Jim Morrison's writings gathered in definitive new collection: First look inside at rare handwritten poem
If you were asked to create the quintessential American rock star in a simulator, there would almost certainly be, consciously or not, a fair amount of Jim Morrison’s DNA sprinkled in.
One need not have even been alive when he prowled the stage to conjure the image of the Doors frontman – lanky, long-haired, wild-eyed and beautiful – sinuously writhing through the psychedelic ’60s in skintight leather pants, so potent is his iconography. Factor in onstage controversy and offstage excess culminating in a tragic early death at 27 in a Paris bathtub, and you’ve got the very model of the ultimate rock star.
That sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll image immortalized Morrison, but it also overshadowed his higher artistic calling: that of a poet.
A new collection promises to correct that. “The Collected Works of Jim Morrison: Poetry, Journals, Transcripts, and Lyrics” (Harper Design, 584 pp., out Tuesday) gathers in one definitive volume Morrison’s prodigious artistic output. Created in collaboration with Morrison’s estate and edited with an introduction by Frank Lisciandro – filmmaker, photographer and Morrison’s friend from their time together at UCLA – the book pulls much of its material from about 30 of Morrison’s notebooks and hundreds of loose handwritten pages, and it features rare photographs, lyrics and film treatments. Much of the material has never before been published.
“Almost everything Jim wrote was first set down in a notebook or on any handy scrap of paper: a cocktail napkin, an empty page at the back of a book, a creased envelope,” Lisciandro writes in the introduction. Morrison wrote down everything, no matter how small or fragmentary – even just scenes, images and bits of dreams.
Lisciandro writes, “Along the way I was forced to abandon my preconceived notions of what a poem should be and understand Jim’s poetry for what it was: unconventional, experimental, bold, threatening, often difficult and, for some readers, possibly offensive.”
To get a taste of the book, take look at an original, handwritten draft of Morrison poem “The Celebration of the Lizard.”