by Simon Warner
But how do the historians of her life and surveyors of her output connect Smith to the Beat oeuvre? It does appear that Ginsberg and Burroughs are the principal members of this literary community to whom she turns for creative succour or artistic assurance.15 It is not insignificant, for instance, that Kerouac is not mentioned in either Bockris’ or Tarr’s account – the third corner of the most discussed triumvirate in the Beat canon is not present in these two overviews. We could speculate further on Kerouac’s absence, although it is worth remembering that the author of On the Road had entered a period of self-exile in the 1960s, occasionally reappearing to share Republican, anti-hippy and even anti-counter-culture views, before his lonely and addicted death in 1969.16 His star had sunk at the start of Smith’s rise to prominence while Ginsberg and Burroughs – who had each experienced quite different relationships with the post-Beat, anti-Vietnam, hippy decade – would each become objects of veneration to the emerging punk scene in New York City of which Smith was a germinal seed.
To visit a number of biographies of Smith or written accounts of her recorded work, there is hardly a consistent thread or clear pattern: some make more of her Beat associations than others. Nick Johnstone’s 1997 volume, Patti Smith: A Biography, opens with the claim that his subject ‘has measured her own life against the lives of those who have influenced her’17 and proceeds to demonstrate this trend with accounts of many examples of poets, artists and singers – from Arthur Rimbaud to Jean Genet and Jim Morrison – who have played muse to Smith’s output but the Beats themselves are less frequent, less defined visitors to the narrative he offers. He makes reference to Smith’s Chelsea Hotel period and introductions to Burroughs.18 Later he discusses the influence of that author on the poem ‘carnival! carnival!’ which ‘projects violent often anonymous sexuality against a backdrop of phrases that recall William Burroughs’.19 Another important, if somewhat circumstantial, reflection on the Beat effect on Smith is also outlined when Johnstone points out that two of her greatest influences – Dylan and the Doors’ Jim Morrison – had explicitly referenced Beat writers as shaping their own art. Thus we might argue that Smith has, by reifying the two singers, also paid her own homage, if once removed, to Kerouac, Ginsberg and others. As Johnstone explains:
The rock ’n’ roll influence was inevitable and when Patti became a renowned rocker and poet, she was following in the footsteps of other musicians who had also been published or whose lyrics were considered to have merged poetry with rock ’n’ roll. Her primary rock influence was Bob Dylan, who has himself acknowledged Rimbaud as well as the Beat writers as influences […] Secondary to his influence, but often more important, is the effect Jim Morrison had on Patti. Morrison was also a rabid Rimbaud fan and, like Dylan, name-checked the Beat writers […] as influences. Patti’s visit to Morrison’s grave in 1972 was also the moment she claims to have committed her life to art.20
Johnstone further draws attention to Smith’s involvement with a Kerouac benefit in the writer’s hometown of Lowell in 1995, when she was joined by regular guitar collaborator Lenny Kaye and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, and also a then forthcoming collection which would pay tribute to the Beat novelist, Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness,21 a spoken word venture incorporating rock contributions from Morphine, Lydia Lunch, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and others. Released in 1997, this homage recording featured Smith reading the Kerouac-based work, ‘The Last Hotel’, when she was again joined by both Kaye and Moore.
