Poetic Obituaries: As a teenage basketball star in the 1960s

at Trinity, an elite private school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Mr. [Jim] Carroll led a chaotic life that combined sports, drugs and poetry. This highly unusual combination lent a lurid appeal to "The Basketball Diaries," the journal he kept during high school and published in 1978, by which time his poetry had already won him a cult reputation as the new Bob Dylan.

"I met him in 1970, and already he was pretty much universally recognized as the best poet of his generation," the singer Patti Smith said in a telephone interview on Sunday. "The work was sophisticated and elegant. He had beauty."

from The New Times: Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker, Is Dead at 60
also Los Angeles Times: Jim Carroll dies at 60; poet and punk rocker wrote about travails in 'The Basketball Diaries'

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