Patti Smith's Horses (8 page)

Smith’s success at St. Mark’s attracted the attention of the rock impresario Steve Paul, who managed the careers of the blues artists Johnny and Edgar Winter. As Bockris notes, Paul tried hard to encourage Smith to become a rock singer and came up with the idea of pairing her with the guitarist Rick Derringer, whom he also managed. For a while, this looked like a real possibility, and Smith even went so far as to have photos taken of herself and Derringer. Later, when she became associated with Allen Lanier of the Blue Öyster Cult, there was
also talk of her becoming the band’s singer. But Smith, for her own part, was reluctant to conform to Paul’s expectations and she decided, for now, to focus on her writing. Meanwhile, her collaboration with Lenny Kaye was put on ice, and the pair would not perform together again until 1973.

A significant presence at this time was the playwright Sam Shepard. Smith met Shepard in the fall of 1970 at the Village Gate, where he was playing drums with a rock band called the Holy Modal Rounders. Although only twenty-six, he had written twenty plays and been awarded six Obie Awards by the
Village Voice.
Like Mapplethorpe and Carroll, Shepard cut a handsome figure, tall, blue-eyed, and physically expressive: the very image of the cowboy archetype that had become the dominant subject of his writing. Smith was drawn to Shepard from the offing and the pair soon entered into a passionate romantic affair. With his intense interest in self-mythology, cowboys, criminals, and outsider artists, Shepard was in many ways the perfect complement to Smith, and very soon the couple were collaborating on a range of theatrical projects.
Mad Dog Blues,
performed in February 1971, featured a number of Smith’s lyrics. The published text included a poem called “Sam Shepard: 9 Random Years (7+2),” in which Smith eulogizes her lover by imagining him ranging over the American landscape, drinking in “the Snake River / the Colorado River / the North Platte River / the Mississippi River / he drank up the ocean—any ocean” (Shepard, 1972). As both a consumer and a godlike creator of the earth and its waters, Shepard
is elevated to the status of a mythic superhero. The earlier reference to the hero “playing cowboys,” which seemed both to poke fun at his self-importance and to offer up the possibility of a playful countervoice to the poem’s dominant tone of inflated self-aggrandizement, is negated. In writing this vast, unabashed hymn to narcissism, Smith, it is clear, takes her subject entirely seriously. Although self-conscious enough to admit the ridiculous into the poem, it remains, at heart, a work of the sublime, a poem that attempts to reach the heights of thought and expression and which culminates, inevitably, in death. Thus, at the poem’s close, with “the badlands pulsing through his anatomy,” Shepard, now fused with the landscape, is identified with that ultimate doomed ail-American hero, James Dean. With a glance back toward the song “Ballad of a Bad Boy,” which she performed at St. Marks, and with an echo of “death by water,” the poem culminates with its hero, speeding “like a demon” in “James Dean’s death car,” on the cusp of apotheosis.

Smith, in conversation with Victor Bockris, commented later that Shepard’s “whole life moves on rhythms. He’s a drummer. I mean, everything about Sam is so beautiful and has to do with rhythm. That’s why Sam and I so successfully collaborated. Intuitively he worked with rhythm in his blood” (Bockris, 1998). A sense of rhythmic interaction certainly permeates their next major collaboration, the play
Cowboy Mouth,
which opened at the American Place Theatre on April 29. Taking its title from a line in Dylan’s song, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the play focuses on the relationship between two characters, Cavale, performed by Smith, and Slim, played by Shepard. The action centers on Cavale’s maniacal attempts to convert Slim into a latter-day messiah, a sort of “rock-n-roll
Jesus with a cowboy mouth.” Fusing the couple’s interests in stardom, religion, and rock ’n’ roll music, Cavale intones at one point:

People want a street angel. … Somebody to get off on when they can’t get off on themselves. I think that’s what Mick Jagger is trying to do … what Bob Dylan seemed to be for a while. A sort of god in our image, you know? … in the old days people had Jesus and those guys to embrace … they created a god with all their belief energies … and when they didn’t dig themselves, they could lose themselves in the Lord. But it’s too hard now. We’re earthy people, and the old saints just don’t make it, and God is just too far away. He don’t represent our pain no more. … Any great motherfucker rock and roll song can raise me higher than all of Revelations. We created rock and roll from our own image, it’s our child. … (Shepard, 1972)

Smith’s intuitive grasp of rhythm is illustrated well here as the speech accelerates, building on the retarding effects of subclauses, linked by connectives (“Jesus
and
those guys …
and
when they didn’t dig themselves …
and
the old saints …
and
God”), only to halt, violently, in the aphoristic proclamation: “We created rock and roll from our own image, it’s our child. …” Resisting Cavale’s incantatory rhetoric, Slim refuses to accept his mantle, and accuses her of “twisting” and “tearing” him up. Stardom is tempting, to be sure, but it comes at the price of one’s humanity. Thus, when the rock ’n’ roll messiah is finally revealed, it is in a form that cannot be sustained, and the play closes with the image of the would-be savior placing a gun to his head. As Shepard would go on to write in his introduction to
Seven Plays
(1981): “to try to act
too much, to wish to star, the culmination and hypertrophy of the common desire, is a ripeness for disaster.”

