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Home/Beatdom Content/Noise Poetry: An Interview with Thurston Moore
Thurston Moore reading his poetry at Naropa University's Summer Writing
Program, 2011.
Noise Poetry: An Interview with Thurston Moore
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As an MFA fiction student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
at Naropa University (one of the longest, most consistently-made-fun-of
school names ever), I was fortunate enough to be brought face-to-face with
some of the most legendary members of the American cultural underground of
the past 50 years. Since the Kerouac School was founded by Allen Ginsberg
and Anne Waldman in 1974, we have operated in a lineage outside the cultural
mainstream, inasmuch as the Beat Generation was somewhat welcomed into the
fray with Kerouac’s On The Road, but is still consistently debated and
misunderstood.
So you could say that we are still misunderstood as a school – from the
infamous tales of Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs teaching some of
the first classes, to today, when MFA programs are booming and we are still
rarely mentioned in those lists. Merits of my education there aside, one of
the most remarkable aspects of the program was getting to attend two summers
of Naropa’s famous four-week Summer Writing Program, which Ginsberg had
taught at nearly every year until his death and continues to feature some of
the most cutting-edge writers and artists performing and teaching today,
including legends such as Amiri Baraka and Joanne Kyger visiting, and Anne
Waldman continuing to host the program every year.
My first year at the Summer Writing Program in 2011 coincided with the
arrival of Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore to our little campus in Boulder,
Colorado. I became one of the lucky few to get into his coveted workshop in
the last week of the program. As an editor of the Kerouac School’s literary
journal Bombay Gin, I also decided to make it my mission to get an
interview with him. I had been cautioned not to bother him or take up too
much of his time, but he couldn’t have been more accommodating and down-to-
earth, willing to brave the Boulder summer sunshine one morning and talk to
me for three hours – large portions of which didn’t even fit into the
interview below and will potentially be repurposed somewhere, someday.
The first day Thurston came in to teach our class, he looked like your (
taller than) average punk rock kid – Converse sneakers, a backpack, and a
guitar – not the 30-year veteran of the American underground, the legend
who had “hung out” with everyone from Ginsberg and Burroughs to Kurt
Cobain, Yoko Ono, and Patti Smith. He told the class stories and histories,
of writers and rock stars – an inexhaustible library of knowledge on every
poet, every small press, every punk band.
But Thurston was not there to be the famous guitarist and singer from Sonic
Youth – although he did incorporate a few songs into his poetry reading,
and worked with our class to create a sonic experiment of music, poetry, and
screaming distortion. Thurston came to Boulder, a college town of relative
anonymity, and he came to Naropa, where he could be taken seriously as a
writer and member of not just the musical counterculture, but the literary
underground as well. A place he has rightfully earned through his lyrics,
poetry books, and collaborative associations.
Beyond the living archive that is Thurston’s memories and mind, his
appreciation for the world of small presses and publishing led him to create
what is one of the most interesting and important collections of
underground (and sometimes above-ground) American literature from the second
half of the twentieth century. He is a cousin of the Jack Kerouac School,
related through the spirits of transgression and subversion that haunt our
corridors, the same spirits that gave a tall redheaded kid growing up in
suburban Connecticut a copy of Naked Lunch and the desire to run away to New
York City to play guitar.
Thurston is the space between the words of poetry and the scream of a guitar
, the punk rocker and the professor, the father and the rebellious teenager.
His work as a writer and musician has explored the space where the
subversive becomes the commercially successful, where success doesn’t mean
selling out, where you can create your own world and get everyone else to
live in it. Where poetry is noise – and noise is poetry.
The following interview originally appeared in the literary journal Bombay
Gin (issue 38.1, Fall 2011), published by the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa
University. Initially only available in the limited-run print release of
that issue, it is now exclusively available here on Beatdom in its original
form.
____________________________________________________________________________
___________
Katie Ingegneri: How did you first hear about Naropa?
Thurston Moore: It was through my interest in the world of underground
poetry publishing and small presses – something I became fascinated by
around the early 90s, and before then my interest in literature was more
about the writer and less about the book, as far as poetry was concerned.
But artifact collecting and the idea of a singular vision and an imprint was
always interesting to me. I started getting more into collecting first-
edition, first-printing books by certain authors that I felt were
significant to my own interest. And it was a shared interest with a few
other people that I knew, in my scene of being in a rock band in New York
City. I always saw playing music for myself to have equal value to writing.
