By Vincent Tinguely
Young Patti Smith’s imagination overlapped with the spiritual world – and it was very near to her, almost a physical presence. Her mother taught her to pray, and enrolled her in Sunday School, but Smith asserted her sense of spiritual independence even then, asking to be allowed to compose her own prayers, rather than reciting, “Now I lay me down to sleep …” (Just Kids 5). These early oral compositions opened a path for Smith between the material world and the spiritual. “I’d wait till all was quiet. Then I’d rise, mount a chair, push aside the cloth that covered my window and continue my prayers, wandering, to greet my God” (Woolgathering, 7). Outside her bedroom window was a field where she would sometimes watch beings she called “Woolgatherers” as they moved to a faint music. “Gathering what needs to be gathered. The discarded. The adored. Bits of human spirit that somehow got away. Caught up in an apron. Plucked by a gloved hand” (Woolgathering 16). For Smith, there was no barrier between quotidian reality and this other place. “I believed they were there, the people. I could hear them, now and then, murmuring and whistling as if behind a wall of cotton” (Woolgathering 9). This childhood story vividly illustrates Smith’s belief in an otherworld that was tangible, a part of her daily existence. It is this belief that prompts her to seek communication with the dead, with the angels, and with God. The relationship she establishes with them is fundamental to Smith’s artistic practice.
The spiritual aspect of that career can be broken down into three periods. In her early work, this effort to communicate was insistent, challenging and often conflated the sexual with the spiritual. After she sustained a serious injury in a fall from a concert stage, her spiritual outlook became far less iconoclastic; while her faith in the other world was unshaken, she became more focused on traditional icons of Christian spirituality with whom to communicate. The third phase began when her closest friend Robert Mapplethorpe died of complications related to AIDS. A steady succession of deaths of friends and family following Mapplethorpe’s passing inaugurated a nearly continual conversation through Smith’s art with these dearly departed, which has continued to this day.
Smith’s spiritual formation was eclectic, which was a reflection of her family life. The first book she owned was the Bible, which has continuously been a source for her lyrical, poetic and photographic imagery (Baird 427). Her mother was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness, but her father was a skeptic with an early interest in the UFO phenomenon (Just Kids 9). Smith felt free to explore her spiritual awareness: practicing telepathy with her brother Todd and sister Linda (“Autobiography”), finding William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience in the family library, discovering Buddhism through “her childhood study of the history of Tibet” (Kennedy 51). Her first attempt at communication with the dead occurred when her best friend Stephanie died (Holland 396). Smith had stolen a pin from her jewellery box, and was racked with guilt because now that her friend was dead, she couldn’t return it or apologize to her. “But as I lay there night after night, it occurred to me that it might be possible to speak with her by praying to her, or at least ask God to intercede on my behalf” (Just Kids 8).
This spiritual awareness was coterminous to a growing sense of herself as an artist. At fifteen, she wrote her first elegy. In a 2012 interview, Smith said, “It was in 1959, and Charlie Parker died, and my father used to listen to Charlie Parker. So I writ a little poem and it was published […]. And it was called ‘Bird Is Free’ […]” (Holland 396). She discovered art at a Salvador Dali exhibition, and received sympathetic support from an art teacher in high school. “… when I saw art the first time, I knew that was what I wanted. I can’t imagine a world without art, no matter how perfect it is” (Baird 429). She explored the world of music through early concerts by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, John Coltrane, numerous Motown Revues and The Rolling Stones (Moore 53). While she was working in a factory at 16, she wandered into a nearby bookstore and found a paperback copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which would serve as a template for her poetic practice (Bockris 29).
Soon thereafter she relocated to New York City, where she met Robert Mapplethorpe; as fellow young artists, they fed and encouraged each other’s creativity, providing invaluable feedback and sympathetic critiques of each other’s work. Mapplethorpe encouraged Smith’s spiritual explorations, and broadened it to include the esoteric. He gifted her with a Tarot deck, which she learned to use, and introduced her to Satanism, magic and the occult. When living together in the Chelsea Hotel, they befriended Harry Smith. According to Jarek Paul Ervin, “[Harry Smith] studied a range of mystical traditions, from the shamanistic rituals of the Lummi Native American people to Alastair Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis” (428). Patti Smith enrolled the elder Smith as an artistic and spiritual teacher, meeting frequently in his hotel room to discuss his studies in alchemy. She was also introduced to two founding Beats, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs was a cornucopia of esoteric knowledge, while Ginsberg had been steeped in Eastern spiritual traditions during his sojourn in India. Both were strong influences on her writing. It was in the crucible of this cultural ferment that Smith forged the union of her spiritual and artistic forces. Much later she would write, apropos of Mapplethorpe’s photography, “… art sings of God, and ultimately belongs to him” (Just Kids ix).
