Patti Smith: female neo-Beat sensibility and the

development of punk

Tiago Manuel de Sousa Ventura Alves

Supervisor: Dr. Nick Heffernan

Dissertation submitted in partial

fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in American Studies

2017-2018

1
Abstract

This dissertation examines how Patti Smith came to prominence in the 1970s

and revived the spirit of the Beat Generation via poetry, performance, and music, with

the intention to save rock and roll from falling into the conformist condition of society.

Reflecting on how she infused her work with an innovative Beat, female yet gender-

-bending sensibility, this project ponders on her sense of responsibility over rock and

roll, and dissects the achievements of her revolution. The social, cultural, and

political atmosphere of the late 1940s and of the 1950s, ruled by conformity,

materialism, and a sense of alienation, is analysed, particularly in its association with

the birth of the Beat literary movement. Following this, an examination of the general

feeling of failure of the countercultural movement of the 1960s is made in

concomitance with a survey of the psychological and artistic development of Patti

Smith. This research draws upon primary sources like memoirs, poetry books, and

interviews, but also on secondary sources such as theoretical books, biographies, and

scholarly journal articles. This focus on Patti Smith as a revolutionary in the 1970s

presents how failed movements can be consequential later on through other means,

presenting finally Smith as a neo-Beat rock and roll poet/artist, who has bent gender

norms and revitalized the spirit of insurgence that had been lost in the previous decade.

Keywords: Patti Smith; Beat Generation; counterculture; rock and roll; punk; poetry;

performance.

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Table of Contents

Abstract .......................................................................................................................... 2

I. Introduction ............................................................................................................ 4

II. Theoretical Framework .......................................................................................... 7

1. The Beats ........................................................................................................... 7

1.1. The Beats and a beat-up society................................................................. 7

1.2. Influences and characteristics .................................................................... 9

1.3. The Beats as a cultural formation ............................................................ 10

1.4. Female Beat figures ................................................................................. 11

2. Patti Smith........................................................................................................ 12

2.1. “I’m gonna get on that train and go to New York City” .......................... 12

2.2. Development as a poet ............................................................................. 14

III. Analysis............................................................................................................ 16

1. Beat and hungry ............................................................................................... 16

1.1. “To be a saint in any form” ...................................................................... 17

1.2. Poetry reading and performance .............................................................. 19

1.3. “Rock and roll belongs to the people” ..................................................... 21

1.3.1. Horses .................................................................................................. 26

2. Neo-Beat .......................................................................................................... 30

2.1. Poet and musician .................................................................................... 30

2.2. The female Beat ....................................................................................... 31

IV. Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 36

Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 39

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 I. Introduction

The post-World War II period revealed to the world an America that had entered

a new political and economic era during the conflict. An economic boom, courtesy of

that same war, permitted America to enter the 1950s in wonderful economic shape, and

from this economic growth sprung out a new reality (Amadeo 2017; Zhang 2013, p.

205). When it comes to politics, corporate liberalism, a social and economic

arrangement that fed on “the dual cultural supports of mass culture and bureaucratic

discipline”, after appearing in the 1920s, thrived especially in the postwar period

(Belgrad 1998, p. 4). Corporate liberals held conservative business interests as their top

priority, with rational control holding a privileged spot in their perspective, through

measures that fostered a culture of mass consumption and behavioural homogeneity.

Clearly, this mindset was fodder to a change in the American psyche, driving it

to a culture of conformity, to the standardization of thought and, with that, to less

individuality and a weakening of critical spirit. Reflecting on the 1950s, Brenda Knight

spoke of that decade as having “a choke hold on consciousness” (1996, p. 1).

Contributing to this environment there was also a feeling of restlessness and fear over

the growing power of Russia with their weapons of mass destruction, and Communism

and their possible interference in American democracy, “working to disintegrate

American society from within” (Halliwell 2007, p. 2).

However, a feeling of alienation clearly pervaded, especially among the youth,

and despite the fact that change and insurgence were faced with severe hostility, there

were those who, feeling alienated, sought an escape, an alternative—a safe reality

(Skerl 2004, pp. 14-15). Opposing corporate liberalism and the values that helped it

stand, rebellious movements started to appear, as it was the case of the Beat generation,

4
a group of adolescent and young-adult artists and writers that began to take notice of

the inconsistencies of what was asked of them as citizens and began questioning those

contradictions through their writings (Belgrad 1998, p. 232). Many women were part

of this group of artists, but most of them—if not all of them—were generally ignored

if not altogether regarded as invisible compared to the men (Carden 2018, “Preface”;

Knight 1996, p. xi).

At the end of the 1950s, the Beats were known in the country for their subversive

writings, with Brenda Knight summarizing it perfectly when she said that “the Beats

helped the Silent Generation find a voice and paved the way for the explosion of the

sixties” (ibid., p. 3). Indeed, when the 1960s came along, a lot of people’s perceptions

had changed, even though the dominant culture was still living under the same values

as before, preaching the “panaceas of consumerism and technological progress”

(Belgrad 1998, p. 247). Of this decade, however, arose something new—rock and roll.

Its lyrics allowed an easier connection with its listeners, representing the opposite of

jazz, that was favoured by the Beats, and quickly becoming one of the voices of what

has been called the counterculture of the 1960s (ibid., p. 256-257).

