During the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, 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 captures this sometimes turbulent 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 demonstrates the ways in which musicians borrowed from each other’s forms. Performers such as Lou Reed looked to poetry to give their music a more literary quality while the poets Ed Sanders and Dennis Cooper were drawn to the immediacy and energy of rock and punk music. Kane conducts rich studies of such proto-punk bands as The Fugs and the Velvet Underground. He reads the music and writing of Richard Hell, Lydia Lunch, and Patti Smith against the poetry of Anne Waldman, Eileen Myles, Bruce Andrews, Kathy Acker, Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, and Andrew Wiley. Kane shows how and why punk musicians drew on French symbolist writing, the vatic resonance of the Beat chant, and the New York School of poetry. As punk music found its way into the poetry of the 1960s and 1970s downtown scene, writers developed fresh ideas for their own poetics and related performance styles.