When
Cowboy Mouth
concluded, so too did the relationship with Shepard. Abandoned by the man she loved, Smith was once again entirely at a loss. But rather than withdraw into melancholy, she committed herself to the task of completing a volume of poetry. Some initial efforts, including “Autobiography,” appeared in the rock magazine
Creem
in September 1971, and three poems were included in Anne Waldman’s
Another World,
an anthology of works from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. But it was in performance that Smith excelled, prompting enthusiastic receptions from audiences not only in New York but also, on one memorable occasion, in London (Bockris, 1998). With her innate grasp of rhythm, her unusual and arresting subject matter, and her streetwise persona, Smith made a lasting impression on audiences everywhere.

The difference she brought to the poetry scene was her stress on the act of reading. Poems, she believed, were performative, their meaning realized in the interaction between audience and performer. But whether reading or writing, poetry was for Smith primarily a visceral experience, as she explained to an interviewer in 1972: “for me writing is a very physical process. I write with the same fervor Jackson Pollock used to paint.” Elsewhere, the link between writing and the body is elaborated further: “I learned this from Genet, who wrote in prison so he could turn himself on and masturbate—I’d sit at the typewriter and type until I felt sexy, then I’d go and masturbate
to get high, and then I’d come back in that higher place and write some more” (Hiss and McClelland, 1976).

A clue to Smith’s thinking at this time is given in her recollection of a 1972 performance by the Rolling Stones: “What was foremost was not the music but the naked performance. It was [Jagger’s] presence and his power to hold the audience in his palm. He could’ve spoken some of his best lyrics and had the audience just as magnetized. I saw the complete future of poetry” (Bockris, 1998). The stress on “performance” and “presence” is crucial here. It is as if Smith, in defiance of a hundred years of literary theorizing about the arbitrary and differential nature of the linguistic sign, were rehabilitating the power of the word to become flesh. This emphasis on the physical status of language, on the ability of words to express emotion through pure sound, links Smith, as John Cale has observed, with the Southern Baptist and Welsh revival traditions of inspired speech (Houston, 2006). Moving, in a typical performance, from easygoing, conversational hipster speak, to an impassioned stream of consciousness, she seems at times to be possessed by a higher power, her words tumbling over each other in formless, irrational glossolalia, like the divinely inspired Christian. As the rock journalist Anthony De Curtis has argued, Smith forces language to a crisis, deliberately cultivating the “irrationality” of words “as a means to a higher truth” (Houston, 2006).

While I agree that the poet knowingly exploits the irrationality of the spoken word, the aim, it seems to me, is not always in the service of a higher truth. Here, an important point to bear in mind is the tension in Smith’s work between the material and the divine, a tension that reaches its fruition in the
Horses
recording of “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo).” The
recording of Smith’s solo reading at the St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project (conjecturally dated December 25, 1972) contains at least one performance that supports this idea. The voice of the poet on this occasion is very different from the rasping, self-assured voice known to most of her fans. Here she sounds terribly young and nervous, almost mannered at times. But there are intimations of Smith’s mature performing style. The poem in question, “lono lord,” a fantasy about sexual relations with God, uses fairly conventional metrical and rhythmic patterns, along with the repetition of key words and phrases, to create an echoing, incantatory effect. This makes the payoff line: “and you can stick your big holy dick in my left hand side” all the more shocking, as it wakes the listener from his/her trance. If divinely inspired glossolalia is cultivated at all in this performance it is done so for strategic purposes only. Like Rimbaud, Smith deploys the irrationality of language but in ways that debunk the aspiration toward transcendence. Words no longer reach the higher truth; instead, they drag the higher truth to earth, making it sensual, more human; a secular truth that ordinary men and women may inhabit.

