At a mere eighty-one years of age, Gerard Malanga—poet, photographer, filmmaker, whip-dancer, Andy Warhol Superstar, and raconteur nonpareil who was recently made a Chevalier of Arts and Letters by the French Republic—has lived more lives than many of us could ever dream of. His seventeenth poetry collection, Odie Is Being Called Back & Other Poems (Bottle of Smoke Press, 2024), is a tender, Proustian homage to friends, family, and assorted cultural figures who’ve made a lasting impression upon the renowned artist and writer. Here, Malanga discusses Odie, his early years, and his creative process.
I NEVER KNOW WHEN A POEM IS GOING TO GET WRITTEN. There’s always an element of surprise involved. The poems in this book were created over the course of seven years. I can’t really explain where they came from, but I knew I was onto something because I just couldn’t stop writing them—I was on a roll. I wasn’t planning on turning them into a book, but at some point my publisher wanted to put out a collection. So we did.
I don’t have a daily writing practice. But I come here [The Maker, a café in Hudson, New York] every morning and, in a lot of instances, start the first draft of a poem on a page of the New York Times. I’ll read a line in an article, and I’ll somehow mentally see it as something that leads me into something else, and it slowly becomes a poem.
This book, like the last few I’ve put out with Bottle of Smoke [e.g., The New Mélancholia & Other Poems (2021), Cool & Other Poems (2019)], has a distinctly retrospective quality about it, which might come from reading Proust. Some years ago, when I was staying in Milan, I saw that I had nothing lined up in my calendar for about six months. So I decided to use that period to read the entirety of In Search of Lost Time. And I couldn’t stop—it was so hypnotic. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and read two or three pages, practically in the dark (which is usually how I read), then go back to sleep. Proust made me realize that I could tell stories. A lot of the poems in Odie are story poems, or descriptive portraits of people…portrait poems. By combining narrative with—for lack of a better description—my stream-of-consciousness method, I found an approach to writing that worked out quite nicely for me. I always used to write poems about ex-girlfriends and stuff like that. But Proust led me down another path. I had something new to talk about, which was basically my other past: being raised in the Bronx and living in Manhattan. In fact, the first section of the Odie book is all about growing up in the Bronx.
I only got into poetry because of my high school English teacher, Daisy Aldan—I have a portrait poem about her in the book. I took her class my senior year at the School of Industrial Art in Manhattan (some of my classmates there were Antonio Lopez and Calvin Klein). Anyway, I didn’t choose Daisy—she was assigned to me, randomly. And she was miraculous—like a guardian angel. She brought in people like Anaïs Nin and Jack Hirschman and Kenward Elmslie to come talk to us. I could’ve been placed with anyone, and for some reason I got her. I started writing because of Daisy. Had it not been for her, I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now.
Daisy was my first mentor, but Marie Menken and her husband, Willard Maas, were also great mentors. There are portrait poems about them in Odie, too. Marie was incredibly loving—she actually wanted to adopt me, but the law prohibited it because my real mother was still alive. Marie was a joy to be around. She was a very spontaneous artist—I’m the same way. But she and Willard were intense. Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is based on their relationship. I think Edward might’ve been at a cocktail party around Wagner College, where they taught, and overheard a conversation between them. He had a really good ear!
There are a lot of sad poems in Odie, which I named in honor of my cat, who died last year. He was almost twenty-two when he passed. The saddest poems in the book, in the last section, are about him. I communicate with Odie in these texts—I ask him to help me forget the pain of losing him. Of course, he doesn’t. There’s also a poem about Cairo, Patti Smith’s cat, in that part of the book. He and Odie were roughly the same age. Patti emailed me the day Cairo died. I was the first person she told, and I just lost it. And about thirty minutes after receiving the news, Odie had a seizure. I did everything I could to get him out of it: I kissed him, I talked to him, I petted him. I did every conceivable thing to make him feel comfortable, and I was able to bring him back. But he left me three weeks later.
I’ve had smart cats. And affectionate cats who were really smart. But Odie was in a league unto himself. He was beyond compare. He saved me.
—As told to Alex Jovanovich
