David Franks, early 1970s, often used pain — emotional and physical — to make his artistic points. As a young man, it was all fun and games. As an older man — some 30 years after this photo was taken — it became more real than he ever imagined.
“… on January 14, 2010, when he was found dead in his apartment — an old barber shop at the corner of Regester and Bank streets across from St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Fells Point — Franks left behind multiple copies of his published works, photographs (including one of him with a young Emmylou Harris in Washington, DC, his hometown) and sound recorded on reel-to-reel and countless cassette tapes.
“Also, scores of chapbooks autographed by writers and artists now more famous (unlike Franks) than when they were alive…”
For several years in the 1980s, David Franks taught at the University of New Orleans and lived in the Crescent City. There, he made friends and enemies, stirred things up and once had the great Jorge Luis Borges autograph his chest with a Magic Marker before the cops were called and locked him up.
David Franks remembered by his friend Andrei Codrescu
History of Poetry in Baltimore / 1945 to the present 