So book collecting became as significant to me as record collecting and
documenting certain more arcane musical genres, like free jazz and avant-
garde jazz and underground experimental rock and 20th century composer music
that was really on the margins…and progressive British folk music…[laughs
] A lot of my fascination with getting into rock n roll was about
fantasizing, ever since I was a kid, about being in a rock band, but at the
same time it seemed out of reach. I didn’t really know how to play guitar,
and I wasn’t that proficient a technician as far as music was concerned, so
I had more of a feeling I was going to be a writer. There was a lot of
literature in our house, but it wasn’t very focused on poetry so much – it
was more focused on philosophy. What resonated with me in the 70s as a
teenager was certainly music coming from these people who had some
connection to serious poetry and literature. People like Patti Smith, and
Tom Verlaine, from Television, and Richard Hell, who had a band called the
Voidoids, and I really was enamored by what these people were doing, for a
lot of reasons. It was at a time when rock writers were in the same milieu
as the performers, and it was kind of one of the last periods of when that
existed, because it was completely pre-Internet, and it was all about the
physical interaction between people. There was no real interest from high
media on this activity.
So it was underground, and it was owned by the people. You know, Patti Smith
’s whole thing, “we created it, let’s take it over,” about rock n roll
music. That was a very powerful statement and everybody understood that…and
that’s what drew me in. I knew that was the culture I wanted to be a part
of, and it had a lot to do with the lineage of poetry that was under the
hubris “beat literature” or whatever. For me, you would take it upon
yourself to find these books by writers who these musicians were claiming to
be their inspiration and influence in writing. Certainly Dylan did that in
the 60s, but he was a little more obtuse about that – he was Dylan, he’s
such an enigma as far as that’s concerned. But having not lived so much in
the 60s, I didn’t have the sophistication or wherewithal to glean any sort
of history of poetry or writing.
So as a teenager in the 70s, I really started responding to this information
, of writers who inspired people like Lou Reed and Patti Smith, and it would
certainly be William S. Burroughs, and it would be Allen Ginsberg – those
two specifically. They were like the dynamic duo, and they were extremely
interesting, once you saw these names in connection with rock n roll. How
can this thin graying man with a fedora and a suit and tie, and smoking a
cigarette, and looking very all to the world like he could shut it down with
one glance – like who the hell is that? And then you’d go buy the book,
and you’re sixteen years old, and you’d buy The Wild Boys or Naked Lunch,
and Naked Lunch was so important cause it had the transcript of the trial
with Allen Ginsberg and it was amazing to read, for me. And so of course one
thing leads to another if you allow it to and you’re interested in it.
I figured out what that world was, and I knew right away that moving to New
York and investigating it and working within it is all I really wanted to do
. My romance with writing was that I’m going to move to New York, I’m
going to be a writer. So when Anne Waldman introduced Eileen Myles the other
night [at Naropa’s 2011 Summer Writing Program], one of the first things
she said was that she moved to New York to be a poet. And when I heard that,
it was so simple, and so beautiful, and it was both serious and romantic,
and it just implied everything that was important emotionally for myself,
that I immediately said, “if I ever have to write a memoir, that’s the
title of my memoir: She Moved to New York to Be a Poet”! That was sort of
how I felt growing up in a small town in Connecticut, was that I wanted to
move to New York and I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to hang out with Patti
Smith and I wanted to hang out with Richard Hell, and nobody in my high
school knew anything about this stuff.
So all during this period it was all about my intention was to move to New
York and be a writer, and I didn’t really have any kind of support for it.
I didn’t know anything about St. Mark’s Poetry project, but I did know
that Patti Smith did a very significant reading there, and I had a bootleg
album of it. Throughout ‘76, going into New York a lot, to CBGB and Max’s
and a couple of other places, I would see the [St. Mark’s] Church and I
figured out where Gotham Book Mart was, up in midtown. I would go there and
I would buy whatever was associated with her, and buy the books by Burroughs
and Ginsberg, maybe buy a Gregory Corso book or something. It was
discovering things completely outside the academy, you know, cause I wasn’t
in school and I wasn’t doing any lit courses or anything like that. So my
information, I was just gleaning it from connective tissues, in a way.
If somebody would do an introduction to a book, I would go out and buy the
person who introduced that book. I would find out more about that person,
and one thing would lead to another, and I would let that progress and I
would expound on it – not overly academic or seriously. I moved to New York
in very early ‘77, and I lived right near St. Mark’s Church. I would see
activity going on there, but I was playing music with some people, and my
whole thing was that. I was friends with some poets in my tenement building,
who would read at certain places and I would go see them, and I would share
my poetry with them, because I was writing poetry since high school, and I
remember giving a sheaf of poems to these guys, who were like 10 years older
than I was, and they were poets. Then they all came back to me with such
enthusiasm, like they loved what I wrote. I mean, they said they loved what
I wrote. When I look back at what I wrote then, it’s pretty teenage. But
that was so encouraging, and I have one retrospective regret – not
cultivating my writing by going to a poetry workshop at St. Mark’s. But I
didn’t have so much awareness of it. I knew something was going on, but it
didn’t really draw me in.