One could conceive of Smith’s youthful spirituality as a sort of gnosticism, in which she believed she could approach spiritual beings without intercessors, on her own terms. Like the nineteenth century mediums described by Jeffrey Sconce, Smith would channel the spirit world, but unlike them, she would need no man to serve as her keeper. Sconce describes how, “From their abode in the ‘seventh heaven,’ the spirits reassured those on earth that their loved ones lived on in the afterlife” (24). Patti Smith titled her first book of poems Seventh Heaven (1972), but the poem with that title has nothing to do with the spiritualist’s celestial space. Rather, it’s a gnostic rewriting of the Book of Genesis featuring hot sex with Satan (Early Work 18). In another poem, “Ha! Ha! Houdini!”, in which she mythologizes the great debunker of spiritualism, she writes, “His name was fake but he was not. he was no alchemist. no scientist. […] no heaven-born conjuror. but a man who sought heaven through natural magic” (Early Work 56).
As her drawing practice gave way to words, she became fascinated with the power of language. Her initial foray into composition through childhood prayer had already shown her the path to ecstasy. “My small torrent of words dissipated into an elaborate sense of expanding and receding. It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination” (Just Kids 5). References to Rimbaud run like a thread through Smith’s first four albums, and his poetry stands as a powerful influence on both Smith’s poetry and song lyrics. In the poem “Easter,” on the inner printed sleeve of the album Easter, Smith fantasizes that Rimbaud and his brother are able to transcend the barrier between the material and spiritual; Noland writes, “the theme of transgression, of breaking formations, is also elaborated in the figures of ‘babbling’ and ‘battling.’ Smith claims that by means of ‘babbling’ and ‘battling’ Arthur and Frederic manage to pass […] through a material or conventional block to an unknown, unmappable topography” (595). Smith developed a feisty persona as she began performing her poetry publicly, often playfully “battling” in the cultural debates of the time, and she soon began developing an improvisational logorrheac babble in her performances.
In the summer of 1969, she wrote another elegy, this one for Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. According to biographer David Thompson, “the day that she learned he was gone, Patti set to work on what would become the first poem she wrote in her own true voice, a rock ‘n’ roll mass set to a rock ‘n’ roll rhythm” (56). Although she hadn’t yet considered becoming a singer, Smith set words to a rhythm that would introduce her to a wider audience than any poet could access. She felt she had a special bond with Jones, because at a concert in Philadelphia in 1966, crushed by the mob of sobbing teenage girls at a Stones concert, she had reached out to keep herself from falling, and grabbed Jones’ ankle. “I was grabbing him to save myself. And he looked at me. And I looked at him. And he smiled. He just smiled at me” (Moore 53).
Rock stars would help populate a pantheon of deceased “saints” in Smith’s imaginary. Ervin writes, “She cast figures such as Wilson Pickett, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix alongside Catholic saints, poets and spiritual visionaries, producing an idiosyncratic personal canon of mystics” (424). On her debut album Horses (1975), she wrote elegies for Morrison, who was clearly a strong influence on her rock performer persona, and Hendrix, who she had met once on the stairs of Electric Ladyland. In Just Kids she writes, “Sometimes […] I would pray for the dead, whom I seemed to love as much as the living: Rimbaud, Seurat, Camille Claudel, and the mistress of Jules Laforgue” (63). Her art would come to serve as a conduit between her material existence, and this higher realm. “There’s an aspect of prayer in all of the work that I do” she says (Baird 429).
At the height of her career as a New York poet, in 1973 she made a pilgrimmage to France, staying at the Hotel des Entrangers in Paris, where Rimbaud once stayed. In the town of his birth, Charleville, she visited his grave; visiting the graves of her pantheon of saints and heroes has become such a feature of her career that interviewers habitually ask her about it. “His grave had been neglected, and I brushed away the fallen leaves and bits of debris. I said a small prayer as I buried the blue glass beads from Harar in a stone urn before his headstone. […] I took a photograph and said goodbye” (Just Kids 229).
By then, her identification with Rimbaud had become absolute. In “Skull Bait,” an unfinished play ostensibly about Rimbaud and Verlaine, written in 1969, she is Rimbaud. Verlaine says mockingly: “you won’t make it, this aint marvel comic land you wont turn superhero by spouting devotions. give it up. be patti lee.” “Rimbaud” replies: “… there was too much inside to be just one person. to be every one to be him. / rimbaud rimbaud” (Charleville 56-57). In the 2008 prose poem “Mummer Love,” Smith writes of revisiting Rimbaud’s haunts: “I will give you my limbs, no longer young, but sturdy all the same” (Auguries 59). Her yearning, which started as a kind of adolescent crush on the pretty face gracing a paperback (Kabango 441), has become a wish to embody the departed, to house the spirit of the poet as a means of making contact.
Music served to intensify Smith’s artistry. Edward Foley writes, “Whether arising as a textless chant by a single voice or a percussive auditory event for ritual dance, music in its various modes is a virtually ubiquitous companion to religious and spiritual practices” (Foley ix). In seeking transcendence through rock music, Smith took on the mantle of the shaman. “Shaman” is a word that recurs in “Birdland,” her slant tribute to Charlie Parker on Horses (1975). According to Michael Tucker, “[the archetypal idea of the shaman] revitalises the ‘wounded healer’ of prehistoric and tribal cultures ‘flying outside’ everyday notions of time and space to the cosmic wisdom needed to heal either individual or tribe” (Harvey 9). Smith and her bandmates taught themselves how to “fly outside” from the precursors of “shaman doo-wop” – Coltrane, Parker, and the experimental rock practitioners of the 1960s (Complete 32).
Some of the highlights of Patti Smith’s rock show in the mid-1970s were supplied by extended improvised musical segments on songs like “Land,” “Birdland” and “Ain’t It Strange.” Smith would improvise poetry as well, babbling and battling with a recalcitrant God who refuses to show himself. In a trance, she would take on the consciousness of the dead – the Queen of Sheba, Alexander the Great’s daughter, a sixteenth century ninja serving a Japanese emperor. In Tampa, Florida on 26 January 1977, Smith was performing her ecstatic improvisation when she danced right off the stage. Guitarist and band leader Lenny Kaye reports, “When she fell off the stage that was the realest of moments. […] We were so into that particular moment in “Ain’t It Strange” where she challenges God. […] And at that point we would always, when we were really locked, wobble the music, make it dizzy. And she whirled off” (Heylin 276).
Hand of God I feel the finger
Hand of God I start to whirl
Hand of God I do not linger
Don’t get dizzy do not fall now
Turn whirl like a dervish (Complete 71)
Smith says, “But I think one of the reasons that this happened to me is because I was seeking […] for very intense communication, but not in a disciplined fashion” (Tobler 117-118).
Smith stepped back from the “total abandon” (Complete 78) she had celebrated in her first two albums. Kaye says, “That was the apex … After moving outwards to see how far we could push [it], the envelope [was] coming back” (Heylin 276). However, this didn’t mean that Smith had lost her desire to communicate with the spiritual plane. “I’ve work to do right here and I’m not going to stop communicating with God” (Tobler 118). She chose to take the stage at CBGBs on Easter Sunday to mark her own “resurrection” after months of convalescence.
Her previously blasphemous, confrontational stance toward God and Jesus softened considerably on her next two albums, Easter (1978) and Wave (1979). “Her documented struggle or competition with God was beginning to transform into a journey where she would become spiritually re-aligned with her idea of God, rather than having to compete with Him” (Johnstone 103). This re-alignment led many fans and critics to question her new direction, especially after the soft rock production and lack of “total abandon” on Wave. Instead, the album featured a gentle tribute to Pope John Paul I, and a love song for Fred “Sonic” Smith.
After a 1979 tour to support Wave, the band broke up, and Patti Smith married Fred Smith. Although she seemed to drop out of public view in order to raise a family with her husband, Smith continued working diligently on her art, writing several as-yet unpublished manuscripts, and collaborating with her husband on the 1988 album Dream of Life. Interestingly, the title comes from “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” by Percy Bysshe Shelley:
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep –
He hath awakened from the dream of life – (Complete 150)
Much of the album’s lyrical content addressing the spiritual is subtly woven into reflections on nature, the circularity of time and season. “When Paths Cross” was written to console Mapplethorpe, who had lost his longtime companion to AIDS (Gross 458). There are celebrations of love and family. “Looking for You (I Was)” seems to be a song of yearning after God’s presence: “Where the dervish turns / Where the wild goats play // Looking for you / I was” (Complete 173). The public response to the album was muted, and the critical reviews were harsh.