With the 1960s coming to an end, the voices that had been heard in the last two

decades, decrying America’s cultural and political state, had started to die out a bit, and

even rock lost some of its force, losing many of its key figures in a short span of time.

The 1970s were a confused time, full of disillusionment, in which fighting back seemed

to make a dangerous turn into conformism and complacency (Bockris 1998, p. 44).

Here enters Patti Smith, a young girl from New Jersey who moved to New York

in 1967 and that, as the 1970s progress, starts to appear on the scene as a poet and as a

musician. Living in New York in the 1970s allowed her to be in the centre of a scene

which had been fading out, and that she felt the need to act upon to reverse it (ibid., p.

5
165). Through her innovative poetry readings and, later, her musical performances in

an attempt at a reawakening of a social and cultural consciousness, Smith positioned

herself as a vanguardist in the literary, performance, and music fields.

However, when it comes to Patti Smith, many questions remain unanswered.

Known as a prolific poet, what were the characteristics of the poetry that she wrote?

Could it be considered as Beat? If so, what are the implications of her being a Beat poet,

given the known overlooking of women associated with the Beat generation? Was she

able to revive the Beat spirit and bring it to the 1970s? How relevant is the use of her

poetry as lyrics for her own music, and how relevant is her music, in particular for the

birth of punk? To answer this, this dissertation is divided into three parts. Firstly, I

explore and discuss the importance of the Beat Generation writers, focusing on their

characteristics, what they defended, and what they hoped to accomplish. Next, there is

a consideration of Patti Smith and her work; looking into her arrival at New York and

her objectives, I analyse her path into writing and poetry readings, and ponder on its

relevance. I reflect on her writings and performance style, and on how they intersected

with her attempt to save rock and roll and with the consequent birth of punk. Secondly,

Smith and her poetic work are considered in the context of the Beat spirit, and,

consequently, as a likely female neo-Beat poet, along with her position within the

women from and affiliated with the Beat Generation. Lastly, I draw conclusions on the

importance of Patti Smith as a key figure in the development of Beat writing and of the

music panorama in the 1970s, pondering whether she may be considered a Beat poet or

not, and if she helped bring a revitalized Beat spirit into a new decade.

6
 II. Theoretical Framework

1. The Beats

1.1. The Beats and a beat-up society

America (…)
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?

—Allen Ginsberg, Howl and other poems

The Beat Generation, or simply the Beats, were a group of young artists and

writers that originated in the late 1940s, but only came to prominence in the 1950s.

America was enjoying an economic bliss and relishing on their state of continued

progress, but at the same time living in fear of both Russia and Communism. This fear

reached a crucial point in the figures of Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy of

Wisconsin and of FBI’s Director J. Edgar Hoover, that together led a political witch

hunt against Communism and foreign espionage in American soil, giving way to what

is now called the Second Red Scare. This movement, lasting for almost a decade,

increased society’s uneasiness through a hyperbolized picture of reality, and, in the end,

turned the 1950s into an age of anxiety and heightened paranoia (Douglas Brinkley

1999, pp. 18-19). This mentality was dangerous and debilitating to the American

society, but conformism was now sewn into its thread. Postwar America, still living

under pre-war values, was being held back while being eluded with the idea of progress

and modernization, and the idea of “You must adjust…”, as psychiatrist Robert Lindner

put it, felt unjustified and immutable.

In this period, the instance of war had been replaced by mass consumption as a

pretext for this corporate liberal measures (Skerl 2004, p. 31), and these measures

7
fostered a culture of mass consumption and of homogeneity, which cultivated the belief

of the United States of America as the greatest country in the world (Belgrad 1998, p.

2), being during this period that America took pride and relished on their prosperity,

the development of new infrastructures and services, and their modernization in

general.

Appalled by the consequences that the war had had in America by leading it to

a social neurosis, the Beats began to take notice of what was asked of their generation

and began questioning the contradictions and fallacies by which society was run

(Dickstein 1999, p. 32; Belgrad 1998, p. 232). They believed in the positive and active

role that art could still have in the world, and understanding the power of corporate

liberal ideology and its successful attempt at manipulating society’s perception of

reality, they took it upon themselves to explore America’s consciousness, to

deconstruct it and to expose American society to the true reality through their writings

(ibid., p. 2). In an attempt to challenge the conformist state of America, its materialism,

its state of complacency toward it, and the war in Vietnam, they discussed and wrote,

while seeking alternatives for those conditions; it would figure like a “savage journey

to the heart of the American Dream,” the same expression that Hunter S. Thompson

used to describe his book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), that presented the

drug-induced psychological journey of two men disillusioned with the countercultural

movement of the 1960s.

The key figures of this movement, sometimes called the Beat triumvirate, were

Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, with their works Howl and

other poems (1956), On the Road (1957), and Junky (1953), accordingly. Despite the

unstable nature of literary periodology, these works can be considered the fundamental

pieces that constitute the basis of Beat literature. Seminal works as they were, not only

8
for their brilliance but also for their censure and consequential trial, as it was the case

of Ginsberg’s Howl and other poems, they drove the Beat Generation and their ideals

to the national stage. ‘Beat’ had originated from Herbert Huncke’s description of road-

travel-beaten crooks and jazz musicians, and, later on, Kerouac and Ginsberg added a

layer to it—“beatitude”—, which would reflect the spirituality they hoped to include in

and/or achieve through their writings.