Thurston Moore and Anne Waldman, presenting a panel
The activity I was involved in, playing music and getting gigs here and
there, at CBGB or Tier 3, was very important, and just what was going on
with the people in the No Wave movement, with Lydia Lunch, and James Chance
and the Contortions. These were people who also had the same trajectory as I
did. I mean Lydia Lunch, she was a writer, but she came from this scabrous
background in upstate NY, and ran away to New York City as a 16-year-old
girl. She had this very wild, wild existence in New York, as Lydia Lunch,
and she was trying to get her poetry out to people, that’s how she started.
And she would hand her poems to people like Lenny Kaye, the guitar player
in Patti Smith’s band, like “I’m a poet, I’m a poet.” But she got a
response when she put a guitar on, which she didn’t know how to play, and
turned the amp up and started smashing on it, and then she started reciting
her words. And that’s when people were like oh, who’s this. So that became
the obvious standard, like put a guitar on, and turn the amp up, and THEN
do your poetry, and that became the new poet, in a way – the electric
guitar poet was like the new poet. So it was like that was what punk rock
had as a real blueprint.
But I think a lot of people shared the same response I had, that the lyrics
were so interesting and new and they had such a quality of poetry to them,
but that’s just the basis for later on becoming interested in avant-garde
music through record collecting. Which I could never do cause I never had
any money – I mean, I was kind of doing it, but it was problematic. But as
soon as Sonic Youth started having a little more income I really got
seriously involved with collecting records that were from these genres that
were really arcane and interesting to me. Especially coming out of punk rock
where it was about establishing an independent means in the industry, that
didn’t have to utilize the industry. So when I started seeing other record
labels from the 60s that dealt with avant-garde jazz or whatever that were
independent, I was like oh, we’re not the first ones, this isn’t something
we created. Even though a lot of people who were joining punk rock were
like we’re so cool, we created this kind of independent network, and it’s
like no, there’s a history there. So I became really interested in that
history, and when I found out that there was a lot – that it existed in the
literary, publishing scene, I became really fascinated with that.
But when I started finding out about the communication between poets through
self-published literature, that’s when I became really involved and
interested in the history and all the people involved with it. And by the
ability to tour across the United States with Sonic Youth, I could go to
every college town, and go to the local bookstores – second-hand bookstores
– and go into the dusty poetry section and go to the end of the alphabet
where they would have the anthologies or whatever, and invariably there
would be some boxes of stapled mimeos from the 60s. I began amassing this
collection and finding out about the different imprints and different
writers that were associated with them, and just seeing all this activity of
writing and communication between poets from different regions of the
United States.
I was really into learning through investigation, pure investigation. I knew
a couple other people who were interested in this stuff, and we would
powwow about it, but I didn’t know the writers. So I started going to the
Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, when I could, even though I didn’t live in
town anymore. And I missed everything – I missed all of Eileen Myles’
running the programs there, being the director there, I missed all of
Bernadette Mayer’s era, it was like God, what a fool I was, for missing it.
But I just really did not know any better – it’s just this nostalgia for
something that I didn’t know existed. But I turned Bernadette Mayer, and
Eileen Myles, and Clark Coolidge, and all these people – they became my
rock n roll stars, in a way. And it was very private for me. [laughs] So I
would go see these people, and I would go up to Clark Coolidge with some of
his earlier stapled stuff and have him sign it or whatever, and they’d
always look at me like – where’d you get this? Who are you? And I was like
, this kid. And some would know who the band was, and they’re just like why
is the guy from Sonic Youth asking me to sign this completely obscure
publication.
When I came to the school this week, I brought a couple of documents, and
one of them was the 1979 curriculum calendar of student/faculty events at
Naropa. And I carried it around with me a little bit, and everybody’s just
coming up to me like, can I hold that and look through it, and somebody made
a copy of it, and it had such value as an object. I mean, you could talk
about 1979 at Naropa, and everybody was like yeah that must’ve been so cool
, but to actually see this piece that existed from then, and it exists in
this kind of living state, in a way. You know, it’s kind of faded, it’s
kind of sunburnt, it’s been handled a little bit, which gives it this sense
of time, but it’s like there’s a certain sort of gleaning that comes from
this actual document of paper, that comes from that period. So I found that
really interesting, and I brought a production piece from the workshop here
in 1974. It was a series of broadsides, one of which was Anne’s, in this
die-cut folder that was stitched together, in an edition of 46 copies or
something like that. All numbered, which I had found in some bookstore
amongst a bunch of other papers, and it cost pennies. I brought that here
too, and I showed it at the panel. But that’s all anybody wanted to talk
about afterwards, like can I see that, can I hold it, can I touch it, can I
see it. So for me, the importance of the life – devoting yourself to the
life of being a poet, to me there is such an importance to the history of
what that is, and with the actual production and documentation of work that
existed…and I never knew what kind of value to put towards what I was doing
as an archivist of this stuff. So it’s kind of wonderful, in a way.
Thurston Moore reading his poetry at Naropa University’s Summer Writing
Program, 2011
KI: Now that you have this archive, do you think that will serve a purpose
for future generations?
TM: I think it serves a purpose if it’s made accessible in a way that makes
sense. I do want it to exist as an accessible library of sorts. I don’t
want to let it out of my sight so much because it means a lot to me, but I
have talked to a couple of other people who have similar archives and
possibly talking to some kind of institution that might establish a library
of sorts. But the fact that a lot of the material is so ephemeral, it almost
becomes a thing like – do people have to put on white gloves to look at
this stuff? I have some stapled mimeo stuff where the edges are crumbling a
bit and you really wanna be careful looking at it. So what do you do about
that? And there’s some talk about digitizing it all, so it’s all available
as digital information, which kind of bores me a little bit. I like the
idea cause it makes the work available to read and you can actually see what
these pieces look like, but the physicality of the pieces is, to me, very
important. So I’m not quite sure how to present it. In a way I feel like
all this investigation I’ve done, and the archiving, has come to a really
good point because I think a lot of the culture of poetry has become really
dependent on the archive as a very real sense of vibrational history. Cause
there is all this information, and historical information that’s available,
through the Internet, and we can all share this knowledge – but the
documentation of it, the actual documentation of it, and what that was
physically, and what that meant, has just recently become something of
import for a lot of young writers.
In the spring of 2010 I had a show at White Columns gallery [in New York
City] where I exhibited a lot of the archive in vitrines and I kind of
fetishized a lot of what I liked about it, the visual stimulus of it, and so
I made huge posters of about 40 of the covers. And the whole gallery was
postered with all these images. There was lots under glass, and I had
readings once a week during the show. I had started editing and publishing a
poetry journal myself from the year 2000 onwards, called Ecstatic Peace
Poetry Journal, cause I had a record label called Ecstatic Peace, and so the
show was like a new edition of the poetry journal. And Ecstatic Peace
Poetry Journal was certainly all about referencing and wanting to continue
the lineage of the aesthetic of this kind of publishing. Which I enjoy doing
, to this day. And the idea in my class this week is to actually create one
of these journals.
But I don’t really know what to do at this point. I mean, I’m not too
concerned about it. I think at some point we’ll figure it out. There’s
certain institutions I think that have an awareness of my collection. I know
that it’s sort of idiosyncratic, its focus is very personal, so that makes
it something else than purely academic. Anne and I were talking about my
archive the other night, and she looked at it like “From the Library of
Thurston Moore,” that’s its focus, and I was like okay, I like that. I do
have everything on file – I keep a FileMaker Pro document of all the poetry
– I have to, cause I’ll go into places and find old poetry stuff, and I’
ll see these pieces that look so amazing to have been found, and I’ll come
home and I’ll look in my FileMaker Pro and see that I have like three other
copies of it. [laughs] So I just really don’t know how I’ll utilize it
beyond it just being in my house.
But to me it’s artwork, and it sits in my house to me as art, and I’ll
figure it out someday. I was actually thinking about weeding it out a little
bit and refining it to some degree, and selling off some of it. Which is
what I do with records as well – just crystallizing my focus a little more.
But I’m not there yet, with that. You know when I think of an archive like
Naropa, which is a lot of paper, ephemeral writing, and there’s also this
recorded audio, a lot of it on cassette, that needs to digitized or has been
digitized. I had come here six years ago and played at a benefit for the
school to raise money to allow that archiving to continue. You know, there’
s been a lot of relevance attached to the concept of the archive, the
archive becomes this really mystical concern or something – which is fine,
but it really is just this sort of personalized library, and it brings in
this sense of the political where it’s like you’re responsible for your
own culture, and recognizing the value of that culture, and what it means in
a humanitarian way, what it means in an educational way, what it means in a
very emotional way too. So I am okay with it existing contemporaneously as
this living archive, we’ll see where it goes.
KI: Even in the past 10 years, it’s been such a shift with the Internet.
When I was growing up, I was really into music and I would go to record
stores, I was always buying CDs and creating my own archive of albums and CD
covers. But now all the music I listen to is all just in my iTunes, and I
don’t know how the archive is going to exist as we go further and further
into this digital age.
