Interview #32: Danny Shot

'Genre fluid' writer flying high

FROM NEW Jersey to New York and San Francisco, when he wasn’t sharing notable moments with some Beat heavyweights – a laugh and a taxi with Allen Ginsberg, a drink and a stolen book with Gregory Corso – DANNY SHOT, co-founder of Long Shot arts and literature magazine, was carving out the highs and lows of a blood-spotted, multitudinous career as outsider, teenage wastrel and musician, high school teacher, poet and editor.

LEON HORTON, a regular contributor to the columns of Rock and the Beat Generation, spoke to the man himself about his poignant new book Night Bird Flying…

Leon Horton: Night Bird Flying, described by author Westley Heine as hitting ‘the sweet spot where things can be both funny and sad at the same time’, is a rollicking read along a rocky-road, but what made you want to write your memoir at this time?

Danny Shot: I don’t see it as a memoir. It’s more a collection of stories I’ve told or written over time that Michele McDannold, publisher at Roadside Press, expertly put together in this order to create a narrative flow that seems like memoir. Kudos to her for having the vision.

I wrote these stories/vignettes at various times over the years. I’m not sure what you would call these stories; I see my writing as genre fluid. I mean they’re basically true, but I use fiction techniques to make the stories move along. I’m not comparing myself to Jack Kerouac, but what was On the Road – fiction or memoir? In my case, let’s call what I do writing.

LH: You were born in the Bronx and raised in Dumont, New Jersey, by parents who were German Jewish refugees. To me that sounds the perfect background for a writer…

DS: I would trade not having an interesting early life with not having things to write about. My mother lost her first son, her parents, her beloved grandmother, various aunts, uncles, and cousins and the whole way of life that she was accustomed to in the Holocaust. My father lost his mother, his sister, nieces and nephews. I was born into a sense of loss.

I think cartoonist Art Spiegelman captures this feeling better than anyone else in his astounding, and deeply personal graphic novel Maus. I was born in the Bronx but my family moved to the working-class suburb of Dumont, New Jersey, when I was two years old.

We were outsiders in the suburbs, my parents had funny (German) accents and foreign ways. We just didn’t fit in. I guess we were meant to be New Yorkers. By the time I was in 10th grade, I knew I couldn’t stay in my home town. That said, my Dumont buddies are the audience I have in mind with at least some of these stories.

Pictured above: Danny Shot

LH: When did you first become aware of the Beats?

DS: Believe it or not, I had a poster of Allen Ginsberg on the wall of my room when I was about 11 years old. It’s that iconic photo of him in the red, white and blue Uncle Sam hat. I didn’t really know who he was, I just thought he looked cool. I next became aware of the Beats when I saw an article about Jack Kerouac, who had recently died, in Rolling Stone magazine. I guess it was in 1969.

My mom explained that he was a writer who travelled the country and used to be famous. A few years later, I encountered Neal Cassady (and Allen Ginsberg) in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which became my de facto Bible in 10th and 11th grades of high school. I got into poetry after taking a course in college on the Beat Generation. Eliot Katz [author of The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg] was in my class, and we had a grand old time.

LH: The central theme of Night Bird Flying, much like your childhood, is loss. Loss of innocence, of friends, the death of loved ones, of parents… Is loss the price we pay for life?

DS: The price we pay for life is death and loss and wonder and ecstasy and tears and laughter. Gregory Corso would call it the whole ballgame. Life is a wonderful thing, and pain is part of that. I imagine that the longer one lives, the more one will encounter death. Younger people who die often have spectacular funerals, while older people not so much.

As we get older, as much as we try not to have it be this way, our life gets smaller, we can’t stay out as late, our body slows down, and our social circle gets smaller, partly out of necessity as those friends who we came of age with are no longer present on this physical plane. It’s a natural progression.

LH: Early on in the book you write about the external scars in your life (acne to rival Charles Bukowski, a broken nose, warts on your feet) which in turn led to internalised wounds. Are scars always bad for us? Are they not integral to who we are?

DS: Well, that’s sort of a rhetorical question. Scars do give us character. But I might be willing to trade my scars, both physical and internal, for movie star good looks and loads of confidence.

