I interview Victor Bockris about the interview

Recently at the Kelly Writers House I interviewed Victor Bokris about the interview. HERE is a Daily Pennsylvanian article about the event. And HERE is the recording of the YouTube livestream.

Bockris graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. After graduation, he founded Telegraph Press, a seminal small press in the early seventies. He also had several books of poems and prose published, including In America and The Joe DiMaggio Victor Bockris Special. He worked with collaborator Andrew Wylie under the name “Brockis-Wylie” to publish a number of interviews under the column “Electric Generation” for The Drummer. Their crowning achievement was Ali: Fighter Poet Prophet, published by the legendary Maurice Girodias on the day Ali regained his heavyweight crown in October 1974. After the duo broke up amicably, Bockris went on to publish widely in Interview and High Times. He worked freelance for Andy Warhol and William Burroughs and became a fixture on the punk scene.

In the 1980s he published a trilogy of portraits: A Report from the Bunker With William Burroughs, Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie, and Uptight: the Velvet Underground Story. In the 1990s, he turned to biography, publishing the trilogy Warhol: The Biography, Keith Richards: The Biography, and Transformer: The Lou Reed Story Bockris’s twenty-seven year run as the poet laureate of the New York Underground led him to develop the book Beat Punks: New York’s Underground Culture from the Beat Generation to the Punk Explosion.