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

During 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.

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

About the Author :
Daniel Kane is reader 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).

Review :
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, recording artist and cofounder of Sonic Youth 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, coauthor of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk "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 tome 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, author of Voice's Daughter of a Heart Yet to Be Born 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 cliches 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, New York University, author of Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie