Gerard Malanga--the Warhol years.
Poet and photographer Gerard Malanga is best known for his association with cultural icon Andy Warhol. He was the pop artist’s personal assistant, photographer, and sometimes actor during Warhol’s most famous period in the 1960s and ‘70s. In fact, he has been called Warhol’s “most important associate” during those years.
Malanga was the son of Italian immigrants and was raised in the Bronx. He began writing poetry as a teenager and was soon immersed in the New York City avant garde art scene. He began documenting that scene as a photographer.
He was the chief assistant for artist Andy Warhol from the mid-1960s and founded the magazine Interview with him in 1969. Malanga was also featured in several of Warhol’s films, collaborated with Warhol on his Screen Tests project, and was a member of Warhol’s cross-genre undertaking, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
He was also closely identified with the emerging punk rock movement, was close to The Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, and was one of Patti Smith’s lovers.
His numerous books of poetry, include chic death (1971), Mythologies of the Heart (1996), No Respect: New And Selected Poems 1964-2000 (2001), and Cool & Other Poems (2019).
Malanga has also published the photography books Good Girls (1994) and Resistance to Memory (1998). He served as the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation’s first photo archivist, and edited a study on the link between photography and voyeurism, Scopophilia: The Love of Looking (1985). With Victor Bockris, he co-authored Up-Tight: The Velvet Underground Story (2003).
Malanga remains an active artist today.
This 2012 poem finds Malanga far from the gritty urban streets with which he is most identified.
Elephant Armageddon
NYTimes headline for September 4th 2012:
Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy As Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits
They return to the site whence they came with eyes tearful,
with psalms trumpeting the air.
They stand ever so watchful;
guarding the graves of their ghosts and their kind.
They shall not forget. They shall not want.
They lie down in green silky pastures
and finding their way to the still waters.
They restore and nourish their soul.
They walk through the dark valleys; always the shadows
of death lurking behind them.
Always striding till they reach the comforting light.
They fear no evil. Man fears.
They forage for food and they eat amongst their enemies
because they fear not. They are the happiest.
The honey is under their tongue.
The winter is past, the rain is over and gone.
Their hearts awaken. They know no violence.
Even in the waning light they tower over all else.
They are the landscape. They are the trees.
They throw up the dust in their dance. The skies become misty.
They rise up and lead each other away into the dusk.
—Gerard Malanga
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