1.2. Influences and characteristics

Gathering in cafés, clubs, galleries, in bookstores, parks, and so on, the Beats

met to discuss America’s problematics, and eventually those places turned into little

bohemias, with the most famous ones being in Greenwich Village and the Lower East

Side in New York City, and the North Beach area in San Francisco. The existence of

these bohemian enclaves led to an increase of the number of readings, performances

and plays at the time. The Beats also published a number of small magazines,

newspapers, and newsletters, as it was the case of Beatitude, Yugen, and The Floating

Bear, editions that had a lot of success in the bohemian literati.

Influenced by the poets of the Black Mountain College in North Carolina, who

defended that “the energy the poet transfers to the writing is more important than form,

content, or judgement of critics”, the Beat writers developed their style in this light

(Knight 1996, p. 5). They defended open or dialogical forms of writing, many times

induced by drugs, as these “offered access to a state of mind or way of experiencing in

which the individual identity came unfixed, as did language” (Octavio Paz in Skerl

2004, p. 37). These writers valued innocence and sought it, along with the spontaneity

that it brought along, the authenticity. They reckoned that innocence had been lost to

the technocratic and materialistic society of 1950s America, and, with that, the ability

9
to act and/or write naturally and honestly too (van Elteren 1999, p. 76). Already in

1947, W. H. Auden in his poem Age of Anxiety had declared this lost innocence

(Temperley & Bradbury 1998, p. 242), but the Beats did not stop in their search.

Turning to Eastern religions, they mainly searched for some guidance in Buddhism and

Zen Buddhism, in line with their belief in a holism between mind and body (2004, p.

152).

1.3.The Beats as a cultural formation

“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.

. . . I’m sick of your insane demands.”

—Allen Ginsberg, Howl and other poems

At the end of the 1950s they were known nationally for their fight against

philistinism, with some of their writings being censured and authors arrested for

obscenity. At the same time, those writings gave voice to the feelings of many young

people that did not know how to express their alienation and their disenchantment with

the myth of America—ever so powerful, mighty, and in progress.

The Beats understood and recognised the importance and relevance of the

people on the margins of society—the fellaheen—, those who could not or would not

fit within American society’s preferable standards and codes of behaviour (ibid., p. 32).

Those people, typically referred to as “beatniks”, were not artists or writers themselves,

and so they are quite commonly discarded by academics and seen as a nuisance. Yet,

they were remarkably important for they also questioned and violated the values that

corporate liberalism preached. Through individual action and collective resistance,

their joint action—Beats and beatniks—left a dent in the culture of the time. Besides,

10
their presence in bohemian enclaves soon developed into a sense of community—and

a self-recognised one, with Ginsberg referring years later to a “sense of a Fellaheen

subterranean underground official existence” (Ginsberg in Belgrad 1998, p. 256).

Indeed, the places they frequented turned into their own community institutions, where

they felt free rather than repressed, understood rather than cast aside. This was a

community that gave them space to engage in politics of resistance and permitted the

establishment of long-lasting bonds and relationships between them (ibid., pp. 41-47).

1.4. Female Beat figures

In what Alan Nadel called America’s “containment culture” (Robert Holton in

Skerl 2004, p. 14), women were very limited in their roles. A culture of extreme

repression was the one that women knew in the America of the 1950s, in which they

had to conform to society’s standards and were confined to an idea of a domestic ideal,

where it was only acceptable for women to be housewives and mothers (Knight 1996,

p. 3). This set of rules and restrictions was still a consequence of the existence of pre-

war values lingering in the cultural policies that built a postwar era. Women had been

downgraded to an inferior level and had their opportunities suppressed, something that

led to a traumatized, depressed life (O’Brien 2001, p. 35).

Many women, part of the disillusioned group of people who did not believe in

Henry Luce’s declaration of the twentieth century as the American century in Life

magazine in 1941 (2004, p. 31), decided to abandon the ideal that society envisioned

for them and lead their lives according to their own will. Part of both Beats and beatniks,

women were a constant and growing presence in the Beat Generation movement, and

while some of them served as muses for the Beat writers, others were writers

themselves. Between the more sounding names are Dianne di Prima, ruth weiss, Hettie

11
Jones, Joanne Kyger and Lenore Kandel. Their works, as their lives, are important in

the Beat community, but rarely gathered the general public attention that the male

writers did, and, undeservedly so, these women slowly came to be labelled as “Beat

chicks,” a stereotype that relegated them to a place of submission and silence but

sexually available to men (Carden 2018), a process that generically led them to be

ignored or overlooked.

