One weekend afternoon when I was 15, I received what might be called “mobile criticism.” I was walking into town for my shift at Pizza Hut when a man sitting in the passenger seat of a car careening down the road stuck his head out as it passed me and yelled, “Henry Rollins is a bad poet!” before immediately driving off.
In hindsight, I could think of the incident rather cheerfully. Pretty much anyone with the most basic verbal faculty can be a critic. They have many avenues in which to articulate that criticism. Strange, and a bit disappointing, how so many people prefer to don the digital muumuu rather than to test their theories out before the literal man on the street. We argue about the most trivial matters with the same unsolicited performativity, and total lack of anonymity, why not apply it for your aesthetic system? Your manifesto of cultural reform? Even if it is just six words long.
Not that this occurred to me at the time. Being less prone to intellectual fancy in my youth, and unfortunately fairly accustomed (then and occasionally now for some reason) to being harassed by teen motorists while walking, I only saw the bad faith of an upperclassman from my high school who’d caught wind of a lapse in my personal taste and wanted to rub it in my face for his amusement as opposed to my aesthetic refinement. But that was of a piece with concurrent experience.
Not too long before that, while taking a creative writing class, I gave a presentation on the poetry of Henry Rollins. Poetry like this, from his 1990 collection Bang!:
There was a time
When things weren’t so
And the air was
And people were
When you could go about at night
And hear no gunshots
I remember neither the framing of the project nor anything I said; I only remember that it was not met warmly. In fact it was met with considerable derision from other students, and one student in particular who just generally didn’t like me. “It isn’t poetry,” was the main, extremely adamant, critique. So offensive/amusing was my advocacy that it was mentioned to the other members of the artsy clique into which I was inconsistently welcomed, and hence leading to the drive-by dialectic.
And yet, rudeness of tone aside, I didn’t find anything to disagree with. Of course I agreed with it. Henry Rollins was not the only poet I’d read by that point; and I had enough sophistication to know the difference between the quality of any Rollins poem and that of other free-verse confessors like Anne Sexton or Jim Carroll. Not liking Rollins’s writing, or his music, or his spoken word, or just him as a concept was and is entirely understandable. Rollins is the primordial edgelord1. He set the mold, as yet unbroken, for an affected angst that borders on camp, for an intensity of feeling that passes for intellectual depth, for Devil’s advocacy that passes for moral clarity, and for a surly sarcasm that passes for scintillating wit. It’s the aesthetic of permanent adolescence, typically seen—or assumed—in white males.
Even as he kept writing and publishing he didn’t necessarily get better, just more precise in his brand of ugliness. From 1998’s Solipsist:
All at once she was done with me and I was pushed out the door. Years later the memories of the house and the woman inside haunt me when the weather grows warm. Broken dreams of conquest stabbed with failure. Of hope driven mad by emptiness. Of the long march that ends in muted defeat, tricked by bad maps and dry riverbeds. Blood drying silently on stones under and unrelenting sun. All the time truth was there trying to tell itself to me, but I did not heed the warning. And through the years she has risen out of heat-driven mists like a cobra. Different faces, same killer. Yes, they are all the same. I learned the lesson after many self-inflicted deaths.
And yet I did not abandon Rollins altogether. Something felt necessary in keeping him around; something useful, and which remains useful today, but for different reasons. The first reason being Rollins’s relation to punk.
Black Flag is not my favorite band. Of their official 10-year existence, including six albums I’m willing to acknowledge, three standalone EPs, and God knows how many live bootlegs, all of 45 minutes are taken up by listenable music. The rest is theory-fodder, like abstract sculpture, Rothko, or other stuff of which spectator-born projections are made. Black Flag is like Slint in this respect: easier to write about and mythologize than to endure on record. But, as in most great artists, there is as much about Black Flag that attracts as repels. It was not enough for them to replicate punk, but to mutate it into their own abysmal image. They were not the only ones. Flipper, The Big Boys, Butthole Surfers, and others were just as adamant in this ambition. Chalk Black Flag’s monumental success to their potent ingredients. Greg Ginn and Chuck Dukowski gave Black Flag a distinct aural language that sought to test the loyalty and tolerance of the band’s committed following. The charging hardcore became lumbering, elastic, and formless noise. (Though as it went on that would mostly translate into scuzzy metal.) Raymond Pettibon’s drawings for their records and flyers, not to mention their simplistic but striking four bar logo, gave it a distinct visual language. It was always stark black ink, its humor always high on mordancy and low on wit, not unlike Edgar Allan Poe.