Bockris’ biography of Smith, which followed the year after Johnstone’s in 1998, emerges from a different place, a different position. While Johnstone is a British rock journalist and biographer, Bockris, although born in England,22 was, by the start of the 1970s, a writer and member of that very Manhattan scene from which Smith arose. He has been a friend of Andrew Wylie; he publishes some early Smith poems; and he is a noted documenter of the Downtown milieu through numerous histories. He therefore has the benefit of close proximity to the artist – an advantage in some ways, a disadvantage in others. This biographer may have the connections to the inner circle; he may also be too close to the flare of talent to be able to look beyond its hypnotic heat. That said, his volume sometimes, though not always, carries the franking ‘unauthorised’23 which at least moves it outside the sphere of simple hagiography: Smith has not had copy approval, so to speak, nor has she been a cooperative collaborator on the venture. Nonetheless his closeness to the epicentre, at crucial moments, must also allow him, we can perhaps presume, to build a convincing impression of the Smith persona. In that sense, his more conscious referencing of Burroughs and Ginsberg in his text may have a convincing ring: his role as an eye-witness may help to build a more plausible case for the reader as jury member. Bockris describes various connections between Smith and the two Beats – Ginsberg’s attendance at the St. Mark’s debut, for example, shared book signings and live appearances, a two-way conversation with Burroughs for a magazine, not to mention the impact on Smith of the two writers’ deaths in the same year of 1997. But here, allow me to just home in on a few, more pertinent samples of evidence of Smith-Beat interaction.
At the height of Smith’s engagement with the Chelsea Hotel crowd, from the end of 1969 and through 1970, she would encounter a visiting Burroughs and he plainly had an impact, artistically and sartorially, on the nascent star. Bockris reports Smith’s personal recollection of the celebrated author of such radical titles as Naked Lunch and Soft Machine.24 ‘Burroughs showed me a whole series of new tunnels to fall through. He was so neat. He would walk around in this big cashmere overcoat and this old hat. So of course Patti gets an old black hat and coat, and we would walk around the Chelsea looking like that. Of course he was never too crazy about women, but I guess he liked me ’cause I looked like a boy.’25 Imitation, we can surely identify, as a form of flattery. Later Smith would attend, and contribute to, the Nova Convention,26 a 1978 conference in New York City which paid tribute to Burroughs, and, in 1990, Burroughs would return the compliment by praising Smith’s new collection The Coral Sea. ‘It rings the bell of pure poetry’, the older man said of the younger writer’s verse.27
What of Ginsberg’s presence in Bockris’ account? As early as 1971, her biographer reports, Ginsberg was telling a journalist that he recognised something both original and engaging about Smith.
What Patti Smith seems to be doing may be a composite – a hybrid – of the Russian style of Declaimed Poetry which is memorized, and the American development of Oral Poetry that was from coffee houses now raised to pop spotlight circumstances and so declaimed from memory again with all the art-form – or art-song – glamour […] Then there’s an element that goes along with borrowing from the pop stars and spotlight too and that glitter. But it would be interesting if that did develop into a national style. If the national style could organically integrate that sort of arty personality – the arty Rimbaud – in its spotlight with make-up and T-shirt.28
Almost a quarter of a century later, in 1995, Ginsberg was still showing his support for Smith the poet when he invited her to join a sold-out benefit for Tibetan Buddhists in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Recent losses in Smith’s life – her husband and brother – had left her bereft and Bockris believes that Ginsberg’s gesture to include her was a bid to coax her back from the edge of emotional devastation. He told the audience that the second half of the show would include ‘an important rock-and-roll poet who took poetry from the lofts, bookshops and gallery performances to the rock-n-roll world stage. We’re really pleased and happy that Patti Smith is able to join us.’ He generously added, because the event had been sold-out in advance of Smith’s late involvement on the bill: ‘I see we have a full house, and I think that’s down to her charisma, glamour and genius.’29 Prior to her reading, Smith had paid Ginsberg warm compliments, too, confirming the transgenerational bond. ‘Allen is such a good man,’ she remarked. ‘Look at what he did for the Beat movement. He made sure the work of Kerouac and Burroughs wasn’t lost in obscenity, or
a heap of vomit. He’s so unjealous, he wanted all of them to do well. He doesn’t want to be a big kingpin writer. He just wants everyone who deserves to, to excel. He’s so generous.’30
Shaw’s later account of Smith, her life and art, is shorter but denser: a 2008 critical reading of the artist’s creative powers – contemplating both catalysts and outcomes – with Horses as its ultimate fulcrum. He is not slow to claim her attachments to Rimbaud as crucial. Among ‘several significant literary influences’ he feels the French Symbolist poet is most notable: his ‘provocative life, art and opinions provided a model of Smith’s self-fashioning’.31 But the author also talks about his young subject as ‘a decadent beatnik type’ while in college and cites a 1975 Mademoiselle article in which Smith is rendered thus: ‘Black energy, black clothes. A skinny black jacket. A black shirt buttoned up to the neck. Black peg pants. Black hair, shaggy, coarse’,32 an archetypal Beat vision if there ever was one.