TM: Well I think it has to exist, digitally, because that makes it free, it
makes it safe, but it’s also intangible. So I’ve been coming into this
focus of distinction, what that relationship is between yourself and the
artifact, and a lot of it has to do with the equality of value towards
aspects of the artifact where content is just one aspect, so it does become
very physical – what it looks like, what it feels like, what it smells like
, what it tastes like, whatever, that all to me is like – there’s a
certain shared value in all of that. And so the culture of the Internet
allows one value, and that’s basically just content. I find it very
limiting. But it certainly serves a certain purpose and one of those is just
to be what I refer to as the “exploded library.” So I don’t know what to
think about that, cause I do see a new culture of record stores and book
stores that exist with really focused appreciation on objects and they’re
smaller, more boutique, in a way, and that’s fine. I don’t think that sort
of thing is ever going to disappear, disappear. But there’s something
really political about it that I am interested in, the idea of working at
something that you love as opposed to working for the sake of making money,
and how it’s very rare that anybody can work at something they love and
make enough money doing it. And then there’s this whole idea of this
Protestant ethic of “you have to suffer” [laughs] and there’s a
denigration towards people who work at things they love and are compensated
for it. I don’t think anything’s going to disappear, to tell you the truth
. I think there’s gonna be a certain exhaustion that comes with the
formlessness of the Internet as a library, as a store, as whatever, and it’
s going to create a more independent and factionalized world of commerce. We
just opened up a little record store in Northampton, Massachusetts, with
these two young people, and [rock writer] Byron Coley and I have been able
to fill it with all these secondhand records we’ve collected over the last
30 years and go out and buy collections and stuff like that, and we have
some performances in the back room of traveling independent experimental
music people, and we’re able to pay the monthly rent, and we each get a
check for a few hundred bucks once in a while, but that’s fine. It services
the community, and you’re amidst the pleasure of what you really like,
which is music, and film – we have lots of DVDs, but nobody’s getting rich
off this stuff [laughs], that’s certainly not the idea.
KI: When you were starting out, did you start writing poetry before you
became a musician?
TM: It was kinda concurrent – I mean, I had aspirations to play music but I
had aspirations towards being a writer, and I couldn’t really articulate
what that would entail. I guess my idea of writing, I equated it with
journalism, like I was gonna be a journalist, or I was gonna go to
journalism school. The one quarter of a semester that I went to college in
fall of ‘76, which was at a state college in Connecticut, I remember
signing up for whatever English classes they had, and journalism class,
whatever that was, and that invariably had some connection to the school
newspaper. I wrote about music in the college newspaper, and I wrote about
the Ramones, I wrote about Patti Smith – I wrote about what I was
interested in, and people started responding to it, like, man that was so
cool what you wrote about but what the hell was it – like nobody knew about
this stuff.
So I wrote about John Cale. I went to see John Cale play, and I filed it,
and they printed it, and they took it upon themselves to correct what they
thought was my misspelling of John Cage. They changed John Cale to John Cage
. And so my John Cale piece became this review of a John Cage concert which
never existed, as if it was John Cale, and I went up to the office and I was
like why did you change John Cale to John Cage? And they were like it was
about John Cage, wasn’t it, we just thought you spelled it wrong…at that
moment I was just like – I hate school. I’d had it, and I moved to New
York. I found a place to live and I started playing music with some people,
and I was writing – I’d always sort of written poetry in my later teens,
and continued to write some in New York – but my involvement with playing
music became my primary interest. I always kept notebooks when I was playing
music.
You know, lyric writing to me was predicated upon the art of the rhyme. I
also knew that poetry, the way it appeared on the page as far as it being
rhyming schemes had become so quaint, a fairly passé presentation of poetry
. I didn’t really see anything wrong with that but as far as it being
lyrical in song – rhyme still worked as something that was really permanent
and substantive. I understood the relationship between the poem on the page
and the poem as a sung lyric, where the art of the rhyme had a different
nature. So that was kind of important to me, and a lot of times when I would
write and I had ideas of writing, I would think about how it would exist as
a song lyric, and I would write down lyrics that had certain intonation and
a certain sense of rhyme, but I never really thought of presenting them as
poems. I thought I wouldn’t want to have them read as poetry just because
there was a certain kind of sing-songy aspect of it that, without the
context of the music, it just read too quaint on the page. I understood that
distinction.
