really felt it. I got so excited I could hardly stand being in my skin and, like, I believe in that. That’s given me faith to keep going.
BOCKRIS: In as much as there is the possibility of poets becoming public figures, what is the public function of the poet?
SMITH: All I try to do is entertain. Another thing I do is give people breathing room. In other words … I don’t mean any of the stuff I say. When I say that bad stuff about God or Christ, I don’t mean that stuff. I don’t know what I mean, it’s just it gives somebody a new view, a new way to look at something. I like to look at things from ten or fifteen different angles, you know. So it gives people a chance to be blasphemous through me. The other thing is that through performance I reach such states in which my brain feels so open, so full of light, it feels huge. It feels as big as the Empire State Building and if I can develop a communication with an audience, a bunch of people, when my brain is that big and very receptive, imagine the energy and the intelligence and all the things I can steal from them.
BOCKRIS: Would you give up writing tomorrow if you could continue performing in some other way?
SMITH: No, I can’t give it up. I have no choice.
BOCKRIS: Is that really true?
SMITH: I wanted to be an artist, I worked to be an artist for maybe six years and so as soon as I became a good artist all of a sudden I couldn’t draw because in 1969 it began that I put my piece of paper and my canvas in front of me and I could see the finished product before I even touched the paper and it was frightening to me.
I like to work. I like that anguish you go through when you’re writing something. I like to battle with language. When I started being able to see the finished product before I got a chance to work it out, it had no interest for me. I’m not interested in the finished product; I’m interested in creating the moment. I mean the finished product is for the people who buy the stuff, you know. And I’m not interested in doing stuff so other people can get their rocks off only. I gave up art just like that in one day after putting seven years into it. And I was fucking good and then I wrote and now what happens is I became so good at writing those vertical poems, those performing poems, they’re no longer a challenge.
BOCKRIS: So what did you do?
SMITH: I stopped.
BOCKRIS: Are you in a transition phase?
SMITH: Yeah. Transition phases are very hard for me. They usually come in the summer and last about three months and they’re usually the worst three months of my life. This one wasn’t ’cause I happened to be in love. They usually come when I’m most fucked up. My brain is hungrier than it ever has been in my whole life but my pussy is being fed so I can … So I’m not as fucked up as I could be. Last year when this happened I just wanted to kill myself. I thought I wasn’t learning, I wasn’t developing.
BOCKRIS: Are you self-critical?
SMITH: Extremely self-critical. So much as I love my work, I hate it.
BOCKRIS: If I was to offer you a reading tour with three other poets, who would you choose as the three other poets?
SMITH: Jim Carroll, Bernadette Mayer, Muhammad Ali.
BOCKRIS: Why?
SMITH: Because they’re all good performers. Ali’s a good performer. He’s got great rhythms. He’s a good writer in a certain frame of reference. He’s entertaining. Bernadette Mayer because I like what she does conceptually. She’s a real speed-driven poet. Sometimes I don’t like her because she’s overly political and too influenced by St. Mark’s, but she’s also a good performer. Jim Carroll because I think he’s one of the best poets in America. At least he was when he was writing; I don’t know if he still writes. Jim Carroll is one of America’s true poets. I mean, he is a true poet. It kills me he’s twenty-three, he wrote all his best poems the same year of his life as Rimbaud did. He had the same intellectual quality and bravado as Rimbau
d. He’s a junkie. He’s bisexual. He’s been fucked by every male and female genius in America. He’s been fucked over by all those people. He lives all over.
He lives a disgusting life. Sometimes you have to pull him out of a gutter. He’s been in prison. He’s a total fuck-up. But what great poet wasn’t?
I think the St. Mark’s poets are so namby-pamby they’re frauds. They write about “Today at 9:15 I shot speed with Brigid, sitting in the such and such.” They’re real cute about putting it in a poem but if Jim Carroll comes into the church and throws up that’s not a poem to them, that’s not cool. If you could play with it in your poetry that’s okay but if you’re really with it, that’s something else. They don’t want to face it.
I think he’s got all the characteristics of a great poet. He was St. Mark’s chance to have something real among them. And they blackballed him because he fucked up. I mean, he didn’t come to his poetry reading. He was in jail. Good for him. “Oh, well, we can’t ask him to do poetry readings anymore.” That’s ridiculous.