2. Patti Smith

2.1. “I’m gonna get on that train and go to New York City”

The 1960s marked a turning point in America’s cultural history. During this

decade, ongoing movements like the Civil Rights Movement, the Gay Rights

Movement, and the Women’s Liberation Movement grew and reached their zenith, the

Berkeley protests and the Cuban missile crisis took place, the Vietnam War carried on,

as did the Cold War and the hippie counterculture with its “flower power” slogan that

developed to its highest form. It was also when the Port Huron Statement was released

to the public, advocating for the recovery of human values and interpersonal

relationships, and for the end of America’s hypocrisy and complacency, an America

that was mainly guided by values that revealed an ideology of nationalism in place of

patriotism. They asserted the need for a participatory democracy and hoped that their

statement would serve as a wake-up call to an eluded America and as an incentive and

reassurance to the many disillusioned within its borders (Students for a Democratic

Society 1962). The sixties were marked by the election of John F. Kennedy to the White

House and by the rise of figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, and by

their assassinations in a period of only five years. It was the decade of the Summer of

Love, of Woodstock, but it was also when The Beatles broke up and when Bob Dylan
12
almost died. Less than a year after Dylan’s motorcycle accident, Patti Smith arrived in

New York (Smith 2012a, p. 24).

Born in 1946 in Chicago, Smith was mainly brought up in New Jersey, and it

was there that she first had contact with what the America of the 1950s and 1960s

presented to her. Growing up with a tomboy attitude, Patti Smith had a disregard for

gender that never really went away. Reminiscing about her childhood in her National

Book Award Winner memoir Just Kids, Smith recalls an argument with her mother

when at 11 years old she was not allowed to play shirtless anymore. With a sense of

betrayal, she felt angry, feeling unnatural with a shirt on, and for that reason, out of

place with what was expected of her as a girl, physically and psychologically—notably

in regard to the submissive domestic ideal that her mother seemed to have conformed

to (2010, pp. 10 & 174; Brownell 2011, p. 9). An avid reader, she connected with

characters from the books she read, and, regarding this subject matter, when she was

older she remembered how she wished to be Jo from Louisa May Alcott’s Little

Women—“so strong yet so feminine” (Bockris 1998, p. 14). In the end, this restraining

of her nature only made her consider the power and influence of gender roles in society,

while contemplating her own goal of not subscribing exclusively to one, which

reflected her nature since the beginning.

After an unwanted and unexpected pregnancy forced her to abandon her studies

at Glassboro State College, she made up her mind to do the big leap and move to New

York. It was there that she met Robert Mapplethorpe—who would later become a

photographer and visual artist—, and it was with him that her journey in the city began

in earnest. Like with her father, who often took her family from New Jersey to

Philadelphia where she saw and connected with art for the first time, Smith and

Mapplethorpe would gather their little money to visit museums and galleries (Smith

13
2012a, pp. 10 & 48) and to buy their art supplies in the intervals of city wandering

“through the debris of the sixties” (Smith 2015, p. 4).

2.2. Development as a poet

“Freedom is a waterfall, is pacing

linoleum till dawn, is the right to
write the wrong words. and I done
plenty of that . . .”

—Patti Smith, Early Work: 1970-1979

Inspired by the works of the decadent Arthur Rimbaud and the symbolist

Charles Baudelaire, by William Blake and, by the Beats (Stefanko 2017, pp. 19 & 63;

Wadsworth Atheneum 2011, p. 9), Smith was also influenced by Jean Genet and an

incredible list of heroes and heroines from different centuries, about whom she penned

several poems. Writing, born out of a necessity to express herself in a society that

privileged the woman’s silence, came to her in the form of verse, along with the several

drawings she made.

In a sort on symbiotic relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, she and Robert

created as much as they could, a routine that helped develop Smith both personally and

artistically. Her poetry leant heavily towards the glorification of her heroes and

heroines, and many times there were poems which were a concentration of different

characteristics from those same heroes that she felt represented her. “I’m a hero

worshipper,” Smith stated once. With these poems, Smith was deconstructing,

analysing and rebuilding herself in verse, something that helped her develop her one

true persona, not hindered by the conformist and submissive values which told her who

she had to be (Bockris 1998, pp. 44 & 56).

14
 Her writing, nonetheless, was mostly focused on female subjects—“The girls

interested me,” she admitted in Just Kids (2010, p. 199). This was not surprising, given

the number of poems that dealt with her female heroines or with women, as were the

cases of “jeanne d’arc” (about Joan of Arc), of “georgia o’keeffe,” and “amealia

earhart,” of Edie Sedgwick, Marianne Faithfull, and Céline (Bockris 1998, p. 5). Yet,

she wrote about those women from a male perspective, a somewhat subversive stance

on gender rules, and surely with the intention of inverting the reader’s expectations.

This is immediately noticeable, for example, in “Gloria (In Excelsis Deo)”, the first

track of her debut album. With this attitude, it is perceivable that Smith had grown up

but had not abandoned her gender bending nature, applying it here in her verses, and

most surely inspired by the equally dual nature that Mapplethorpe presented, being both

masculine and feminine (Smith 2012a, p. 60). “The masculinity in me gets inspired by

the female,” she would say for Interview magazine in 1973, reflecting on her straddling

of the gender barrier throughout her life (Paytress 2010, p. 185).

15
 III. Analysis

Once Patti Smith had many influences and agents responsible for her

development as a poet, it is not surprising that a rather big part of that influence came

from the writers of the era just before hers. During the 1950s, the Beat Generation

writers became renowned for their remarkable works of cultural relevance, and had

managed to induce part of America to revisit and rethink their moral codes and ideals.