The workshop taught by Thurston Moore at Naropa, 2011
But all through the 90s, I understood the correlation between writing and
poetry and writing and songwriting, and I invariably would get lyrics either
from notebooks, poetry writing, and I would sort of reshape them for the
song, or I would go to a number of poems and take lines from different poems
and create a unified piece that would work in a song. Sometimes I would do
that, which was a semi-kind of cut-up method, or had some kind of
correlation with cut-up, but I was kind of into wanting to have an identity
as an poet that was separate from an identity as a musician, which I always
found very difficult. I would actually do a book of writing or poetry, that
I would do myself or somebody would publish, and whenever I would see it in
a bookstore it would more than likely be in the music section, cause I was a
musician making poetry, or something like that. Which really kind of bummed
me out, because it inferred that poetry was a dalliance, and I didn’t want
to be Jewel [laughs]. And Spin Magazine, when my first book Alabama Wildman
came out, they actually did this page where it was these three books of
writing that were out, and it was Dee Dee Ramone’s book, Jewel’s book, and
my book, and they were like – Jewel’s was this flighty romantic poetry,
and Dee Dee Ramone’s was like this memoir of madness of being in a punk
rock band, but then “we can’t even decipher what Thurston Moore’s was
about,” they didn’t know what was going on with this different poetic kind
of thing, cause there was nothing in that book that was relative to anybody
who thought poetry was basically what Jewel was writing. [laughs] So it was
just like, I was weird – this is some fucking weird thing this guy did.
Which I like. I was like great, at least I’m not the musician making the
bad poetry book.
KI: We spoke a little bit about your association with William S. Burroughs
and Allen Ginsberg. I was in a class this past semester on the history of
the Beat Generation and we watched the recent documentary on William S.
Burroughs, “A Man Within,” a project that you were involved with. I
understand you and Sonic Youth collaborated with him on his album “Dead
City Radio.” I also recently read that Sonic Youth celebrated Allen’s 60th
birthday with him. How did you first meet these legendary writers (and
Naropa teachers), and how did you come to collaborate with them?
TM: When I lived on East 13th Street between Avenues A + B in NYC in the
late 70s I’d see Allen and Peter Orlovsky walking hand in hand around the
neighborhood (and sometimes even on the L – very bold!) Allen’s place was
on East 12th Street, same building where Kerouac lived, and where Richard
Hell still lives I believe. Allen would appear at CBGB once in a while and
play Buddhist harmonium chants on stage opening for Patti Smith, Television
and other denizens of that stage. So he was a neighborhood figure. I didn’t
really meet him until much later when Sonic Youth garnered a more
prestigious profile. I seem to remember Lee [Ranaldo] and I going to a book
publication party at The Poetry Project and talking with Allen and he had
asked about working together. He called me up and we discussed possibilities
. I said I thought it might be hip for SY to improvise music with Allen
reading. He replied that that’s what Dylan also requested. Ha! I would run
into Allen here and there and it was always cool. He came to hang out at the
NYC stop of Lollapalooza 1995 and I have some pictures of him and myself
with my baby daughter Coco. While I talked to him, Coco would be grabbing at
his beard and mouth and while most people would flinch at such messiness,
Allen allowed her to stick her fingers into his mouth and he sucked and bit
at them. I was very impressed. We never did get around to collaborating
beyond him sending me a package with a nice letter and a sheaf of poems to
peruse.
Burroughs lived on the Bowery in a place called The Bunker, same place as
John Giorno I believe. I remember having to call Giorno, as we were
submitting a track to one of his Giorno Poetry System records, and Burroughs
answering the phone. I can still hear that gravel tenor in my ear. After he
located finally to Lawrence, Kansas we were invited to come to his house by
his assistant James Grauerholz, who was a SY fan. We went a couple of times
, once by ourselves and once when we were touring that area opening for REM.
The first time I recall sitting in his living room and he had a number of
Guns and Ammo magazines laying about and he was only very interested in
talking about shooting and knifing. Not exactly a subject dear to me but it
was amazing hanging out. And we went into his backyard where he had an
actual orgone box built from the specifications of Wilhelm Reich, which I
sat in, even though it was rife with spiderwebs. The recordings we did on
the “Dead City Radio” LP were organized by Hal Willner, who had a personal
and professional relationship with both these men as well as with SY.
KI: I’ve noticed a few Sonic Youth songs are dedicated to Beat writers like
Gregory Corso. Were the Beats a big influence on you as a writer and/or
musician – in terms of style, subjects, and/or their challenge to
traditional, mainstream American culture?
TM: The Beat writers, even to this day, are still on the margins of American
letters. Even though they are universally recognized as a significant
development in modern and post-modern literature, they are still considered
off-the-grid. In a way it was relative and resonant to the structure of
American society and its professed standards in that they need to be defined
as troublemakers, which is where I wanted to be. In that lineage. And, in
music history, it was concurrent, where you had experimental and punk rock
music on the margins of “popular” and acceptable. I came to Beat writing
through music where music writers like Lester Bangs, Patti Smith, Richard
Meltzer and others would point to Ginsberg, Burroughs, Corso and others as
compatriots of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Bob Dylan, Iggy & the
Stooges and many others.