LH: Did 30 years working as a high school teacher in the South Bronx, Harlem and Brooklyn leave the kind of scars a writer can use?

DS: I would say no. On second thoughts: maybe. I enjoyed being a teacher for all my 33 years in the profession. Call me Pollyanna or Candide, for I enjoyed working in every situation that encompassed my teaching career, be it the Bronx, Harlem, or Brooklyn. Many of my former students are still friends.

If I may get on my soapbox for a moment, I believe teaching is among the most noble of professions. In the United States, teachers are vastly underpaid and underappreciated. Teaching English had probably more to do with my development than any other aspect of my life. Working in an inner-city high school toughens one up, but also opens one up to experiences that would otherwise be almost impossible to achieve.

LH: Night Bird Flying includes the laugh-out-loud, satirical ‘BIG DICK’, which tells the story of George and his rampant, ever-increasing penis with a mind and ideas of its own. It put me in mind of Gogol’s ‘The Nose’, or a Burroughs routine, no?

DS: ‘BIG DICK’ is the oldest story in the collection. I wrote it as a much younger man. What I find funny about it, in a couple of early reviews of the book, the reviewers say that Night Bird Flying is a memoir, with the obvious exception of ‘BIG DICK’. How do they know? I don’t remember what I was thinking, or what influenced it all those years ago.

Pictured above: Shot’s latest collection published February 2025 by Roadside Press

LH: In ‘What a Wonderful World’ you make a profound comment on the pitfalls of writing memoir/biography: ‘I know that by writing this story I run the risk of forever losing the parts I choose not to tell.’ What parts did you choose not to tell?

DS: With your pardon, I’ll demur on this question.

LH: You cofounded Long Shot arts and literary magazine with Eliot Katz, which ran from 1982 to 2004. Notable contributors included Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Charles Bukowski, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka… How did the idea for Long Shot come about?

DS: Eliot might have a different origin story than I do. For me, it was partially an act of spite. I got a particularly nasty (aren’t they all?) rejection letter from Beatitude magazine in San Francisco. I said to myself (and Eliot) ‘Fuck it, we can do this better.’ And we did. Of course, there’s more to it than that.

Eliot spent the summer of 1980 at Naropa, studying with Ginsberg. He came back from that life-changing experience full of ideas. The next year, Ginsberg did a reading with Eliot and me at Rutgers, the university we had attended, and split the money we took at the door, which was enough to get us started.

LH: You also published actor Sean Penn and musician Tom Waits. What did they contribute?

DS: They each contributed poems. I had seen a mention of Sean Penn’s poetry on ‘Page 6’ of the NY Daily News where they were making fun of his poems. I thought they were pretty good. They spoke to me. Through a friend, actress Karen Young, we got in contact with Penn’s people and he sent poems our way, twice. I imagine part of the reason was because he was an ardent admirer of Charles Bukowski, whose work frequently graced our pages.

We got Tom Waits through actor Paul Gleason. You might remember him as the uptight vice principal in The Breakfast Club and the villainous character in the Eddie Murphy film Trading Places. Anyhow, Eliot and I met Paul at the famous 1982 Jack Kerouac Convention in Boulder, Colorado. He helped us out with a few things after that, including getting in touch with Tom Waits.

LH: Speaking of Waits – and your own time in various bands – how important is music to Beat literature? Come to think of it, how important is Beat literature to music?

DS: I don’t know how important music is to the Beats. Actually, I do know, but other people know better. What I do know is how important music is to my life. I wrote a poem, which is in my upcoming collection, The Jersey Slide, about how Patti Smith’s heroes are my heroes.

In 1975, the year I graduated high school, two albums came out that changed how I allowed myself to view the world: Patti’s Horses and Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run; both artists, by the way, hailing from New Jersey.

I still get a thrill opening up for the insanely talented Karyn Kuhl and the Gang at local gigs she does. Opening up for a rock band is my idea of heaven.

How important is Beat literature to music? Go out and see A Complete Unknown. It’s a wonderful movie, though it leaves out Ginsberg’s impact on a young Bob Dylan. Better yet, just watch the video of ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’. That tells you everything you need to know on the subject.

LH: You were friends with Allen Ginsberg for the last 20 years of his life, which you write about in the chapter ‘Ginsberg Lives’. How would you describe your relationship?

