Patti Smith is in trouble. She's caught in a classic double bind—accused of selling out by her former allies and of not selling by ner new ones. Maybe she's just too famous for her own good. Habitues of the poetry vanguard that provided her initial panache, many of whom mistake her proud press and modest sales for genuine stardom, are sometimes envious and often disdainful of her renown as a poet, since she is not devoted to the craft of poetry and they are. Music-biz pros both in and o...
The writer Grace Paley once talked in an interview about the fact that many women missed the sense of boyhood when they were children, "the freedom and excitement of boyhood," and that girls would try "to invent some kind of risky, boyhood life for [their] girlhood—which creates imagination, which means imagination." Patti Smith—poet and rock-and-roll star—accepted her boyhood life right from the beginning. "Female. feel male," she wrote in her ...
Patti Smith is the hottest rock poet to emerge from the fecund wastes of New Jersey since Bruce Springsteen. But Smith is not like Springsteen or anybody else at all. Springsteen is a rocker; Smith is a chanting rock & roll poet….
Patti Smith's pretensions are as important to her as feedback—both give the music the kind of kick and quirk that makes falling off a stage a transcendent experience. Her unwarranted assertions are grandiose, self-serving, impossible but noble. They hold out cosmic solutions, received philosophy, and, especially on Easter, lavish hope. Frequently they don't even fuck up the music; their profusion of exhortation, drivel, hallucination, and poetry complements the verve and, increasingly, ...
[There's] a new kind of poetry being made—a poetry that exists in equal partnership with the rhythm and sound of music, poetry that needs performing to make it real. A few poets have realized this to some extent, and there are more and more readings—but Patti Smith, New Jersey swamp child and angel-envisioning rock-and-roll street punk, says that poets are killing poetry.
If critics are having nightmares these days, one of the worst of them will undoubtedly be about not liking "Horses," Patti Smith's ubiquitous debut album. Without missing a beat, the nation's linotypers seem to have shifted from Springsteen to Smith, and there is no escaping this strange New Jersey Nightingale. Sneakers are out, Rimbaud is in, and I feel so poeticized I could die. However, after listening to the record a dozen times, not only do I not like "Horses,"...
"Wave" is a much better record than I expected, but to explain why I'll have to go back a bit. Patti Smith's problem is that what was touching in a rock fan is obnoxious in a rock star. Her desperate faith in the cleansing spiritual power of rock 'n' roll was inspiring as long as she was on the outside. "Horses" was a gripping debut album that rekindled the rock faith of even the most jaded critics. What Patti the poet brought to her versions of ...
Patti's music [is] a unique combination of fairy tales, gleeful excitement, melodic singing, spitting, unshed tears of childhood, hypnotic reiteration, teasing, dancing, masturbatory fantasies, sheet-metal schooldays and chunks of real 50's and 60's hard-rock songs…. (p. 24) Patti Smith knows she's got it. On stage, she burns like a white filament dressed in black, spitting, crooning, screaming a volcano of lyrics about sex, U.F.O.'s, horses, internal voyages, Jimi ...
Rock star Patti Smith is one of the newer phenomena on the far-out youth scene, one of the most brilliantly gifted pop performers and poets since Dylan. Here [in "Babel"], in a single volume that includes her photos and line drawings, are her poems, prose sketches and other lyrical outpourings composed during the period of her rise to rockstardom—a collector's item, most likely, and certainly a mind-boggling expression of the surrealist temper that will have some readers shouting...
[There] really ain't no way I'm gonna be anything but thrilled to my shorthairs by a Patti LP and [Radio Ethiopia is] no exception. Altho the last one was a bit less grave cause y'know her live show (still—when it's on—the best by a cunny since Billie Holiday and best by either gonad group since James Morrison's prime) has its moments of excruciating gravity but it's also got her laffing it up and spitting on the stage. Like the title cut's grea...
You'll find Patti Smith, poetess, in the Gotham Book Mart, New York's hippest bookstore, where her slim volumes of manic poetry nestle snugly between volumes of Burroughs, Ginsberg, Goray and Rimbaud. Patti Smith enjoys a literary reputation. Jerzy Kosinki is one of her fans. I don't feel particularly qualified to assess her poetry. I've browsed through it and wasn't conscious of being in the presence of greatness, but I'm no Harvard poetry professor, that's ...
The four plays in [Mad Dog Blues and Other Plays] all tend to be basic (most with little scenery), and full of street talk and rock-and-roll images…. [The] main reason I got the book is for the second play, "Cowboy Mouth" [which Sam Shepard] co-authored with Patti Smith, who is one of the greatest poets writing in English. (Probably other languages too, but English is all I got covered right now.) The play is heavily auto-biographical; the two characters, Slim the Coyote and Cavale the ...
On [Radio Ethiopia] Patti Smith lays back, refusing to assert herself as she did on last year's Horses. The key is in the billing: on Radio Ethiopia, her group dominates. But while Smith can be an inventive, sometimes inspired writer and performer, her band is basically just another loud punk-rock gang of primitives, riff-based and redundant. The rhythm is disjointed, the guitar chording trite and elementary. Even at best ("Distant Fingers," for instance), the Patti Smith Group isn�...
Patti Smith has set about creating a movement to free the world through rock & roll. Her personal charm, when she wants it to be, is enormous. Her followers are increasing every day, and they are among the most ardent anywhere…. She is a poet for the people…. Patti Smith's detractors think Radio Ethiopia, a loosely defined organization of her supporters, amounts to a Kiss Army for intellectuals who like to be mystified by poetry without capital letters. They think she is a fool. Bec...
[Babel is composed of] fast-paced, visionary poems and prose poems, but the fact that the visions seem to be drug-induced makes them frequently difficult to follow. It's hard to separate Smith the writer from Smith the cult figure (a difficulty which she herself seems all too conscious of—when she succeeds, it's almost in spite of herself). The writing includes everything a cult figure needs: drugs, sex, the wrestling with religious concepts. Most of her best poems fall into this last c...
Over the past three years, Patti Smith … has developed into a New York legend. Onstage …, she exudes an inimitable aura of tough street punk and mystic waif, in whose skinny, sexy person the spirits of Rimbaud and William Burroughs miraculously intersect with the mystic qualities of Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, the Stones, the Velvet Underground, the Marvelettes and Mary Wells, to name but a few…. Her improvised raps, often very humorous, combine graphic sexual fantasy with surreal, extr...
Patti Smith certainly has one hell of a lot to answer for. Not only does she unashamedly use her band as a backcloth for her pretentious "poetic" ramblings, but she simultaneously comes on as the saviour of raw-power rock and roll as it struggles to survive the onslaught of esoteric rock. In other words, she's into the myth-making business. And in this, her second album, the myth is exposed … as cheap thrills. At least "Horses" had the dubious privilege of a rabble-...