BOCKRIS: Do you read Pound or Olson?
SMITH: I like some of Pound. I’d rather read Eliot. I like pieces of Pound. I like Jules Laforgue better than either of them. I like Pound when he uses ditties same as Eliot, but I don’t understand much of what they’re saying. My intelligence is really dubious. I memorized “Prufrock” when I was a teenager. I thought it was beautiful. It had a lot to do with instilling in me a love of flowing rhythms but I don’t know what that poem’s about.
BOCKRIS: Do you find you learn a lot from Warhol?
SMITH: I used to think he was real cool in the sixties ’cause I like his lifestyle, I like the people he surrounded himself with and there was a lot of energy in the Factory. It paralleled with Bob Dylan but I think his whole family has gotten a lot tackier. But every time I want to say something about Andy Warhol I don’t trust him. Socially, you know, I’ve met him a lot of times and he’s always very nice. I don’t know how to take him … Let me just say one nice thing about Andy Warhol: he gave Stevie Wonder a camera, which was really cool, which is also what a good hustler he is. He has the ability to zoom in on the heart of things. Such an action reveals the two moods of Andy.
BOCKRIS: Are you interested in interviewing people?
SMITH: I’d like to talk with Mick Jagger, mostly because I’d like to talk about performing. I’d like to talk to Dylan if he was in a certain mood, but that’s why I stopped doing rock writing. I started interviewing people like Rod Stewart who I admire but because of my ego and my faith in my own work I don’t like meeting people on unequal terms, so I figured I’d stop doing that and would wait until they discovered me and we can meet on equal grounds. I couldn’t wait to meet Rod Stewart and then when I met him I didn’t want to ask him anything. I wanted to tell him stuff. I didn’t want to ask Rod Stewart about his work. I wanted to show him mine, that’s because right now I’m into performing. I’m into extending myself rather than putting other people into me. I’ve spent half to three quarters of my life sucking from other people and now I’d like to give some.
BOCKRIS: Do you think you’re really a phony?
SMITH: When I say that I mean it totally endearingly, I say it with love, you know. I just think I get a kick out of myself. I act tough. I act like a bitch, a motherfucker, it’s like when I’m doing this interview I act real tough and then my boyfriend comes in and I apologize to him and say, “I’ll be finished quick, baby.” I’m like a chameleon, I’m not a phony. I’m like a chameleon. I can fall into the rhythm of almost any situation as it calls for me. If I’m supposed to be a motherfucker I can be a motherfucker, if I’m supposed to be a sissy or a pansy I’ll be that too. I’ll be a sexpot, I’ll be a waif. It doesn’t mean I’m phony, it just means I’m flexible. I can marry the moment.
February 1974
Meanwhile we had not lost touch with Patti. And I for one was thrilled when she gave a poetry reading at St. Mark’s in February of ’74. “William Burroughs is back in town!” she announced at its conclusion adding, “Isn’t that great?” I breathed a sigh of relief because I realized that punk was not just going to pull the same lame rebel act of the E.G. Den Hop crowd and believe they had to kill their fathers to make it, like rock killed jazz. But that instead the punk artists would align themselves with both the beats as neo-beats to create their own movement in alliance with the past, in celebration and recognition of their fathers.
Smith and Hell were the standout examples. Patti spoke equally of Rimbaud and Artaud, Jim Morrison, and Dylan. Richard Hell, too, with his young Dylan ballads and his serial roles, some in the exact moment of teen collision, welded his act together under punk’s umbrella with one song: “Blank Generation.” This popped-up, pithy, 8-line long song became our equivalent of “Howl.”
That beat and punk were in pairs of prams underscored the knowledge that punk was an instant international movement. In Germany, France, and Japan, it survived. It was a big world. And minimalism played as big a role in the basis of punk as the Beats and Warhol did. Thus our poems too like Saroyan’s “guarrante” or my “in america/all we/do is work” stripped back the fat to start again with a single word. Like Iggy songs. Minimal. Mindblowing. Sexy. And all confusing.