As for Horses, the album itself, Shaw offers an insightful summary of the binary oppositions at play within the record, tensions that have powerful echoes of the terrains that Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac had boldly explored in an earlier period. The recording is ‘concerned with testing limits: the boundaries of the sacred and the profane; between male and female; queer and straight; the poetic and the demotic; self and other; the living and the dead’.33 In works from ‘Howl’ to ‘Kaddish’, Naked Lunch to Big Sur, to identify just a few obvious examples, the Beat writers, too, address these potent intersections of personal and psychological, sexual and spiritual paradox.
Further, the actual form of Horses is linked by Shaw to the practices of a wave of pre-modern and modernist artists who adopted bricolage methods as mirrors of a fractured age. He comments: ‘In the literary sphere, Smith’s heroes, Rimbaud,34 Eliot35 and Burroughs, had each attempted to create multivocal, layered forms of expression. Via symbolism, collage and “cut-up”, all three had sought to challenge the hegemony of conventional literary narratives, allowing for the eruption of unconscious connections, and for the creation of random, aleatory meanings.’36 He supports this analysis by quoting Tony Glover’s review of the album in Circus in 1976, in which the journalist suggests it could be considered ‘the aural equivalent of a William Burroughs book’.37
Yet Shaw is wary of undermining Smith’s originality and talent by over-playing her sources, her guiding lights, whether Beat, rock ’n’ roll or otherwise. He comments: ‘But while Patti Smith’s fame can be traced to her strategic place in a chain of makers and shakers, her vision remains unique, a product not merely of her times, but of the shaping spirit of her imagination.’38 And he adds: ‘For as much as Patti Smith is motivated by the spirits of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Jin Morrison, her deepest love is reserved for the dead poets, the cracked actors, and the darkling chanteurs.’39
Tarr, too, returns to the notion of antecedents in his comprehensive survey of Patti Smith’s recorded canon. He says that ‘even as a star, she has found herself engrossed by the work of others’.40 Smith, in a 2007 interview, reveals: ‘I’ve always been an iconographer […] I was always a big fan […] By the time I was enjoying a certain amount of popularity I was 29 years old and so had already tasted what it meant to be a devoted fan, a documenter or reviewer of other people’s work.’41
Tarr comments on this idea:
Smith was never content to merely admire, however. Her obsessions with icons pushed her to become one herself. Although the imagining of fame has been played out countless times, it is mostly a fantasy of self-creation and identification. Rarely does the dreamer make it public through performance. It’s even rarer that the dreamer makes any music or art of any significance. In the twentieth-century as music became the realm of professionals, most Americans settled for vicarious thrills with no risk involved. But although pop art is an extremely elite club, anybody can force their way through its doors, if they have enough verve, talent or chutzpah.42
As for key Beat references, Tarr homes in on two important later details on the album Peace and Noise from 1997: Smith’s dedication of the album to the recently deceased Burroughs and her setting of Ginsberg’s ‘Footnote to Howl’, itself a homage to the poet whose death had also been recorded a little earlier that year.43
So, a summary of some of the ways in which the Beat writers, and wider concepts of influence, have been addressed in biographically based works that attempt a consideration of Patti Smith as woman and artist. But what about more recent, more individual, reflections on the Smith-Beat confluence: its relevance and importance and the perceptions that might arise from that relationship. I contacted around 20 established figures who were linked in some fashion to this intersection of rock and literature, historically or critically – associates who knew or who had worked with Smith; academics and journalists interested in Smith as an artist and particularly as a female artist; and poets and novelists who had feet in either the original Beat camp or might be regarded as growing out of that earlier tradition. Most of those I approached were happy to comment on this link; in the end, more than half of my correspondents did share views.44 The questions I raised were these: Where do you feel Patti Smith’s art and life rest in relation to Beat culture? To what degree do you perceive Beat influence on Smith’s work? Might we justifiably call Smith a post-Beat? To what extent might commentators critical of later musicians/artists associating themselves with earlier writers/movements have a valid case? The next section of this essay gathers an edited collection of answers that were gleaned.