KI: How has working as a writer and editor impacted your musical career, or
vice versa? Do you find you get different rewards from different creative
practices?
TM: Writing and editing are a more singular passion for me, whereas music
usually has a more collaborative practice. Lately I’ve been more interested
in writing music alone and am seemingly becoming more focused thus.
KI: One of my Bombay Gin co-editors, Jade Lascelles, who was also in our
class, had a question: When you returned to “Daydream Nation” 20 years
later to perform it in concert, you said you had to return to the same kind
of bodily space you had inhabited when you were first creating that album.
Do you ever find you undergo similar experiences when revisiting old writing?
TM: I do, without a doubt. With writing though I find I can take the work
and update it, sometimes. I find the more I study the work and history of
poetry as a spiritual as well as academic vocation, the writing I’ve put to
paper decade(s) past is very innocent and, in a way, I feel it best to
choose to not update the work and keep it as a reminder of who and where I
was.
KI: Do you think that there’s hope for a renewal of non-corporate
creativity, in all forms, in the mainstream? Or will it all be underground?
TM: Well, that’s pre-supposing the mainstream as the more valuable
environment. The underground is where all the foxes are.
T. Moore, Naropa University 2011
Thurston Moore and MFA student Katie Ingegneri at Naropa
[All photos copyright Katie Ingegneri, 2012.]
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Posted by Katie Ingegneri on October 10, 2012 In Beatdom Content, Features,
Interviews allen ginsberg, anne waldman, archive, beat generation,
bernadette mayer, bob dylan, boulder, byron coley, clark coolidge,
counterculture, daydream nation, ecstatic peace poetry journal, eileen myles
, gotham book mart, Gregory Corso, guitarists, hal willner, independent
publishing, interview, jack kerouac school, john cage, john cale, john
giorno, lester bangs, literary journals, lou reed, lydia lunch, media,
musicians, naropa, naropa university, new york city, patti smith, poetry,
punk, richard hell, small presses, sonic youth, st. mark's poetry project,
the voidoids, thurston moore, tom verlaine, William S. Burroughs,
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Katie Ingegneri
Posts Website Twitter
Katie Ingegneri is an MFA fiction student currently in her thesis semester
at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
Obsessed with the Beat Generation, she is writing an experimental novel on
the life of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, while also working in Boston at an
internet marketing company and living at home with her parents, 3 cats, and
a dog. She plans to start her own literary journal and small press,
exploding this metamodern culture inside out.
The Last Man Standing: Al... A Willamette Valley Springtime
2 responses to Noise Poetry: An Interview with Thurston Moore
John October 11, 2012 at 10:24 am
Thurston is a legend! Thanks so much for posting this wonderful interview,
Beatdom. You are brilliant!
Reply
Trackbacks and Pingbacks:
Thurston Moore curates CUNY Chapfest book display from his archived
collection : CUNY Chapfest - June 12, 2013
[…] For more on Thurston and his collection, read Noise Poetry: An
Interview with Thurston Moore by Katie Ingegneri which originally appeared
in the literary journal Bombay Gin (issue 38.1, Fall 2011), published by the
Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University. You can read the entire interview
exclusively on Beatdom in its original form here: http://www.beatdom.com/?p=1983 […]
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© 2016 Beatdom — foundly by Foundly | t*******h
发帖数: 2744 | 2 You know, lyric writing to me was predicated upon the art of the rhyme. I
also knew that poetry, the way it appeared on the page as far as it being
rhyming schemes had become so quaint, a fairly passé presentation of poetry
. I didn’t really see anything wrong with that but as far as it being
lyrical in song – rhyme still worked as something that was really permanent
and substantive. I understood the relationship between the poem on the page
and the poem as a sung lyric, where the art of the rhyme had a different
nature. So that was kind of important to me, and a lot of times when I would
write and I had ideas of writing, I would think about how it would exist as
a song lyric, and I would write down lyrics that had certain intonation and
a certain sense of rhyme, but I never really thought of presenting them as
poems. I thought I wouldn’t want to have them read as poetry just because
there was a certain kind of sing-songy aspect of it that, without the
context of the music, it just read too quaint on the page. I understood that
distinction. | t*******h
发帖数: 2744 | 3 I ripped your heart out from your chest
Replaced it with a grenade blast
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
The firefighters hose me down
I don't care, I'll burn out anyhow
It's four-alarm girl, nothing to see
Hear the sirens come for me
You doused my soul with gasoline
You flicked a match into my brain
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
The firefighters are so nice
I remember you so cold as ice
The flames are licking at your feet
The sirens come to put me me out of misery
You wave your torch into my eyes
Flamethrower lover burning mind
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
Incinerate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP3ovD8ZSS4 | t*******h
发帖数: 2744 | 4 "NYC Ghosts & Flowers"
When the phone rang, 3 in the morn, dead middle of night
There was nuthin on the line
I set back the silent receiver
tiny flames lit in my head
Hey did any of you freaks here ever remember lenny?