DS: Probably more accurately, we were friends of friends. Allen was a close friend of poet Andy Clausen whom he very much admired and was enthusiastic about, and Eliot Katz, who had studied with him at Naropa. I was probably more of a hanger on, which was easy as I was often around Andy and Eliot.

I first met Allen in 1976 when he was doing a poetry reading at Rutgers with his father Louis. Basically, I handed him a poem I had written titled ‘America ’76’, a mishmash of long Ginsbergian lines, faux street wisdom, hippie platitudes, and plagiarized Kiss lyrics. He tried to tell me something about the poem, but I said ‘Shh, just read the poem when you have some time and let me know what you think. My address is on the back.’

About a week later I received a postcard, diplomatically telling me what was wrong with the poem and some strategies I could employ to become a better poet. I still treasure that postcard.

LH: Do you see yourself primarily as a poet of the page or the stage? Are the two mutually exclusive?

DS: I don’t see myself primarily as a poet. I write poems, I write stories, which may be either non-fiction or fiction depending on how you might label it. I enjoy reading my work in front of others, though I sometimes get nervous. I think the oral tradition is very important in making poetry accessible to the public out there.

I was fortunate to attend Rutgers University in the late 1970s, when the English faculty included the likes of Alicia Ostriker and Miguel Algarîn. Having them as mentors opened doors to Eliot and me and Robert Press (a brilliant poet in his own right) that we were too young and stupid to appreciate at the time. Of course, Miguel, who I write about in ‘Maestro’, was founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café, which gave us access to a stage.

LH: Night Bird Flying concludes with an incredibly moving piece on the death of poet Andy Clausen, who you helped nurse through his final days. What did Clausen mean to you?

DS: Andy Clausen is a friend. I can’t bring myself to say ‘was’. When Eliot and I met him, we were 23 years old and he was 37; in other words, an old guy. As poets we were a team, Andy, Eliot, Rob Press, me. Andy was a force of nature who opened up our world, and who was constantly pushing us to be better writers and performers.

When I met Andy he was still married to his ex-wife Linda and was trying to raise a family. Sometimes I feel guilty for coming into Andy’s life when the foundations of his family life were starting to crumble, as if I were a bad influence. But upon serious reflection, the screw ups were on Andy. Nevertheless, we had a good time over the years.

LH: Congratulations on becoming a New Generation Beat Poet Laureate (2024-Lifetime) last year. How’s that flying?

DS: That’s a good question. Through the course of my writing, I’ve taken great pains not to identify as a Beat. Not that I have anything against the Beats. I love the Beat writers. But I don’t love to be categorized or classified.

I think it’s a lazy way of looking at the world around you, at writers, artists and musicians, with the goal of making them more marketable. Sylvia Plath was not a Confessional Poet – she was a fucking talented writer with a world of influences and experiences contained within herself.

LH: CavanKerry Press (who published your collected WORKS in 2018) will publish a new collection, The Jersey Slide, later this year. What can you tell us about this?

DS: It’s poems written between 2018 and 2024. I don’t want to characterize what the poems are about, but there are four sections that divide the book. I will tell you what the title references. It’s a New Jersey thing. Picture yourself driving on the Turnpike, maybe going down the Shore.

The speed limit says 65 miles per hour and you’re going along with traffic flow at an acceptable 75 mph. Suddenly, some asshole in the left lane (reverse of England) realizes his exit is rapidly approaching. He cuts across all four lanes in order to make his exit, eliciting sneers, honking, the finger and cursing from everyone he’s cut off.

That’s the Jersey Slide. Take a drive down the Turnpike or the Parkway and experience it for yourself. Maybe it’s a metaphor for life in the United States.

Editor’s note: Night Bird Flying is published by Roadside Press and available through its website or Amazon.

About the author: Leon Horton is a UK-based countercultural writer, interviewer, and editor. He is the editor of the acclaimed essay/memoir collection Gregory Corso: Ten Times a Poet (Roadside Press, 2024), and interviewer of author Victor Bockris for The Burroughs-Warhol Connection (Beatdom Books, 2024). His essays and conversations have been published by R&BG, Beatdom, International Times and Beat Scene.