Poets on Film: The Basketball Diaries Creates One of the Most Successful Conflations of All Time

Sex, Drugs, Basketball, Jim Carroll, Poetry, and Me

Welcome to the first installment of Poets on Film: (Re)appraisals of biopics that have featured real-life poets as their subjects or as secondary characters.

Poets on Film 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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Beginnings

In 1997, I discovered Jim Carroll’s poetry. I was 12. Two years earlier, a film about Carroll’s life based on his book, The Basketball Diaries, premiered with a young and ferocious Leonardo DiCaprio playing Carroll. I wouldn’t see the film for a few more years, which made it possible for me to get to know Carroll as a poet before linking him with DiCaprio’s raw performance.

When I was interviewed by Foley Schuler at Blue Lake Public Radio during National Poetry Month this year, he asked me who the first poet I ever read was, and I noted that it was Carroll. Foley rightfully pointed out that Carroll’s work was pretty mature (read: full of drugs and sex and rock ‘n’ roll) for someone so young, and he’s absolutely right.

When I first read Carroll’s collection of selected poems, Fear of Dreaming, it was everything I thought poetry was or should be: mysterious, moody, rife with the forbidden, and absolutely uninterested in what anyone else thought about it.

So, too, is Carroll the man, or so it has always seemed to me.

via E! Online