Jim Carroll at Seton Hall University
South Orange, NJ, 18 March 1998
Review by Laurie Pine
Waiting for Jim Carroll, the pressed milk skin, red tresses and fair lashes are there soon enough. Heavy leather coat, scarf of soft blues and Russian black cap that the nubile students flirt over. This rainy March night can’t be dampened. Still a basketball player’s lanky step greets those gathered. The raspy voice transports us to the song of angels, Kurt Cobain, knowing pain, pulsing promises of racing crab love, tainted possibilities, the pawing puss. You capture the vision, emotions raw and unsentimental, yet striking reality chords to the pulsing mass. New audiences commingled with familiar friends, cheering, exhilaration. Clapping echoes the generations as you score endlessly, still in prime form.
Your stories of that performance with the cockroach in the bag. What does it mean? Same as it always does. And I feel 20 again, no 17, 16 with you easing the rediscovery, pre-Eden’s fall. A poet-philosopher with the wit to bring on the laughter but make all feel connected, safe. And yet many of those who share your stage are the ones for whom you must translate their pain, no longer present. From the Brown Eyed Girl dancer at your friend’s jukebox gravemarker to your vanished puss, the night warrior who worries on gravity’s mortality no longer.
They all wait on line–the college professor, the angry poet, the anxious chicks, the hopeful writer, the pilgrim with the bootleg tapes from the age of radio–to be singed by your burning presence, the desire to stay awhile, the writing yet to be. Still alive, working through the pain. No drinks proffered accepted. You got to get home to be up early and in that studio. So prolific: books, poems, music. And we celebrate and think, no, not everything dies.