May 1974
When I interviewed Mick Jagger at the Pierre Hotel in New York in ’74, one memorable thing he said was, “Something will happen. There’ll be some sort of change, but I think if there’s going to be a real sort of change, it will come from something completely new and they’ll take everyone by storm. But I dunno. It may not happen at all.”
October 1974
Andrew Wylie and I ran into William Burroughs sitting in a booth near the front door at Max’s Kansas City. Andrew approached him and was told to call James Grauerholz about an appointment.
Two weeks later we gave a dinner party for William at 110 East 17th Street. It was a convivial evening. Afterward, we walked to the corner of Park Avenue South to get a cab. Bill and I were in front, Andrew and James behind. As we neared the corner Bill put his arm around my shoulder in an avuncular fashion and said, “Well, it’s all up to you now, Victor.” A shiver went through my body. I couldn’t believe I’d heard him right, but his words froze in the air like icicles and hung there undeniable in their brevity and directness.
We were all punks really. Although in conclusion of our nine-month original investigation by publishing new poets with Telegraph Books, we had never at the time recognized that we had unearthed punk and brought it to the attention of this fucking world. And disciples of Ali, Burroughs, and Warhol. They walked through our center, the true white-hot hearts of punk. There was never a greater punk than Andy Warhol. He is the definition of everything that is great about punk. And he started out as a poet and remained one all his life. Muhammad Ali was treated like a punk and acted like one in the 1960s. Burroughs’ brain gave birth to the counterculture, the love generation, and the punk in Naked Lunch and The Wild Boys. Bill looked on benignly, letting us know he approved across the boards, even writing a letter in support to the Sex Pistols when they released God Save the Queen. Two years earlier he had written “Bugger the Queen.” So Burroughs co-invented punk, too.
As Punk magazine editor and master cartoonist John Holmstrom recently pointed out, “One cultural influence on Punk that’s been forgotten is 1970s minimalism. There was a concerted effort by bands like Suicide, the Ramones, and Talking Heads to follow the aesthetic that ‘less is more’ and to strip music down to its core. Blow it up and start all over again!” This was of course exactly what the minimalist poets I published in 1972 were doing.
The only thing I am interested in writing about is people, how they live, what happens, how they do it. It is true that we give ourselves to our work, and I believe that to an extent certainly for me this is necessary. And when you give yourself to your work you are of course not as there are you might otherwise be for other people.
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King of the Underground: The Magic Wo
rld of William Burroughs
This profile of the great novelist and poet was composed for Gadfly magazine, where it was published as a cover story in 1999. William Burroughs was a wonderful interview subject, as anyone who has read Sylvère Lotringer’s Burroughs Live interview collection or my With William Burroughs would know. He was a great raconteur and fine conversationalist. My newest book, The Burroughs-Warhol Affair, which consists primarily of four taped conversations between Burroughs and Andy Warhol, is another testament to his conversational skills and sense of humor.
William Burroughs (1914–97) was the king of the beat generation and the godfather of punk rock. He was the author of more than fifty books. Junky is a classic, autobiographical account of life as a heroin addict in the United States during the Second World War. Naked Lunch, published in 1962 in America, was a key text of the beat generation, alongside Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. In 1991, David Cronenberg’s film of Naked Lunch introduced Burroughs and his writing to a whole new generation.
But Burroughs’ importance goes well beyond writing. He was the man who had the original vision of the “love generation” of the 1960s. He was also a major figure of inspiration for many rock stars. He was on the cover of the Beatles’ masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and counted the Rolling Stones among his acquaintances. In fact, the first discussions about filming Naked Lunch were introduced by Mick Jagger, who, in 1972, considered playing Burroughs’ alter ego, Inspector Lee of the Nova Police. The Soft Machine and Steely Dan were two of the many rock groups who took their names from his books; Burroughs was the inventor of the phrase "heavy metal"; Bob Dylan invited him to go on his 1975 Rolling Thunder tour. Burroughs’ influence was also spread by films—he starred in Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy and played lesser roles in ten other films. In the 1990s he collaborated with various musicians, ranging from John Cale to Kurt Cobain, on CDs of his readings.
Beat Punks Page 3