Dream of Life was followed by a series of devastating losses for Smith and her family. In March 1989 Robert Mapplethorpe died. Smith describes her reaction to his death in Just Kids: “Suddenly I realized I was shuddering. I was overwhelmed by a sense of excitement, acceleration, as if, because of the closeness I experienced with Robert, I was to be privy to his new adventure, the miracle of his death” (277). As she explained to Terry Gross, “I think each of us have our own way of dissipating or entering a new field” (461). She uses a distinctly Buddhist perspective to describe her friend’s death, and says in another interview, “I really think of death as part of a continuum. I think it’s more of a Buddhist point of view” (Lim 194). As the spectre of death shifted, in her mid-life, from the departed rock stars, poets and artists of her beloved pantheon, to people from her own life, Smith’s gnostic spiritual perspective matured.
In June 1990 Richard Sohl, pianist for the Patti Smith Group, died. Her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith died in November 1994, and a month later her brother Todd died. She navigated her deepest period of mourning by returning to the stage, and with a new band gathered around her, she recorded Gone Again (1996) as a tribute to Fred. It is a truly haunted album …
Hey now man’s own kin
He ascends into the wind
Grateful arms grateful limbs
Grateful man he’s gone again (Complete 188)
Song after song refers to human mortality, longing, grief and memory. “Beneath the Southern Cross” is a lament: “Oh to be / Not anyone / Gone” (Complete 190). “About A Boy” is an elegy to the late Kurt Cobain. The refrain of “My Madrigal” is “Oh till death do us part” (Complete 195). “Raven” yearns for a return to God, “Come to where the feather flies / To eternity” (Complete 208). “Fireflies” is another song of yearning, “Ghost of thy ghost walk I will walk” (Complete 211). “Farewell Reel” is addressed to her late husband. There is a sense of crushing sadness, solitude and finally, in a lullaby, “Come Back, Little Sheba,” there’s a sense of Smith’s resolve to look to her children’s future.
In the same year, Smith published The Coral Sea, an allegorical poem about Robert Mapplethorpe which she had written soon after his passing. “When he passed away I could not weep so I wrote” (Coral 11). This wasn’t to be her last word on Mapplethorpe: that came with 2010’s elegiac memoir Just Kids. 1997’s Peace and Noise marked the recent passing of Burroughs and Ginsberg, and again, Smith sang of, for and to the departed in song after song. It was to be the last of her powerful mourning albums, but she continued to mark in song the passage of musicians like Amy Winehouse, as well as that of her parents. She wrote of the passing of her friend, the record producer Sandy Pearlman in her most recent book, The Year of the Monkey (2020).
As she matured, Patti Smith came to understand the place of the dead in her own imaginary. In the liner notes for Peace and Noise, she writes,
The dead speak, but we as a people have forgotten how to listen. We hold them in our hands, they course through our blood. They are found in the leaves of the Koran, the Psalms, the Torah, the Constitution, the New Testament. All revelations, all poetry, all books. They send words of love and woe. And we entwine their ideas with our own, forming a new body. … (Complete 221)
This calls to mind Jacques Derrida’s assertion, “We inherit the possibility of bearing witness to the fact that we inherit, and this is language” (49). Davis, in reference to Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde, could be writing of Smith: “Derrida places himself amidst his own ghosts, a growing throng of dead colleagues and friends. He addresses them, quotes them and calls on them to maintain a dialogue, knowing that they cannot” (128). Still, she seeks in performance to communicate with those on the other side. In Johnstone’s biography, Paul Williams reports on one such attempt to live “graciously with death and loss”:
So when the club’s phone rang rudely in the distance during her performance (she’d been mentioning Fred) and she got this attentive look on her face, I immediately thought, “She thinks Fred may be calling her.” She then affirmed that she and I (as audience) were in tune, by saying, “He’s calling me.” A moment later, a moth flew by, and she pointed: “There he goes.” (155)
In an extraordinary interview with Daniel David Baird in Winnipeg-based Border Crossings, Smith spoke at length about her photography practice. Since reviving her touring in 1995, she’s been taking pictures in the cities she visits with an old Polaroid camera, using expired black and white film. Most of her photos are “third-class relics” of great artists – their former homes, their possessions, their final resting places: the fork and spoon that belonged to Rimbaud, Virgina Woolf’s old wooden cane, the grave of Sylvia Plath. Smith says, “I don’t think of these things and people as part of my past; they are part of my working life. I don’t think of Robert Mapplethorpe or my husband as part of my past, and while I never knew Rimbaud or Blake or Bolaño, they are always with me, and they have made my life more inspiring” (425-427).