Having a special effect on their own youth generation, they were able to influence the

generations to come after almost with an equal strength, and Patti Smith had been part

of the lucky ones. It is, in fact, an excerpt from Allen Ginsberg’s “Footnote to Howl”

that figures as epigraph to her book Collected Lyrics: 1970-2015, containing all the

lyrics from her music recordings (Smith 2015).

When it comes to Patti Smith, reality in the context of the late 1960s differed

from that of the first fifteen years of the postwar period. Economic values had stayed

mostly the same, with corporate liberal principles still overpowering the conduct of

social and cultural politics, but the Beats had been able to shake the ground in which

those values stood.

1. Beat and hungry

Several times throughout her life, Patti Smith has referred to herself as both

“beat” and “beatnik,” with her clothing and shoewear and, overall, her appearance as

beatnik, and her humour and herself as beat (ibid., pp. 19 & 177). The title of this

section is retrieved from a quote from Smith’s Just Kids (2012a, p. 27), when she

describes how weary she felt after a roofless first day and night in New York—“I was

beat and hungry”. While it is a literal description of her condition, another interpretation

16
can be made of those five words, as a manifestation of not only her physical condition,

but also psychological—a declaration of herself as part of the Beat tradition, and of her

hunger for a revitalization of the values in different levels of society, through that same

tradition. I will return to this idea later in this dissertation.

Nevertheless, upon her arrival in New York in July 1967, she felt the energy of

the city, declaring it “shifty and sexual,” with “an air of vague and unsettling paranoia,”

describing a sense of calm before the storm, an anticipation of the revolution that was

afoot and that she would be an essential part of.

1.1. “To be a saint in any form”

The poetry of Patti Smith and her stance towards it and life in many ways relates

directly to the Beat’s own stance. Firstly, Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe were

enamoured “by the idea of being artist and living outside society”. A deliberate posture

towards a rebuttal of society’s attempt at homogenization and complacency, Smith and

Mapplethorpe accepted and proudly embraced the social margins as their home, which

made fellaheen out of them.

Smith thought of writing as a rather physical act, and quite close to a sexual act,

much like Jack Kerouac; the On the Road author likened writing to orgasm and vouched

for the act of writing under its laws (Belgrad 1998, p. 202), which Patti Smith literally

did. Smith sat next to her typewriter, masturbated (sometimes several times a day) and

wrote under the influence of the orgasmic rush (Bockris 1998, p. 8; the Muir 1980?, p.

31). Much like the Beat writers, Smith used alternate ways to present to her a new

vision, a new flow of words, a new language, allowing it to recombine on the paper,

and it was under this technique that many of the poems that we find with a female

subject with a male perspective came about—with a sexual intensity beneath it.

17
 Besides the origin of much of her writings, these were of critical importance to

her psychological growth, as stated before. Her pieces would often aid her in her own

journey of self-discovery, as it allowed her to look within herself to identify and fight

her demons—the sorrow and distress over the loss of the spirit of the 1960s generation,

and the increasing conformity of cultural society, represented in the idea of “you gotta

relate” that she presents in the poem “Piss Factory” (Smith 2015, p. 25). These demons,

along with her wanderlust, led her several times to Paris, where she tried to lead rituals

of purification next to the tombstones of her deceased heroes or by just strolling through

the old streets (Bockris 1998, p. 62). In the 1970s, in an interview for NME, Smith

pondered how Jimi Hendrix had been exactly through the same road, with a demon

inside that he tried to articulate the best he could but that eventually got hold of him.

One thing she knew: she did not want to be a martyr. She idolised her heroes, many of

them martyrs for their own causes, but she refused to have that characterize her own

demise (Paytress 2010, p. 44; Bockris 1998, p. 166).

In the beginnings of her attempts at poetry, feeling akin to jazz musicians, Patti

Smith dreamed of being a jazz poet (Bockris 1998, p. 21). Many Beat poets had the

same feeling for jazz, with much of their poetry being written based on a bebop jazz

prosody, and Daniel Belgrad has commented how Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg

had found in this music genre “a subjective sense of time” that they had not found

elsewhere (Belgrad in Skerl 2004, p. 36; Belgrad 1998, p. 256). The Beats embraced

many aspects of African-American culture, and jazz, with its element of

improvisational ability and, thus, spontaneity, turned into a fundamental facet of the

Beat Generation spirit. Moreover, spontaneity was equally as important for these

writers, as it was this aesthetic principle that served as an alternative to the two realities

presented to them at the time: mass culture and high culture (Belgrad 1998, p. 1). Smith

18
believed also in the power of improvisation for her written work, understanding its

degree of importance for the writing process and for herself—“I’ve always spewed out

my subconscious through improvising poetry, language” (Bockris 1998, p. 156). Both

the Beats and Patti Smith had discovered the power of rhythm in language by

combining the two elements and, thus, of rhythm in the new language that each were

building, each in their own time. Later in the text I will also come back to this thought.

