In 1975, Patti Smith’s album ‘Horses’ struck the match that ignited an artistic revolution.
Some of us are marked as ‘other’ at birth. What we do with the base elements of that otherness becomes our life’s challenge and on occasion, our bliss. Some start early, grasping the secrets of alchemy and jumping straight into the fiery mix. Others are thrown a curveball that may take decades to learn to dance upon. One can whirl on a slow burn for most of a lifetime before reaching the goal. Making art of a life is a tightrope dance. The line twists beneath you, the fool –you watch your step, you do not fall. When its time, you dive.
Patti is a diver. She is perpetually convulsive, a maker of words, sound, art, lives. Patti is a visionary.
She always commits, knowing ambivalence is the killer of art. She’s my generation’s Jeanne d’Arc, declaring Rimbaudian war on a world that would ignore life’s mysteries and take its glories for granted.
Summer, 1974 I visited Provincetown and a group of artists, one of whom reverently handed me a copy of Patti Smith’s book of poetry, Seventh Heaven. “You have to see her in New York.”, he told me. “She’s the first of the rock and roll poets. And she’s from New Jersey.” He laughed at this last bit as if Jersey were too crass a place to birth an icon, then described her as androgynous, percussive in her delivery, and like no other.
On the cover of Seventh Heaven, Patti looks windswept in a sailor shirt, more Keith Richards than Jersey girl. I took Seventh Heaven to read at the edge of the sea. The poems were terse, rhythmic, thrilling. Most, about women. Edie Sedgewick, Marianne Faithful. Renee Falconetti, the Jeanne of Dreyer’s La Passion de. She wrote across sex, sometimes as man or boy, sometimes as girl or woman and her fluidity of gender moved through me, felt right and reconciled for the first time. I had stopped writing poetry when I was thirteen but just as David Bowie showed me there was a place for the other in music, Patti’s book re-ignited my fire for words and rhythm.
Winter, 1975. I was laying in a dark room one night when a DJ on WMMS radio in Cleveland announced a new release by a New York City poet. Patti’s voice bled into the shadows of the room. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” In that moment, my life changed. That voice as raw as Lorca's rusted wings ripped open a place inside of me I'd allowed the world to nail shut, a place filled with all of my young yearning of how and who to become, where to fit. Her voice tore into that space and turned it inside out with hot blue light. All the lost and aching girls were in that voice. The wild girls, the girls who could not find themselves in mothers or mirrors or stories of holy were inside that voice, pumping out a rhythm a rhyme an affirmation that we will not be denied... we who are in this world but not of it. We who would seize and take of life every piece of passion it has to give and give it back in spades.
"...to never let go of this fiery sadness called desire." - Patti Smith
After hearing Horses, the search was on. For compatriots, for visions, for travel. For new ways to see and feel, unafraid of who and what I might encounter in my becoming. I was not the only young woman who would leave home for New York, on the trail of the Piper who gave our unformed dreams substance and weight.
Patti continues to reach and dive, to defy the rules and remain free of the brain/body corsets that confine hearts and minds. She remains unrivaled. She is on my mind, always a beacon, on my pages today. The way she changed my life. The international movement of art she provoked. The respect she still asks of us for the true artists who have come before, those whose footsteps she has traced and elevated into light again.
Patti makes me believe all is not lost in our culture. Her memoir Just Kids rose to the top of the New York Times nonfiction list, and now there is M Train, an epic poem of the holy artist’s solitude.
Resurrect the book as object to hold, feel the weight of, be delicate with. May we enter in with the same reverence as she in her offering of word and telling.
© Adele Bertei, all rights reserved
Patti is a diver. She is perpetually convulsive, a maker of words, sound, art, lives. Patti is a visionary.
She always commits, knowing ambivalence is the killer of art. She’s my generation’s Jeanne d’Arc, declaring Rimbaudian war on a world that would ignore life’s mysteries and take its glories for granted.
Summer, 1974 I visited Provincetown and a group of artists, one of whom reverently handed me a copy of Patti Smith’s book of poetry, Seventh Heaven. “You have to see her in New York.”, he told me. “She’s the first of the rock and roll poets. And she’s from New Jersey.” He laughed at this last bit as if Jersey were too crass a place to birth an icon, then described her as androgynous, percussive in her delivery, and like no other.
On the cover of Seventh Heaven, Patti looks windswept in a sailor shirt, more Keith Richards than Jersey girl. I took Seventh Heaven to read at the edge of the sea. The poems were terse, rhythmic, thrilling. Most, about women. Edie Sedgewick, Marianne Faithful. Renee Falconetti, the Jeanne of Dreyer’s La Passion de. She wrote across sex, sometimes as man or boy, sometimes as girl or woman and her fluidity of gender moved through me, felt right and reconciled for the first time. I had stopped writing poetry when I was thirteen but just as David Bowie showed me there was a place for the other in music, Patti’s book re-ignited my fire for words and rhythm.
Winter, 1975. I was laying in a dark room one night when a DJ on WMMS radio in Cleveland announced a new release by a New York City poet. Patti’s voice bled into the shadows of the room. “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.” In that moment, my life changed. That voice as raw as Lorca's rusted wings ripped open a place inside of me I'd allowed the world to nail shut, a place filled with all of my young yearning of how and who to become, where to fit. Her voice tore into that space and turned it inside out with hot blue light. All the lost and aching girls were in that voice. The wild girls, the girls who could not find themselves in mothers or mirrors or stories of holy were inside that voice, pumping out a rhythm a rhyme an affirmation that we will not be denied... we who are in this world but not of it. We who would seize and take of life every piece of passion it has to give and give it back in spades.
"...to never let go of this fiery sadness called desire." - Patti Smith
After hearing Horses, the search was on. For compatriots, for visions, for travel. For new ways to see and feel, unafraid of who and what I might encounter in my becoming. I was not the only young woman who would leave home for New York, on the trail of the Piper who gave our unformed dreams substance and weight.
Patti continues to reach and dive, to defy the rules and remain free of the brain/body corsets that confine hearts and minds. She remains unrivaled. She is on my mind, always a beacon, on my pages today. The way she changed my life. The international movement of art she provoked. The respect she still asks of us for the true artists who have come before, those whose footsteps she has traced and elevated into light again.
Patti makes me believe all is not lost in our culture. Her memoir Just Kids rose to the top of the New York Times nonfiction list, and now there is M Train, an epic poem of the holy artist’s solitude.
Resurrect the book as object to hold, feel the weight of, be delicate with. May we enter in with the same reverence as she in her offering of word and telling.
© Adele Bertei, all rights reserved