With photography, recordings and writings, Smith has created her own “archives of consciousness” (Peters 144). She is perfectly aware of this: “For knowledge is its own body, the fluxiant body of mankind. It is the whole of human history. For as breath is known every man is known. Cradled in the hand of the mind. An infinite souvenir” (Complete 243). In the biographical film Dream of Life, she displays numinous artifacts of her past for the camera: a tambourine made and decorated by Mapplethorpe, her favourite childhood dress, a black Gibson guitar. The film captures her visit with her parents, shortly before their death. Derrida’s words come to mind: “Mourning and haunting are unleashed at this moment. They are unleashed before death itself, out of the mere possibility of death, that is to say, of the trace, which comes into being as immediate survival – and as ‘televised.’” (49). Patti Smith’s childhood spirituality remains, like bedrock, anchoring all of her artistic strategies. She is ever aware of that other world, always addressing it.
Works Cited
Baird, Daniel David. “Patti Smith: Making the Past Present.” Patti Smith on Patti Smith: interviews and encounters. Aidan Levy, ed. Chicago Review Press, 2021, pp. 422-429.
Bockris, Victor. “The Poetry of Performance: An Interview with Patti Smith.” Patti Smith on Patti Smith: interviews and encounters. Aidan Levy, ed. Chicago Review Press, 2021, pp. 25-44.
Derrida, Jacques and Bernard Stiegler. “Spectrographies.” The Spectralities Reader. Eds. Maria del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren. Bloomsbury, 2013, pp. 37-51.
Ervin, Jarek Paul. “‘I hold the key to the sea of possibilities’: Patti Smith Group and the occult.” Punk & Post Punk, vol. 8, no. 3, 2019, pp. 423-437.
Foley, Edward. “Music and Spirituality – Introduction.” Music and Spirituality, MDPI AG, 2015.
Gross, Terry. “Patti Smith Looks Back on Life Before she Became the Godmother of Punk.” Patti Smith on Patti Smith: interviews and encounters. Aidan Levy, ed. Chicago Review Press, 2021, pp. 447-461.
Holland, Eric. “Patti Smith Discusses Banga on Words and Music.” Patti Smith on Patti Smith: interviews and encounters. Aidan Levy, ed. Chicago Review Press, 2021, pp. 389-403.
Harvey, Jonathan, Michael Tucker and Maxwell Steer. “Music and Inner Meaning.” Contemporary Music Review vol. 14, parts 3-4. Peter Nelson and Nigel Osborne, eds. 1996, pp. 7-18.
Heylin, Clinton. From the Velvets to the Voivoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock. Chicago Review Press, updated edition 2005.
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Kennedy, Deborah. “Looking for you: Patti Smith, God and rock and roll.” Singing for Themselves: Essays on Women in Popular Music, P. S. Rudden, ed. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, pp. 39-55.
Lim, Gerrie. “Patti Smith: The Power and the Glory, the Resurrection and the Life.” Patti Smith on Patti Smith: interviews and encounters. Aidan Levy, ed. Chicago Review Press, 2021, pp. 184-198.
Moore, Thurston. “Patti Smith.” Bomb, winter 1996, pp. 51-53. Reprinted in Patti Smith on Patti Smith: interviews and encounters. Aidan Levy, ed. Chicago Review Press, 2021.
Noland, Carrie Jaurès. “Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 3, Spring 1995, pp. 581-610.
Peters, John Durham. “Phantasms of the Living, Dialogues with the Dead: Spirit Photography, Magic Theatre, Trick Films and Photography’s Uncanny.” Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. University of Chicago Press, 1999, pp. 137-76.
Sconce, Jeffrey. “Mediums and Media.” Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Duke University Press, 2000, pp. 21-58.
Smith, Patti. “Autobiography.” Creem, September 1971. Reprinted on A Patti Smith Babelogue, http://www.oceanstar.com/patti/poetry.htm. Accessed 1 August 2021.
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