1.2. Poetry reading and performance

The Beat movement privileged and celebrated the power of words and its

creation. Spoken word, in a society that was in favour of silence and obedience, was a

blow to those ideals, and revered thought and the creative and critical spirit (Skerl 2004,

p. 75). In Beat culture, public poetry readings, a fragment of the varied events held by

the movement for the sharing and discussion of ideas throughout the years, proliferated

soon after the movement started gaining traction, influenced by the Black Mountain

College’s stance on poetry (Knight 1996, p. 5). Early on, it was this type of events that

successfully created a first sense of community between the people attending them—

there was an “emphasis on intersubjectivity” (Belgrad 1998, p. 218). The most

notorious public reading took place in 1955 at Six Galleries in San Francisco, with the

reading of Howl and other poems by its author, Allen Ginsberg. Its impact was

undeniable and, thus, both Beat and San Francisco literary movements gained an

official birth date (Skerl 2004, p. 89).

A few years after arriving at New York, Patti Smith gathered her scattered

poems to choose which ones to read at her first public reading. At first, she was doubtful

of the quality of her poems, but after incentives from friends and after several

conversations with Beat poet Gregory Corso—for her, one of America’s greatest

19
poets—, Robert Mapplethorpe got her a spot in the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Corso

had been the one to introduce Smith to the Project, a poets’ collective in New York led

by Anne Waldman who organized frequent public poetry readings, and whose reading

spots were both coveted but feared, given the Project’s importance and ‘make it or

break it’ potential. In her visit with Corso, Patti Smith thoroughly observed the poets’

performances and Corso’s line of action, with his recurrent heckling of the poets, given

his frustration at what he saw as a lack of vitality or, at least, veracity in what they

transmitted. “I made a mental note to make certain I was never boring if I read my own

poems one day,” Smith thought (Smith 2012a, pp. 137-138 & 180).

She eventually did, and with her chosen poems under her arm, she fetched a

musician to help her leave a mark of her presence there forever (ibid., p. 180; Smith

2015, p. 3). Poetry readings accompanied by music was nothing new in the field; Allen

Ginsberg had already done it, as had ruth weiss (Knight 1996, p. 242), for the rhythm

of jazz resonated with the Beat language and made it grow in power. However, Smith

looked for a guitarist and, when she reached the stage, gasps were audible, as it was the

first time an electric guitar was to be played at a poetry reading. Victor Bockris, present

at that reading, described her as “a figure of the future standing before them,” with her

raw New Jersey accent and with her sexual, gender bending material, punching the air

to add emphasis to her words and intentions (Bockris 1998, p. 2-3; Paytress 2010, p.

98).

From there, there was no turning back. After that moment, when she read again

at St. Mark’s, fearing the loss of their credibility, no one wanted to follow her, so

powerful and organic had been her intentions and her words every time (the Muir

1980?, p. 112). Gerard Malanga, the poet she had opened for in her first reading,

portrayed her as “a breath of fresh hair” in the midst of the poetry scene, with her sense

20
of liberty and her bebop diction—much like the Beat writers’ performance style. It was

through these performances that Smith learned how to communicate with and negotiate

an audience though, learning from them as much as she hoped they were learning from

her (Bockris 1998, pp. 3 & 69). Patti Smith had incorporated Beat traditions into the

1970s poetry reading scene; by means of an adaptation of poetry readings with musical

accompaniment, Smith orchestrated a revolutionary move that not only had

consequences in poetry readings from then on, but changed the poetry reading and

performance panorama altogether. Nonetheless, throughout the decades, she carried on

giving poetry readings, both with musical accompaniment and without, in its traditional

way, including readings with Allen Ginsberg (ibid., p. 209).

1.3. “Rock and roll belongs to the people”

“These things were on my mind: the course of the artist,

the course of freedom redefined, the re-creation of space,

the emergence of new voices.”

—Patti Smith, Collected Lyrics: 1970-2015

In terms of spirituality, Patti Smith always had a troubled relationship with

organised religion, seriously wanting to understand it but having great difficulty in her

attempts, as, equivalent to society, she found many inconsistencies in what religion

presented her. This relationship, with its turmoil, led to a search for what Victor Bockris

described as her “spiritual resonance” (1998, p. 17). About this search, Smith recalls in

a 1975 interview to Newsweek: “I desperately wanted a god, but I wasn’t ever satisfied,

so art replaced it, and rock ‘n’ roll” (Paytress 2010, p. 132), and to religion she had said

“. . . Christ/I’m giving you the good-bye/firing you tonight/I can make my own light

21
shine/and darkness too is equally fine” (Smith 1994, p. 7). Already in the summer of

1969 she had felt the wish to be able to stop time and enjoy the last summer of the

decade, of what she felt like the last summer of that generation, for she could feel the

spirit of the 1960s and of rock and roll slipping through their fingers (Smith 2012a, pp.

104-105).

Brian Jones, the founder and original leader of the Rolling Stones, one of the

many icons of the 1960s to disappear, had hoped, along with many others, for the

gradual appearance of “a new, more progressive society, liberated in part by pop

music”. Patti Smith had hopes for that same society but as the years passed, she quickly

realised that those hopes had been left in the 1960s, together with its spirit (Paytress

2010, p. 24), that “the idea of change ha[d] collapsed into the idea of continuity”

(Bromell 2000, p. 3). Of this, Smith wrote, in “wītt”:

“look at this land where we am. lost souls. failed

moon over the carnival. deserted. there is no twi-

light on this island. night falls like a final curtain.”