Q.1 Where do you feel Patti Smith’s art and life rest in relation to Beat culture?
One respondent Victor Bockris, commenting some 13 years after issuing his life story of the singer, recalls a seminal moment when the connection to the Beats and the cultural power the movement still possessed was patently expressed. He remarks: ‘In 1974 from the stage of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project at Second Avenue and 10th Street she asked the audience, “Do you know who just moved back to New York? William Burroughs just moved back to New York! Isn’t that great … fucking great!” I remember thinking, “Thank God! This punk movement isn’t going to have to kill their fathers, they’re going to use them”. And that was the beginning of the alliance between the Beats and Punks that put such firm ground under the movement. And turned it from a pretentious political movement to a movement based in tribal song.’
Philip Shaw, author of Horses, states: ‘Through Dylan in the 1960s she was drawn to Rimbaud. Burroughs et al. presented Smith with a contemporary American take on Rimbaud’s poetics: the “cut up”, the interest in transgression, and the fascination with the outlaw figure can all be traced back to French avant-garde practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century. Therefore, in this sense, Smith owes a great deal to the Beats. The poetry collection called Kodak, for example, owes much to Burroughs’ “cut up” technique and you can hear this as well in the multi-tracked vocals of “Land” from Horses. But she also draws on other, non-Beat influences: rock ’n’ roll and Pop Art. As for her life, the cultivation of an unkempt, roguish look is very much in the Beat tradition.’
Ginsberg guitarist for two decades, the New York-based musician and writer Steven Taylor, has also shared stages with Smith and expresses this view: ‘She learned her trade and style from Rimbaud and Ginsberg and Corso and Dylan. She embraced that vagabond aesthetic, or outsider, marginal style, and the black– white crossover of the mid-twentieth-century, a major cultural trend in which the Beats played a part.’
Taylor adds: ‘The whole poetry scene she emerged out of in the early 70s was heavily Beat influenced. Just the fact of getting up in a club and reading your poems to music is a Beat thing. She was in the same scene as Lou Reed, who had studied with Delmore Schwartz – a kindred spirit to the Beats, writing dark, post-Holocaust realist American fiction. And Richard Hell, who read Baudelaire and Rimbaud and the Surrealists. It was a whole complex of influences, a big atmosphere that was cooking downtown with connectio
ns back through the American moderns to the French avant garde.’
But he makes this further point about straightforward interpersonal reasons for this apparent artistic alliance. ‘Also, it’s personal – you walk into a cafeteria and Ginsberg offers to buy you a sandwich because you look hungry and broke (Patti relates this in her book45). People often miss that personal connection. Ginsberg was in the neighbourhood, and he knew everyone, or talked to everyone, like a chatty old aunt. It wasn’t a grand academic tradition that you are supposed to get licensed into by some professor or critic. It was buying your groceries on First Avenue. As Allen would say, it was a matter of “gossip” or ordinary personal connections.’
Sheila Whiteley, formerly Professor of Popular Music at the University of Salford, UK, and gender specialist, comments: ‘What I find interesting is that the Beats were men and she embraced a similar “on the road” attitude in her bohemianism. It’s perhaps because she took on board the marginalised in society, the outsider, the misfit that aligns her with Beat culture. I think, too, that her androgynous body also challenged the sexual certainties of mainstream society, not least while with Mapplethorpe. Her move to New York in 1967 is obviously significant, in that its poetic communities were built around the existential values of Kerouac, Corso et al., not least in the blend of anarchy and individualism found in Warhol.’
