Poetics of Patti Smith
One February day in 1971, a young woman went up to the stage of St. Mark’s church in New York; the holy altar where numerous poets had recited their transcendental pieces. She was going to introduce her painted words to the world, only she wouldn’t be satisfied by merely reading out what she’d written, she needed more. She began to perform but as opposed to expectations, it wasn’t just a poem, it was a musical act. Among these was her poem “Oath” which reeled out the following line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” She was Patti Smith in the Church with an electric guitar.
The above would go on to become the opening lines of Smith’s debut album Horses and eventually become the poet’s most iconic statement. It displayed resistance, assuming responsibility for one’s self and a denial to succumb (and whatever else you’d like to attribute to it). A punk poet who would leverage and remind rock and roll its place in the days to come. Smith’s first album would become a seminal classic. Her music embodied an existential transcendence, literature and even gibberish; Smith repackaged the existing genre into something different along with her peers at the CBGB music scene giving birth to the new wave of Punk. A large part of what Smith and her band played were simple garage rock tunes which could be looped infinitely allowing plenty of space for Smith to improvise.
Horses captures themes of liberation, surrealism, reinvention and so much more. The album has a definitive trait, it has a personality. Among the plethora of chaotic and scattered thoughts, it almost feels like one is running and sweating and ‘laughing hysterically’ in an effort to keep up. Every track, in fact, every verse within the same track evokes diverse ideas.
“And I go to this here party and I just get bored
Until I look out the window, see a sweet young thing
Humpin’ on the parking meter, leanin’ on the parking meter
Oh, she looks so good, oh, she looks so fine”
The first track, Gloria in excelsis Deo was Smith’s take on Them’s (Van Morrison’s group) song Gloria, intertwined and hybridised with her words from Oath. It contains themes of sexuality, liberation and youthful defiance. The track erupts with the sexual energy of youth with an abject rejection of gender norms. Smith’s phenomenal portrait by Robert Maplethorpe (the album cover) embodies an androgynous look, one of fluidity beyond black and white. Dishevelled, tall and skinny Patti Smith was an unconventional figure of a woman and ambivalent at that.
‘No, my work does not reflect my sexual preferences, it reflects the fact that I feel total freedom as an artist’- Smith on Horses.
The album transitions to Rodondo Beach, an exploration of queer identity, a lesbian tragedy. It speaks of death like many of her other songs on the album. It is in fact, ironic that something that marked the beginnings of something talks such a lot about the end, in essence, death. Smith’s Elegy was a tribute to Hendrix and was recorded on his 5th death anniversary in his studio. We meet death again in Birdland which spans a good 9 minutes, with morbidity, otherness and yearning melded with stark mystical imagery- a fever dream.
It’s a radar scope in all silver and all platinum lights
Moving in like black ships, they were moving in, streams of them,
And he put up his hands and he said, “It’s me, it’s me,
I’ll give you my eyes, take me up, oh now please take me up,
I’m helium raven waitin’ for you, please take me up,
Don’t leave me here!”
The sun, the sign, the cross,
Like the shape of a tortured woman, the true shape of a tortured woman,
The mother standing in the doorway letting her sons
No longer presidents but prophets
The song ends with a reference to Chubby Checker’s Birdland where Smith strips off its elated tone to a funeral march.
Accompanying the glorious 9-minute mess is Land on the B side of the album. There could not be anything more powerful than the album reaching its crescendo with three songs merged into one massive untamed force. Many times, the album may not be a pleasant listening experience, with Smith howling, screeching and whining like a wild cat, with an absolute disregard for pitch and tone.
Smith’s views and ideas in Horses are well interlinked with that of the Beats, some of whom she was close with. The thematic elements of freedom, bruisings, anarchy and transgression are mapped all over her music. The surreal and existential quality of Beat writing in free verse is a musical journey in Smith’s work. Her track Land was influenced by William Burrough’s The Wild Boys after which Johnny, the protagonist is named. The beauty here I think is that Smith lends us other voices to learn from; she quotes Rimbaud and sings the footnote of Ginsberg’s Howl. A polyphonic collage of different lives in perfect harmony. Horses is powerful with the explicit glory of words and raw music reality.
Note: The interpretation and deconstruction of Smith’s lyrics are purely subjective. Things written about the influences on her tracks and so on are true, but the rest is just what I feel.