(Smith 1994, p. 36)

She feared for the continuity of that generation. Nonetheless, she had not

forgotten the way New York felt upon her arrival, a city full in its potential, smoothly

trembling with the smell of possibility, caressed by a small wind of impending

revolution, even under the weight of a need to conform and be silent brought by the

postwar, and years later, even if progressively fainter, she decided to breathe in the air

and turn her face to the breeze.

22
 Although Patti Smith had always felt beaten by the bureaucracies of political

movements, and she had not participated actively in any, she progressed with this

movement, which she intended to lead to its goal—the salvation of rock and roll. This

was, in fact, the aforementioned psychological hunger that she had in 1967. She had

often hoped for people to wake up from their complacency and do something that

benefited them, a similar image that she recalled through the figure of Paul Revere,

“riding through the American night, petitioning the people . . . to take up arms”

(Paytress 2010, p. v; Smith 2012a, p. 245), while, in “Birdland”, the third track in her

debut album, presents her crying out “Am I alone in this generation?” (Smith 2015, p.

39). Believing in the power, potential, and social role of rock and roll and art, Smith

led a movement that, though related to a form of entertainment and philosophical in

nature, had implications in social and cultural politics—being, in the end, a political

movement in itself (Belgrad 1998, p. 2). From Smith’s standpoint, the music that had

led sustenance to the younger generations during the 1960s was failing to thrive,

particularly and, most likely, due to the deaths of many of the heroes of the decade as

it came to a close, leaving her generation’s heritage in jeopardy (Hermes 2012; Smith

2015, p. 4). Confident on the notion of rock and roll as a powerful vehicle for self-

expression, she declares it stagnant, taking on the task of starting to write rock music

articles to music magazines like Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone (ibid.; Smith 2012a, p.

245).

Patti Smith looked at rock and roll as her religion, retrieving from it her spiritual

sustenance; this attitude matched perfectly with Beat poet Ted Joans’ declaration that,

in turn, jazz was his religion (Hermes 2012; Skerl 2004, p. 118). A reflection from both

eras, these declarations perfectly present the mighty importance of music and rhythm

in the lives of both poets. For Joans, kin to the remaining Beat community, be it writers

23
or affiliates, jazz was the ultimate genre of music that created the bridge between

rhythm and language, that allowed a fuller understanding of poetry and its goal, being

jazz that gave language its utmost vigour. Yet, for Smith, rock and roll in the 1970s,

primarily fed by a healthy previous decade, was now the main supplier of the rhythm

that nourished verse (Kane 2012, p. 118). Patti had said that “[t]here’s a lot of American

rhythms,” and this proved it; each found the rhythm that applied and helped them the

most (Bockris 1998, p. 7). Yet, rock and roll had surpassed jazz’s limitations with its

lyrics (sometimes written originally as poems), its danceable characteristic and the

ability that it had in swiftly becoming the voice of a generation and of a culture of

dissidence, irreverence, and inconformity (Belgrad 1998, p’. 256-257). It was this

fierceness of spirit that Patti Smith hoped to reinvigorate with this major task. There

were indeed a lot of American rhythms, but it was every generation’s role to find its

own and not blindly accept and trust the one that had been coercively given to them.

In this search for an original and authentic rock and roll, nevertheless, Smith

took another step in a convergence of her objectives with the ones from the Beat

Generation. Striving to reach, by way of nostalgia, the original sense of rock and roll,

it was as if Smith was striving for its lost innocence, “its possible pureness” (Bockris

1998, p. 151). As I have already stated before, the search for an innocence lost was one

of the biggest tasks the Beats took in hands, believing it essential for the possible grasp

of spontaneity. Much like the Beats, Smith hoped to seize the innocence that had been

robbed from rock and roll and, thus, from culture.

This search is seen from another angle in Mark Paytress’s book entitled Horses

and the remaking of rock ‘n’ roll, where he examines a collaborative play with Sam

Shepard entitled Cowboy Mouth. In the play, Smith’s character, Cavale—the French

word for ‘escape’—rages about the contemporary stasis, advocating for the need of “a

24
saint with a cowboy mouth” and declaring that “[a]ny great . . . rock ‘n’ roll song can

raise me higher than all of Revelation.” This stance from Cavale serves a direct

reflection of Smith’s train of thought, with her movement explained and justified

succinctly in two small sentences (2010, p. 89-90). In Cowboy Mouth, Cavale poses

simply as an alter ego for Smith, while at the same time, offers a rather peculiar

prophecy, being that she is essentially describing herself—she often would be described

as talking like a truck driver, and, in the end, she would be the one leading the change

(Smith 2012a, p. 178). In regard to this prophecy, nevertheless, we perceive yet another

bond between Smith and the Beat writers, given that Smith, like Ginsberg, as many

before them, had been acknowledged for their prophetic writings—something that,

throughout the centuries, artists and writers have been quite often associated with (Kane

2012, p. 107; Crabtree 2018). Once again, Smith’s connections with the Beat

Generation appear to be vital for a fuller and grounded understanding of her actions and

thought processes during such a moment of social numbness.

Patti Smith equally believed that radio played a big role in this condition of

starvation of rock and roll music, having succumbed to corporate liberal dictates with

their business oriented mindset, which, if carried on through the entirety of the 1970s,

would only be fodder for a gradual intensification of the problem (Paytress 2010, p.

