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Jim Carroll to provide literary experience at Blind Pig

"I'm not really Ôon tour' right now," Carroll said. "Mainly in the past year, I've been doing a lot of colleges. I mean, I've been with one of those giant speakers' agencies with like Diane Sawyer and Schwarzkopf and stuff. I guess I'm one of the few people who reads poems and does something like that."

For Carroll, "something like that" could be one of his many creative outlets, including spoken word or music. On his trip through Ann Arbor, however, he plans a strictly literary journey.

"I may not have any music backing me up, but I do have some lyrics from songs that I've written recently," he said. "I might just rap some of those. Sometimes they're better that way. Some songs can work fine without music."

As far as a distinction between writing song lyrics and writing poetry goes, Carroll insists that the lines are pretty clear-cut.

"I hate when people call your lyrics Ôpoems.' Because in an aesthetic, spiritual sense, you're trying for the same affect on the audience Ñ to affect not just the intellect but the heart, too. But in a technical sense, they're completely different," he explained. Carroll admitted that he wasn't always into the poetry scene, though Ñ especially in the "Basketball Diary" years of his early adolescence.

"I thought poetry was sissy stuff, like all the kids in the Irish Catholic neighborhood," Carroll said. "Then I got a scholarship to this real exclusive private school with these hip, rich kids, and I got into poetry there. But at Catholic school, this one brother was teaching me, and he liked my compositions in English, so he made me sports editor of the school newspaper.

"He thought I had talent," Carroll continued. "So he made me cut out the sports in the New York Times and underline metaphors and similes, and I would use them in these things that I would write about. I can still remember lines that I wrote. Like there was this one guy named Morales, and he was a really good, fast runner, and at the track meet. I said, ÔMorales walked away with everything but the floorboards.' And I'd use alliteration like ÔMarvelous Morales' and stuff like that. Well, that was a little trite." By that summer, a 12-year-old Carroll had already developed a love for writing, and he decided to pick up where the newspaper left off.

"I started to write the diaries because I wanted to write a novel, but I just didn't have the wherewithal to sustain a plot idea and characters. So I just decided to write about my life Ñ not in a Ôdear diary' kind of way. I mean, I only wrote it on days that something anecdotally interesting happened.

"And I don't know where (the writing talent) came from because no one in my family was artistic. In fact, they thought that writing made people a little sissy or something," Carroll laughed.

When asked about the recent film version of his boyhood diaries, Carroll seemed pleased with the performances Ñ especially Leonardo DiCaprio's portrayal of himself Ñ but disappointed with the script's overall bend from reality. "I thought the director just totally blew it at this certain point. It just got too dark or something," he said.

Carroll plans to finish up two pending novels sometime in the near future, which will be a step in a new direction for an author whose endeavors of that length have been autobiographical up to this point.

"They're a big change for me ... They're in the third person. I've written short stories and stuff, but not a novel with a plot. It's like a real blessing, but it was kind of like a curse because two of them came at once."

If Carroll is worried about finishing up both novels, he probably shouldn't be. The right words have been coming to him since his childhood days of shooting hoops and shooting drugs. And bad directors or not, you can bet Jim Carroll's story has not nearly come to a close.