All That Glitters: I Read Billy Corgan's Blinking with Fists so You Don't Have to

From Smashing Pumpkins to Smashing Poems (I'm So Sorry)

Welcome to the second installment of All That Glitters: (Re)appraisals of musicians, actors, and other culture-makers who have written and/or published poetry. You can revisit the first post on Jewel’s A Night Without Armor here.

All That Glitters is a semi-regular feature of PopPoetry, a poetry and pop culture Substack written by Caitlin Cowan. You can learn more about it here. Check out the archive to see other TV shows, movies, and films whose intersections with poetry I’ve covered. If you like what you read and want it in your inbox, subscribe so you won’t miss a post!

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When I first heard that Billy Corgan would be publishing a book of poetry, I was certain that it would be good. It was 2004, and I was graduating from high school. I was an enormous Smashing Pumpkins fan still bummed about their 2000 breakup. Blinking with Fists promised to be as moody and expressive as Corgan’s lyrics, and I was eager to check it out as a poet myself.

via Jay L. Clendenin / LA Times

But I hadn’t even gotten my hands on it yet before the reviews made their way to me. In short, it sucked. The book, that is. In a brief review for Entertainment Weekly, Thom Geier graded it a “D” and quipped:

Corgan is a random-metaphor generator whose poems are both pretentious (”a twixt the twine and flowers divine”) and confoundingly esoteric (”armadillo trains rustle underfoot”). Where are the guitar riffs?

“Where?” indeed.

It took me years to get up the nerve to peek into it to see how bad it really was, and I had never really read it seriously until I began the research for this post.

I would happily rescue Corgan from the critical fate that he suffered if I thought the work merited it. But it doesn’t. Some 17 years later, I regret (?) to inform you that Blinking with Fists is not a good book. But that’s not all that interesting.

What is interesting is why the book’s a bomb, and what Corgan’s work tells us about the popular conception of poetry.