Billy Corgan: over the years music's most penetrating singer-songwriters have straddled the line between poet and lyricist. With the recent publication of his first collection of poems, it's a mantle Billy Corgan, former front man of seminal rock quartet smashing pumpkins, assumes with authority

Interview, Nov, 2004 by J.T. LeRoy

Billy Corgan has sold almost 30 million records, first as one of the founding fellas of alternative rock with Smashing Pumpkins, and most recently with the group Zwan. He as always dealt out his emotions with the fury of a cat released underwater, but Corgan's genius comes from his ability to transform his world, and his heartbreaks, into palpable, lyrical beauty--and his ability to express it so perfectly. Last month he released his first collection of poetry, Blinking With Fists (Faber and Faber/FSG), which is a kind of exposed inner sanctum, a record of the alchemy of an artist who must craft. In his lyrics and his poems, Corgan conceives a landscape for us, then escorts us through it, providing the tight weave of artistry and truth that serve as armor on the battleground of the heart and allow us to get as close as we dare without blinking.

J.T. LEROY: I hear you're in prodigious work mode on your album. Sony to take you away from that.

BILLY CORGAN: Yeah. I'm emotionally unavailable.

JTL: I know what that's like. Let's talk about your poetry. You write a lot in your head, don't you?

BC: Yeah.

JTL: How much of that actually gets recorded or makes it down on paper?

BC: I would say about 25 percent.

JTL: That's a hell of a lot.

BC: I learned long ago that if it comes, go get a piece of paper. Most of my poems start with a line coming into my head as I'm just lying in bed. Once you write down the one line, it all comes pouring out.

JTL: Did you start doing that as a teenager? Because you read me pieces you wrote as a teenager that are absolutely amazing.

BC: I'm not really sure. I remember consciously making the decision to write things down when I was about 5. That was my first dream, to be a writer. Music didn't really come till later.

JTL: What books were you exposed to when you were 5 that made you even have that awareness?

BC: I was in a weird situation because I started reading when I was 2 1/2.

JTL: Who taught you to read?

BC: I don't remember. It's one of those apocryphal family stories where I'm in diapers and just start reading kind of thing. They tested me in second grade and found I was reading at a sixth-grade level. I remember the teacher saying, "You did so well on your test, you get to go over to the special big kids' section for books." I said I didn't know anything about those kinds of books and asked if she could recommend one. She said, "Why don't you read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl?" That was the first real book I ever read. After that I was just voracious.

JTL: I've noticed that there's a real difference between musicians who read and those who don't. Before I even knew you, it was clear from your lyrics and from interviews that I'd read with you that you're incredibly literate.

BC: That's always been a great disappointment to the rock 'n' roll masses. I was raised to speak well and think clearly and read.

JTL: You're a mix. You've got this instinctual kind of emotional reflectiveness and a literary ethos that houses it all--in your lyrics. Smashing Pumpkins had a punk-rock sensibility to it, right?

BC: We were a reaction against the reaction.

JTL: When I read Kurt Cobain's diary, I was surprised at how un-self-aware he was. There was a real reflectiveness in his work, but I realized it was a quality I was reading into it.

BC: But he still had poetry in the way he saw things and put things together. The best rockers really do it like that. Everybody gets to the mountain in his or her own way. Some get high, some get fucked, some get crazy, some do like me and just sit in a room alone with no drugs and no nothing. [laughs]

JTL: Well, you've got that notebook by your bed, which you've turned into a beautiful poetry book. At what point did you decide to publish your poems? That's pretty daring-that's really laying yourself out.

BC: Well, the original idea was that I was going to do a book of my lyrics and intermingle the poetry with the lyrics. But when I looked through the work, it struck me that the poetry had a voice that was distinctive from the lyrics, and that surprised me. I thought that my poetry read like my lyrics, but what I discovered is that my lyrics serve the beat and the rhythm and the rhyme while the poetry isn't subservient to anything. There's a moment in all my journals when the work stops being just lyric-based and becomes raw writing, which then goes into poetry. So I separated that stuff out and started entertaining the idea of doing a book.

JTL: What's the difference for you between writing for music and writing just for the sake of words?

BC: Lyrics are more like a punch: They have to have a force to them; they have to be able to be sung. I can almost hear the melody in my head, even if there's not a song. There's a forcefulness, even if they're slow. But poetry is like a conversation, like I'm drawing a circle around something. It moves at its own speed. It doesn't have to resolve or have a peak moment, and there doesn't have to be the phrase that you have with songs. It's closer to who I really am. JTL: Do you ever start writing and the work lets you know what it is--lyrics or poetry? BC: Yeah. And sometimes when I'm whoring for lyrics, I'll come across poems, but I'll think, "No, leave it alone. They're really not to be messed with."