Applying the Black Flag approach to actual language seemed inevitable in this light, but that wasn’t the case until after Rollins, a dynamic performer who sometimes read Henry Miller aloud at shows, joined the band in 1981 as their fourth vocalist. The first half of the 1984 album Family Man is made up of Rollins’s early spoken word, and serves as a kind of coming out. His style, consistent throughout his writing, is pure bone. Rollins by his own account says his books go through many stages of revision. This maybe too much for Real Writers to accept, but I can see Rollins taking to a mess of blank verse and winnowing it down to its most necessary elements, everything around it disintegrating like an animal carcass decaying at double speed. What remained appeared like a telegram from a Sarah Kane play or ad copy targeted at insomniac demons. In an earlier time it wouldn’t seem out of place with mid- or low-tier modernism. Perhaps hardcore, in its way, is a modernist enterprise.
As a recent convert to punk and one with literary leanings, “Can punk be literary?” was a question I asked myself a lot at that time. Initially it appeared that writing was subservient to music by way of zines and journalism. It was an angle of promotion, not an end in itself. If it became one it had to match the scope of intensity and introspection set by the music—which meant poetry or memoir. Rollins’s transition into poetry was nursed by Harvey Kubernik. His spoken word compilations that included Dennis Cooper, Exene Cervenka, Chuck Dukowski, and Susanna Hoffs calcified that standard. But however interesting those are as cool projects or historical documents, their interest was not lasting to me personally.
One way to think of punk is as a road beset with a series of tollhouses. You come to one, pay some sort of vague due, and pass through to the experience it offers—a record, a show, a scene, etc. Each subsequent tollhouse offers a different experience commensurate with one’s maturity. Not everyone stays on the road at the same length, and those who stay on long enough might only have a faint memory of the first destination. (Or, conversely, that is all they remember.) But the road is still the road. Henry Rollins, however, was more of a detour or an off-road attraction. He didn’t really reveal anything to me that, at the time, I hadn’t already encountered with other poets. The real tollhouse was very nearby, though.
After Raymond Pettibon fell out with the band (and especially Ginn, his older brother from whom he is still estranged) over the use of his artwork, he set off on his own career that is arguably more independent of Black Flag than Rollins’s. Though his ink-based comic strip-style artwork remains starkly minimalistic, it has grown more sophisticated. Its singular personality is much clearer as Pettibon became a fixture in the contemporary art world, exhibiting in MoMA and the New Museum, and contributing cover art to other bands. Ultimately, for all of Black Flag’s artistic innovations, their real testament is to discipline: the simple, but defiant, act of getting things done, regardless of the niceties of aesthetic or craft. It was Pettibon who embraced artistic development.
Nearly 20 years after receiving my mobile Rollins criticism, however, I find myself defying it even more than I did originally. True, I’ve since encountered people who’ve done what Rollins has done much better. Steven Jesse Bernstein was a better “punk” poet; Jim Goad is a more savage and transgressive polemicist; E.M. Cioran was a wittier and more stylish fragmentary nihilist. But Rollins works well within the strictures of his skill set, which isn’t nothing. He’s above everything a gifted performer. Much of his best work comes from his faculty for talking. His essay on 7-11 in the second issue of SPIN very likely came out of a spoken word gig. He has his substance as well. His minor hit song “Liar” is a pointed, prescient character study of a narcissistic manipulator. He is, moreover, one of pop culture’s best primary-source chroniclers and archivists. His diaries during his time in Black Flag best capture in real time the milieu of brilliant misfits in which he found himself—not just Ginn, Pettibon, and Dukowski, but D. Boon, Mike Watt, Kira Roessler, Spot, and Keith Morris.
Most of Rollins’s recent publications are diaristic and based on his world traveling, but he admirably never shied away from his early work. There is something admirable still in it. Whereas in the ‘90s it was praised for its “rawness” or “realness,” what comes through now is its modesty. His writing does not aim higher than it needs to or should. It serves a concise purpose of articulating an experience or feeling as the writer saw it, which is the base purpose of most literary expression. It just happens to resonate with a lot of people. “I fell in love with Henry Rollins when I saw an episode of his spoken word show,” writes an Amazon reviewer for Black Coffee Blues, considered by some his best book after Get in the Van. “I have never seen such raw emotion and a genuine sharing of feelings. It hit home and helped me understand that no matter how many people are around, you can still be totally alone.”
That Rollins’s work never aspires to greatness or art is the point. Rollins witnessed and directly facilitated feats of greatness that came with costs not even the people willing to pay for them could afford. What you lose in excellence you gain in wisdom, and strangely a kind of perfection. “[James McNeill] Whistler was an amateur,” Max Beerbohm wrote of the painter’s book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, something of a predecessor to Get in the Van. “But you do not dispose of a man by proving him to be an amateur. … His very ignorance and tentativeness may be, must be, a means of an especial grace. Not knowing ‘how to do things,’ having no ready-made or ready-working apparatus, and being in constant fear of failure, he has to grope always in the recesses of his own soul for the best way to express his soul’s meaning.”