"Do You Have a Band?": Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City

by Daniel Kane

Overview

Durgaing the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, and into the 1980s, New York City poets and musicians played together, published each other, and inspired one another to create groundbreaking art. In "Do You Have a Band?", Daniel Kane reads deeply across poetry and punk music to capture this compelling exchange and its challenge to the status of the visionary artist, the cultural capital of poetry, and the lines dividing sung lyric from page-bound poem.

Kane reveals how the new sounds of proto-punk and punk music found their way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, enabling writers to develop fresh ideas for their own poetics and performance styles. Likewise, groups like The Fugs and the Velvet Underground drew on writers as varied as William Blake and Delmore Schwartz for their lyrics. Drawing on a range of archival materials and oral interviews, Kane also shows how and why punk musicians drew on and resisted French Symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and, most surprisingly and complexly, the New York Schools of poetry. In bringing together the music and writing of Richard Hell, Patti Smith, and Jim Carroll with readings of poetry by Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Ted Berrigan, John Giorno, and Dennis Cooper, Kane provides a fascinating history of this crucial period in postwar American culture and the cultural life of New York City.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231162968
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	07/25/2017
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Daniel Kane is Professor in English and American literature at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His books include We Saw the Light: Conversations Between the New American Cinema and Poetry (2009) and All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (2003).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Fugs Are Coming
2. Lou Reed: "In the Beginning Was the Word"
3. Proto-Punk and Poetry on St. Mark's Place
4. Richard Hell, Genesis: Grasp, and the Making of the Blank Generation
5. "I Just Got Different Theories": Patti Smith and the New York School of Poetry
6. Giorno Poetry Systems
7. Eileen Myles and the International Fuck Frank O'Hara Movement
8. "Sit on My Face!": Dennis Cooper, the First Punk Poet
Afterword: People Who Died
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

["Do You Have a Band?"] makes a valuable contribution to New York City history and provides an important argument about the origins of punk rock. Readers interested in either of these topics (or of the NYC poetry scene) would certainly find the book beneficial and worthwhile.

Journal of Popular Culture - Michael P. Marino

"Do You Have a Band?" is a formidably researched and galvanizing cultural history of the poetry–punk rock connection, with its lofty aspirations, history, gossip, and genius. This book continues Kane’s passionate scholarship of the formative years of the downtown New York performance/poetry worlds. When were we ever so free to incubate our wild desires in language and sound? Current and next generations of artists, rockers, scholars, and fans will love this book.

Anne Waldman

“Do You Have a Band?” is a lively, irreverent cultural history which serves as a fitting companion piece to Kane’s excellent All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2003).

Rain Taxi Review of Books - Christopher Luna

A pioneering work of literary history that chronicles a period from roughly the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s when the line between poetry and Manhattan-based proto-punk and punk rock was markedly permeable. . . . Kane allows for an expansive definition of poetry, tacitly advancing the idea that poetry is not a set of formal values but whatever its writers and readers need it to be at a particular time. His writing is richer for it, and it will ensure that poetry, punk, and punk poetry remain consequential for years to come.

Public Books - Josh Schneiderman

Daniel Kane’s 'Do You Have a Band' illuminates the connection of Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith to Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, Bernadette Mayer, and beyond. The dialogue among poets hanging out at CBGB and punk rock pioneers reading at the Poetry Project in early-seventies NYC is where so many of us in the sonic-lit lineage enter, charmed into the future.

Thurston Moore

Critics have long remarked that Lou Reed, Richard Hell, Patti Smith and other musicians associated with the emergence of punk rock began their careers in the New York poetry world. Why then are timeless evocations of the Rimbaudian maudit all we ever hear about their interest in poetry? Banishing these clichés with a critical power chord, Daniel Kane's "Do You Have a Band?" finally brings into view the actual landscape of later New York School poetics in which (and often against which) New York punk rock took shape.

Lytle Shaw

["Do You Have a Band?"] succeeds spectacularly. . . . Equal time and space is given to NYC poetry/music godfather Ed Sanders (of the Fugs) as well as three figures who, to varying degrees, followed in the initial punk wake: John Giorno, Eileen Myles and Dennis Cooper. Placing Myles and Cooper within this milieu is revelatory and really puts the book into new territory rarely covered in other NYC punk histories.

Orlando Weekly - Matthew Moyer

Ear to the ground, attentive to the dialectical turns of the avant-garde in an inventive moment of literary production. . . . “Do You Have a Band?” markedly complicates the often-hallowed story of punk, while adding texture and nuance to the arc of post-New American poetry, providing another essential piece of literary history.

The ALH Online Review - Andrew Strombeck

Kane’s reportage and detailed, historically informed close readings rewardingly commit much of [a] once-ephemeral body of work to posterity.

American Literature

["Do You Have a Band?"] highlights the impact of the New York School on New York punk (not to mention the impact of NY punk on the NY School) and puts the musical revolution in its proper context. . . . Past books on punk have included the part about poetry, but left out the specifics of the scene that was happening right in punk’s own backyard. With "Do You Have a Band?", we can consider the historical record corrected.

The Arts Fuse - Adam Ellsworth

A generous, non-dismissive, but also exacting account of that vexed and unstable crossing-point between 'music that aspires to the complexity of weird poetry' and poetry galvanized by punk.

Journal of Popular Music Studies - Peter Coviello

As far as an academic book can be, Kane’s is punky and irreverent. His writing is of a piece with his subject matter, and is often witty or demotic, his arguments ranging from the casually observed to the borderline polemical. This, combined with his extensive and meticulous research, which includes fascinating archival material and first-hand interviews with many of the figures under discussion, renders Do You Have A Band? both intellectually rigorous and profoundly enjoyable. It is also an important interdisciplinary addition to the growing body of exciting work on the New York School.

ASAP/J - Rona Cran

Daniel Kane’s “Do You Have A Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City persuasively argues the crucial influence of poetry on New York art-rock and proto-punk from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Franz Nicolay

Daniel Kane's incisive study confirms what poets have known for years: that punk rock was spawned by the New York School. Meticulously researched, "Do You Have a Band?" is a must-read for any literature buff, poet, or punk rock fan. This book seamlessly blends historical analysis with literary critique, pop culture, and just the right amount of dirt.

Gillian McCain

Daniel Kane’s “Do You Have a Band?”: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City depicts a similarly tight and intimate scene in New York that coalesced not just around CBGBs and the Mudd Club, but around the St Mark’s Poetry Project. . . . The additions Kane makes to the narrative of the genesis of 1970s underground New York are invaluable.

Times Literary Supplement - Chris Kraus