Billy Corgan has sold almost 30 million records, first as one of the founding fellas of alternative rock with Smashing Pumpkins, and most recently with the group Zwan. He as always dealt out his emotions with the fury of a cat released underwater, but Corgan's genius comes from his ability to transform his world, and his heartbreaks, into palpable, lyrical beauty--and his ability to express it so perfectly. Last month he released his first collection of poetry, Blinking With Fists (Faber and Faber/FSG), which is a kind of exposed inner sanctum, a record of the alchemy of an artist who must craft. In his lyrics and his poems, Corgan conceives a landscape for us, then escorts us through it, providing the tight weave of artistry and truth that serve as armor on the battleground of the heart and allow us to get as close as we dare without blinking.

J.T. LEROY: I hear you're in prodigious work mode on your album. Sony to take you away from that.

BILLY CORGAN: Yeah. I'm emotionally unavailable.

JTL: I know what that's like. Let's talk about your poetry. You write a lot in your head, don't you?

BC: Yeah.

JTL: How much of that actually gets recorded or makes it down on paper?

BC: I would say about 25 percent.

JTL: That's a hell of a lot.

BC: I learned long ago that if it comes, go get a piece of paper. Most of my poems start with a line coming into my head as I'm just lying in bed. Once you write down the one line, it all comes pouring out.

JTL: Did you start doing that as a teenager? Because you read me pieces you wrote as a teenager that are absolutely amazing.

BC: I'm not really sure. I remember consciously making the decision to write things down when I was about 5. That was my first dream, to be a writer. Music didn't really come till later.

JTL: What books were you exposed to when you were 5 that made you even have that awareness?

BC: I was in a weird situation because I started reading when I was 2 1/2.

JTL: Who taught you to read?

BC: I don't remember. It's one of those apocryphal family stories where I'm in diapers and just start reading kind of thing. They tested me in second grade and found I was reading at a sixth-grade level. I remember the teacher saying, "You did so well on your test, you get to go over to the special big kids' section for books." I said I didn't know anything about those kinds of books and asked if she could recommend one. She said, "Why don't you read Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl?" That was the first real book I ever read. After that I was just voracious.

JTL: I've noticed that there's a real difference between musicians who read and those who don't. Before I even knew you, it was clear from your lyrics and from interviews that I'd read with you that you're incredibly literate.

BC: That's always been a great disappointment to the rock 'n' roll masses. I was raised to speak well and think clearly and read.

JTL: You're a mix. You've got this instinctual kind of emotional reflectiveness and a literary ethos that houses it all--in your lyrics. Smashing Pumpkins had a punk-rock sensibility to it, right?

BC: We were a reaction against the reaction.

JTL: When I read Kurt Cobain's diary, I was surprised at how un-self-aware he was. There was a real reflectiveness in his work, but I realized it was a quality I was reading into it.

BC: But he still had poetry in the way he saw things and put things together. The best rockers really do it like that. Everybody gets to the mountain in his or her own way. Some get high, some get fucked, some get crazy, some do like me and just sit in a room alone with no drugs and no nothing. [laughs]

JTL: Well, you've got that notebook by your bed, which you've turned into a beautiful poetry book. At what point did you decide to publish your poems? That's pretty daring-that's really laying yourself out.

BC: Well, the original idea was that I was going to do a book of my lyrics and intermingle the poetry with the lyrics. But when I looked through the work, it struck me that the poetry had a voice that was distinctive from the lyrics, and that surprised me. I thought that my poetry read like my lyrics, but what I discovered is that my lyrics serve the beat and the rhythm and the rhyme while the poetry isn't subservient to anything. There's a moment in all my journals when the work stops being just lyric-based and becomes raw writing, which then goes into poetry. So I separated that stuff out and started entertaining the idea of doing a book.

JTL: What's the difference for you between writing for music and writing just for the sake of words?

BC: Lyrics are more like a punch: They have to have a force to them; they have to be able to be sung. I can almost hear the melody in my head, even if there's not a song. There's a forcefulness, even if they're slow. But poetry is like a conversation, like I'm drawing a circle around something. It moves at its own speed. It doesn't have to resolve or have a peak moment, and there doesn't have to be the phrase that you have with songs. It's closer to who I really am. JTL: Do you ever start writing and the work lets you know what it is--lyrics or poetry? BC: Yeah. And sometimes when I'm whoring for lyrics, I'll come across poems, but I'll think, "No, leave it alone. They're really not to be messed with."

JTL: How did you decide to open yourself up in this way? So much of the book is about heartache.

BC: That's what's so perfect about having [former girlfriend] Yelena [Yemchuk]'s painting on the cover. I told her the book might as well be called Yelena because most of the poems have a lot to do with her.

JTL: You and I worked on a poem together for a while, and I was amazed how there's this natural rhythm you can fall into. It's hard for people to do, you know?

BC: After a while you just get this knack for saying momentous things in four words. Literally, you walk around all the time compacting life into sentences. I'm sure you do the same thing.

JTL: Yeah, but it's very different. With your music you had to learn how to do things in sound bites. You know what they're going to pull out and bring up in interviews. You know how to put words down for lyrics. It's like finding these other voices that kind of infiltrate our beings for a little bit. And it's that willingness to go out there, which just adds a textural depth that you're able to bring out and that you have the innate feeling millions of people will connect with.

BC: That's why it sounds funny when people get possessive about whose language it is, because we're brought into language from common usage. Finding your own voice is having to differentiate between that which is yours and that which is someone else's. One criticism I got when I did my poetry reading in Chicago was that I was trying on voices like hats. At first I was offended, but then I realized it was the same criticism that I got with the Pumpkins. You're sort of not allowed to go into another skin: It's verboten. I think that's a crock of shit because I don't think Hemingway was really Hemingway; I don't think Jim Morrison was really Jim Morrison. Part of their potency is that they found that voice, but that doesn't mean they created that voice wholly of themselves. I think in my particular case, coming from an abusive background, you basically have your voice beaten out of you, and you learn to speak with other voices. You learn the art of using other voices to say what you want to say without really saying it--hence the songs of the '50s talking about "great balls of fire." The ultimate implication of that criticism is that I don't know how to speak with my own voice, and that's not true: I do. It's that I chose to slide in and out of voices because that's the way I choose to communicate. Being free to do that, I have found my own voice. It's an interesting distinction.

JTL: It's true for me as well.

BC: It's the same thing with music--this idea of possessiveness. I've told many of my friends that I didn't invent the world, I didn't invent the colors, I didn't invent the chords: It's just my version of it. I don't buy the idea that anybody owns anything. That's why I'm the Wizard of Oz. I'm really pulling strings.

JTL: It's form for function--like going into a childlike voice for a childlike metaphor. But it's hard because when you push boundaries it takes a while for the critics to get used to you like the fans do. By the time they catch on, you've moved on to something else.

BC: It's interesting to see the press I get now about my past work, because it's totally not in sync with the criticism I got back then. [laughs] Whatever, it's fine. I'm happy doing what I'm doing.

JTL: One thing I want to say is that I can't watch you sing without getting completely blown away by the energy that seems to be streaming out of you. But when you're reading, it's like you haven't waved that magic wand yet.