April 8th - Deer: Dead on the Side of the Road (Four of Spades)

Listening to "People Who Died" 

I saw Jim Carroll speak once. It was at the Annual Poetry Marathon on New Year's Day - one of the first of the new millennium. It was cold gray afternoon; the cobblestones outside of St. Mark's Church were covered in blackened snow and the crust punks huddled together on the benches.

Inside held a different extreme: dry heat from church radiators mixed with the moist warmth of bodies packed together. It wasn't great for a mild hangover and the poets varied in quality, but we couldn't bring ourselves to leave. We were in the presence of greatness that day. Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, Tom Verlaine, Yoko Ono were all there. Some were waiting to speak, some just watching. And there were more in attendance we couldn't see: Fred Smith and John Lennon, Joe Strummer, Joey Ramone, Allen Ginsberg - all were in the walls and the floorboards and the sweltering air of St. Marks Church, bits of them still lingering. Or at least that's the sort of thing I thought when I was nineteen.

I watched as Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs condemned the fascist machine, and thought about how my father watched the same man condemn the same machine 35 years earlier.

And then Jim Carroll took the stage: a rail-thin redhead who moved with hyperactive grace. His face was warped and wrinkled but he overflowed with a youthful energy. He commanded the room better than anyone else that day and Jim Carroll was the only speaker at St. Mark's Church who did not read a poem. Instead, in a tense soft voice, he told the story of the first time he shot a deer:

How he awoke to find a doe that had been impaled by a picket in his fence. How the deer was still alive, but slowly bleeding out. How he and his wife, eyes red from lack of sleep and from crying, had tried everything they could to save it and had failed. How he finally took their shotgun that had never before been handled and after a moment of spiritual connection with the animal, shot it dead.

It was a near-perfect short story - at least that is what I thought at the time, and how I remember it now. It moved all of us: me, my friends, the poets of varying quality, Tuli Kupferberg, Patti Smith, the lingering bits of Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone, and on, and on, we - the congregation - were moved together.

Soon afterwards, my friends and I got bored and we left.

Out from the church and back into brisk winter reality, I went home and slept off my hangover. The next day I walked to Borders and purchased a collection of Jim Carroll poems. It still lies, mostly unread, on a bookshelf in my parents' house.

Fifteen years later Jim Carroll has died, and Lou Reed, and Tuli Kupferberg. Patti Smith has denounced the whole city as dead:  “New York has been taken away from you...it is not a place for young artists anymore." And she is probably right. And I am not so young anymore. But if I'm sitting in a hallway bar in the East Village and someone uses their dollar to play "People Who Died", I can feel the energy in the walls and in the floorboards and in the stale air and I think, maybe we can reclaim what is ours.

The St. Marks Annual Poetry Marathon still happens every year. It's as good a place as any to start.