In light of the emphasis placed by Smith on the act of recitation, the production of a volume of poetry in which words, hitherto brought to life in performance, were reduced to black marks on a white page, might seem regressive. But in
Seventh Heaven,
published in September 1972, Smith produced a body of work that encourages its audience to push beyond the visible/readable realm. Again like Rimbaud, words for Smith are not simply metaphors for “things,” they do not pre-exist “the reality of the senses, of bodies, of wishes and desires” (Lefebvre, 1991). For both poets, the body is primary. Unlike language, which reifies, the body holds its meaning in
reserve and is first of all felt and experienced through physical sensations and movements. Hence Smith’s repeated emphasis, throughout
Seventh Heaven,
on the sheer physicality of her subjects. In the title poem, for instance, the story of man’s Fall is retold as a transgressive sexual fable, where forbidden fruit “looks like an ass. Its fags fruit,” and where Eve, “her knees wide open” allows the snake to rub “against her clit for a while.” Elsewhere, the predominantly female subjects are “bruised,” “squashed,” “nicked,” “agonized,” “scourged,” and “pierced.” The verses abound in references to “pussy,” “ass,” “buttocks,” “shit,” “throat,” “gums,” “teeth,” “cocks,” “bones,” “tongue,” “mouth,” “heart,” “feet,” “hair,” “fingers,” “eyes,” “saliva,” “spit,” “womb,” “belly,” and “puking” (Smith, 1972). It is as if the volume, as a whole, were charting a body’s capacity for suffering, for love, and for desire, focusing on erogenous zones and on sites of ingestion and excretion. The stress on abjection, and the use of crude slang terms to describe male and female genitalia, is, I would argue, an attempt on the poet’s part to retain a sense of the brute materiality of the body. Like the comic payoff lines deployed so successfully at St. Mark’s, the use of expletives and crude sexual references arrests the leap toward a higher truth. Against a tradition of symbolist abstraction in which mind is prioritized over matter, sign over referent, the body emerges here as a prelinguistic space of unfathomable warmth, depth, and opacity. Its presence serves as a reminder of the origin of this poetry in the lived experience of the poet.

And yet, even, as the body is privileged in this way, Smith acknowledges that meaning must ultimately reside in the interplay between language and the material. Thus, in “longing,” the final poem in the collection, she talks of how “longing” was
initially experienced: “as a child i knew of it. watered. got juiced up / ruled by feeling. the definition. but the word /
the angel
was not there. not in brain on tongue.” The word or signifier comes after the feeling, or definition, that which the body keeps in reserve. But in the italicized
“angel”
the word as abstraction also has its charms and leads the adult speaker to contemplate a life of airy nothing, until “suddenly I let go completely. the ceiling parted. / the sky unfolded.” Standing, like the dreamer in Dante’s
Paradiso
(1321), on the very edge of paradise, she realizes the value of mere words: “the word that passed / thru me—was
longing”
In what amounts to a dialectical reversal of the preceding poems, with their stress on the abject, recalcitrant matter of the body, here language itself acts as a material force, spurring the body on in pursuit of transcendence. It is a last gasp gesture toward the divine, anticipating that other side of Patti Smith, the artist of
Easter
(1978) and
Wave
(1979) who turns, despite all, to the white radiance of eternity.

Read as a sequence,
Seventh Heaven
takes the reader on a journey from abjection to transcendence, beginning with the transgression of Eve, passing through the sufferings and triumphs of a host of female saints (“sally,” “jeanne d’arc,” “Edie Sedgewick,” “Marianne Faithfull,” “judith,” “marilyn miller,” “mary jane,” “amelia earhart,” “Linda”) and ending with the deliverance of the volume’s central narrative persona (“longing”). In light of her unrelenting focus on women’s experiences of lust, objectification, and violation, Smith was frequently asked to state her position on feminism. Her answers then, as now, were open to interpretation. In one sense, as she stated in an early interview, she regarded herself as chameleonic, capable of inhabiting multiple versions of
the feminine: from the cool, sardonic “bitch” to the dutiful, submissive housewife. The notion of femininity as a form of masquerade, advanced in the 1950s by Simone de Beauvoir, is certainly borne out by a reading of
Seventh Heaven
. Each poem may be read as a form of mimicry with Smith “trying on” a range of personalities and personae, from the self-loathing adolescent of “Female” to the craven sexuality of “jeanne d’arc,” and then again from the Sapphic explorations of “judith” to the rapacious masculine perspectives of “mary jane” and “girl trouble.” Once again, Smith refuses to be confined by a single persona, preferring instead to pass through “some of many facemasks” (“judith”). A statement from Rimbaud, quoted by Smith around this time, provided as fit a gloss as any on the nature of her feminism: