Making a Turn for the Verse : Spoken-word performances, many by artists who are better known for music, grow more popular

One on one, eyeball to eyeball, face to face, there’s nothing quite so direct as the spoken word to energize an encounter between performer and audience. On almost any night in the Southland, open poetry sessions, spoken-word performances and what are called, in only slightly tongue-in-cheek fashion, rock ‘n’ roll readings are increasingly being heard.

Many are being done by such music-associated artists as Lou Reed and Jim Carroll, as well as John Densmore (The Doors), Henry Rollins (Black Flag) and Bruce Thomas (longtime bassist for Elvis Costello). Frequently, they take place in coffeehouses such as the Cafe Beckett and Highland Grounds in Hollywood, the Cobalt Cafe in Woodland Hills, the Iguana Cafe in North Hollywood and the Queen of Cups in Venice, as well as in bookstores and private homes. A number of university arts programs are beginning to add readings to their schedules, and some bigger-name performers are being heard at rock music venues.

Jim Carroll, whose career has included periods devoted to both music and poetry, says, “Poetry readings bring the kind of energy I used to experience when I had my rock ‘n’ roll bands.

“When I started doing music, and reviewers talked about audiences being mesmerized or hypnotized, that was exactly what I wanted, because that was the way I felt myself. And that’s the kind of feeling that poetry readings can sometimes bring back to me.”

Carroll will appear at the Cafe Largo Wednesday and Thursday nights, reading from his diaries and poems.

Is his appearance part of a trend in the works? Probably not. Poetry is far too ephemeral an art to generate an honest-to-goodness populist movement.

Its fragility may best be illustrated by the fact that a booking of two other prominent performers, poet Michael McClure and former Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek, was canceled last month due to lack of advance sales. And Lou Reed, one of the bigger names in the music-poetry crossover, has canceled the balance of his current tour.

But the grass-roots activity continues, with a range and variety of endeavors that clearly suggest that spoken-word performances are passing through one of their periodic cycles of rediscovery.

Carroll, whose work has been praised by, among others, Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, may be the perfect figure to lead the vanguard of the current resurgence.

Born in New York in 1951, he was a published poet at the age of 17. His schizophrenic life as a Catholic schoolboy, a basketball star, a street punk and a heroin addict was the foundation for his coruscating early works, “The Basketball Diaries” and “Forced Entries.”

But Carroll, despite his highly visible association with the hip New York art scene of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, resists an identification with the literary thread that moves through Kerouac and Ginsburg.

“When people started writing about my work, they used to refer to it as ‘beat poetry,’ and that’s wrong,” he explains. “My poetry--especially the early work--wasn’t written to explore myself, it was to get out of myself. My street experiences were too real to me. I didn’t want to write some beatnik street thing. I like to read Ginsburg’s poems and Whitman’s poems, but I wasn’t interested in writing like that.

“I was looking for the kind of elegance--even the erudition--of the surrealists and Rilke and people like that. I wanted to put my own life into my writing, and filter it through that style of poetry.”

Eventually, however, the ingrown qualities of the New York scene, the interaction of the Andy Warhol crowd, Max’s Kansas City, the little poetry magazines and Carroll’s deepening drug addiction drove him into isolation in Northern California, where he finally kicked his heroin habit.

The seclusion also opened up another possibility--rock music.

Carroll had been told many times that his readings were like Mick Jagger doing poetry, but it wasn’t until he read about the emergence of such New York bands as Blondie, Talking Heads and Mink de Ville that he saw music as a possible arena for his own artistic expression.

“At first,” he says, “I wanted to get into rock ‘n’ roll because I was so fed up with the kind of incestuous nature of the poetry scene and the little magazines: ‘You publish me in yours, and I’ll publish you in mine.’

“But the real reason was because I wanted my writing to make a difference and, at the time, it seemed to me that the best way to do that was with rock ‘n’ roll.”

Three Carroll albums followed--”Catholic Boy,” “Dry Dreams” and “I Write Your Name.” Critical commentary compared his work to that of everyone from Bob Dylan and David Bowie to Iggy Pop and Patti Smith.

Carroll had other concerns: “My main thing was avoiding any signs of pretense. I mean, for good or bad, I was fairly entrenched in the poetry scene when I got a band together, and I was worried that people would be looking for artsy stuff in the music, which wasn’t what I wanted at all. I think I did manage to avoid that on the first record, although I’m not so sure about the second album. But I do think I got back to business on the third album.”

Now, seven years after the release of his last music album, Carroll has mixed feelings about that aspect of his talent. His newest recording, “Praying Mantis” (Giant Records), is a pure spoken-word outing, done in performance at New York’s poetry mecca, St. Mark’s Church.

“At first,” recalls Carroll, “I thought maybe I should put on some music. I mean, like, Ginsburg has wall-to-wall music--hot studio musicians and stuff--on his albums. But after I thought about it, I knew I had to do it straight, without any music. If I was going to do something with music, I might just as well do another rock ‘n’ roll record, and that wasn’t really what I had in mind--at least not right now.”

Carroll still enjoys what he describes as the “exercise of writing songs,” but his focus has moved toward larger scaled works--most notably two novels that are in the early stages.

“Books,” he says. “That’s what I’m more interested in working on now. Because you have to make the shift, at some time, into getting out of that ecstasy-inspired period into some more sober thing, or else you go crazy--you wind up like Hart Crane. You get that kind of ecstatic inspiration that he had, the kind that comes so easily when you’re very young, and then, after a while, it fades.”

Rock music was, for a while, a way of maintaining that “ecstatic inspiration” for Carroll. But writing rock songs and, inevitably, having to become an entertainer, repeating the same numbers night after night, have reduced the appeal of leading a rock ‘n’ roll band.

Fortunately, poetry readings have provided him with some of the best of both worlds.

“Poetry readings can bring back the energy,” concludes Carroll. “When I was younger, I was a wreck with poetry readings. When they first asked me to read at St. Mark’s, I was scared to death. But rock ‘n’ roll has taught me how to deal with an audience.”