I can't remember his last name
He's turned to dust now, one of the chosen few
Left out in the rain, out of town again
Left out in the rain, ocean bound I guess
Between the matress and a column of hazy faces
I remember every word you said
Quite a clear picture ev'ry word you said
The door was open but the way was not lit
And there was no way out of my head
On a crimson hiway by a chrome bumper I last saw you:
Alive
inclined to thrive
evening fireflies lit sparks around yr head
But wait a minute let's back up a bit:
Some famous stars were busted by the thought police down on fashion avenue
Impersonating real men
not knowing who they really were
Now here at dark corners all is calm and quiet and good
The kids are up late dreaming quiet questions in a graceful mood:
Can you please pass me a jug of winter light?
Fold me in an ocean's whim?
In sweet corrosive fire light?
In the city made of tin?
Are you famous under the skin?
Familiar with the things you wanted?
Able now to take it all in?
Making peace w/ every hole in the story?
Did lightning keep you up all night?
Illuminate the soot and grit?
Can you tell how high the sky tonight?
Dig out from under in spite of it?
Can you cover up the one that floats?
Can you push back the hours?
I hear yr voice, I speak yr name
Among nyc ghosts and flowers
Will we meet? to run again?
Thru nyc ghosts and flowers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8vfj1zWkwY | C*********X
发帖数: 10518 | 5 Cool guy.
A lot of nutrition in your post.
Bow down thanks.
对你唯一的要求就是，你不是_大爷，不是就不是。你的水平挺高的。I like it..
【在 t*******h 的大作中提到】
: Beatdom
: ABOUTSUBMISSION GUIDELINESBUY
: Home/Beatdom Content/Noise Poetry: An Interview with Thurston Moore
: Thurston Moore reading his poetry at Naropa University's Summer Writing
: Program, 2011.
: Noise Poetry: An Interview with Thurston Moore
: Share
: 0
: 0
: 0
| C*********X
发帖数: 10518 | 6 这个drum beat 我感觉有到170+了，这么均匀，难度很大！！thumb up...
电话吉他评价不了，不过很接近木吉他的声音，another thumb up ...
关键是，这个画面的创意确实有些erotic , 还好我心志成熟了
Lol
【在 t*******h 的大作中提到】
: I ripped your heart out from your chest
: Replaced it with a grenade blast
: Incinerate
: Incinerate
: Incinerate
: Incinerate
: The firefighters hose me down
: I don't care, I'll burn out anyhow
: It's four-alarm girl, nothing to see
: Hear the sirens come for me
| C*********X
发帖数: 10518 | 7 那你有没有吸毒啊。。。
对艺术家，我感觉有点恐怖。。。俺是科学家。。
poetry
permanent
page
would
as
and
【在 t*******h 的大作中提到】
: You know, lyric writing to me was predicated upon the art of the rhyme. I
: also knew that poetry, the way it appeared on the page as far as it being
: rhyming schemes had become so quaint, a fairly passé presentation of poetry
: . I didn’t really see anything wrong with that but as far as it being
: lyrical in song – rhyme still worked as something that was really permanent
: and substantive. I understood the relationship between the poem on the page
: and the poem as a sung lyric, where the art of the rhyme had a different
: nature. So that was kind of important to me, and a lot of times when I would
: write and I had ideas of writing, I would think about how it would exist as
: a song lyric, and I would write down lyrics that had certain intonation and
| t*******h
发帖数: 2744 | 8 你精神不正常
我也不正常
【在 C*********X 的大作中提到】
: Cool guy.
: A lot of nutrition in your post.
: Bow down thanks.
: 对你唯一的要求就是，你不是_大爷，不是就不是。你的水平挺高的。I like it..
| C*********X
发帖数: 10518 | 9 我还下流。。lol
睡觉了。。。。。seriously 想，要不要再生一个baby ......
今天抱着一个2岁别人的baby, 我的眼泪直流。。
不是我不能生。。。。。而是我要一个真正的爱情的结晶，而不是上帝的恩赐。。。
人是胜不了天的。。。。。
【在 t*******h 的大作中提到】
: 你精神不正常
: 我也不正常
|
|