36). She had noticed this cultural predicament and, in a 2003 interview for the

Washington Post, Smith recalls that she was indeed trying to “remind people that rock

‘n’ roll was theirs, that it didn’t belong to business, or to stars” (Harrington 2003).

Regarding her poetry readings, a critic from Philadelphia remarked that Smith

owed quite a lot to the Beat writers, especially “to the incantatory chants of Allen

Ginsberg and the jazz recitations of Jack Kerouac”. Her reading and performance style,

however, was shifting, and slowly she found herself singing way more often than

25
reciting in the usual bebop style (Bockris 1998, p. 80). From her first reading, Smith

knew what she wanted, revealing her wish to make good use of her first opportunity at

St. Mark’s with a fusion of language and rock and roll, in what turned out to be the first

step of the beginning of her complex negotiations between poetry and music (Smith

2012a, p. 180).

1.3.1. Horses

Revealing in Just Kids that she did not understand the relevance of Andy

Warhol’s work and declaring her preference for “an artist who transformed his time,

not mirrored it” (Smith 2012a, p. 69), Smith took it upon her hands to revive rock and

roll from its dormant condition (Weller 2009, pp. 9-10). After many readings backed

by Lenny Kaye on the guitar, Patti Smith engaged on the assignment of creating

songs—either out of her writings or original ones. Created, however, mostly from her

writings, songs that had once been poems started filling her repertoire. Inspired by

Richard Hell and Bob Dylan, who she considered rock and roll poets, but mostly

buoyed by Bob Neuwirth, who she met while living at the Chelsea Hotel with

Mapplethorpe. He had told her she easily had the skill for it if she worked on it, and so

Smith developed new songs, and soon enough she was performing some of them during

her poetry readings and at CBGB too, where, in the beginning of 1975, her recently

formed band had guaranteed a seven-week residency (Smith 2012a, p. 142; Paytress

2010, pp. 70 &126).

When it comes to ‘punk’, the term was coined by writer Dave Marsh in 1971 in

an article for Creem, referencing firstly to garage-rockers (Hermes 2012), but a growing

number of critics find it significant as a genre associated with those same garage-

rockers and the increasing reaction against the popularity that glam rock and disco,

26
while it “negotiated interestingly between the ‘low’ genre of popular music and the

‘high’ genre of poetry.” By 1975, the word had already been adopted into the music

lexicon and was used frequently to describe acts like the ones at CBGB, and, with that,

Patti Smith, culminating in the fact that her music, in the end, could be and is nowadays

catalogued as punk rock or simply punk and Patti Smith is generally known as the

Godmother of Punk (Kane 2012, pp. 106-107).

Jimi Hendrix had left behind Electric Lady Studios, the music studios he created

with the objective of leading there the revolution that so many waited for, a space that

reflected his hopes of the future, and where he hoped to create the language that would

define it (Hermes 2012; Smith 2012a, p. 249). He was not to be the one to do it, but it

was Patti Smith’s turn. At Electric Lady, Patti began the recording of her debut album,

Horses, in 1975. When it came out, in December of the same year, Horses precipitated

the revolution that Smith had felt in the air for so many years. Victor Bockris weighed

on the significance of the album:

“Horses’ release . . . was cause for celebration. Patti had fulfilled

her desire to wake people up to a new form of rock and give the

fans an album that would make them feel the way she had when

purchasing a Dylan or Stones album in the sixties. It was a kind

of manifesto and Patti was suddenly thrust into the spotlight as a

rock politician.”

(1998, p. 103)

Horses was indeed a good reason for celebration. Unique in the music business,

the album paved the way for the revolutionary stance that Smith so desired that

happened in music—a revival of rock and roll, reflecting the times they lived in, and

remembering with nostalgia what rock and roll had once offered, while it gave an

27
innovative angle on the genre, with the “new image of a rock-and-roll woman” (Bockris

1998, p. 101). The album served as an intermediate for the cultural revolution Smith

had waited for, combining “formal experimentation with overt calls for major

ideological transformation” (Gair 2007, p. 162). Charles Shaar Murray, from NME

declared it a “some kind of definitive essay on the American night as a state of mind,”

contemplating the fresh approach that Smith had taken with her record, analysing and

deconstructing her time through a new (and might we say ‘Beat’) lense (ibid., p. 105).

In addition, the record featured Patti Smith in her full essence on the cover; taken by

Robert Mapplethorpe, the picture showed Smith in man’s clothes with a defiant pose—

unsubmissive and in control, with the traces of androgyny that characterized her. (ibid.,

p. 100). Not only the cover subverted the ongoing archetype of women as feminine and

submissive to the domestic ideal that prevailed since the postwar period, with an impact

to the gender norms from then on, but Jan Butler pertinently brings into attention how

Jonathan Gray explained the importance of paratexts (in this case, cover art) for a more

complete insight into the significance of a cultural text (2014, p. 181). The Horses cover

was an authentic photograph of the mid-1970s, a representation of its dualities, of its

impending sense of alienation.

Relevant to Patti Smith’s accomplishment, Victor Bockris comments how

Smith had talked once of Rimbaud and of one prophetic statement in particular, where

he marvelled at the artistic possibilities that would come out of the liberation of women

from the servitude of men; presenting the notion that the great next generation of great

poets would be women through the creation of new rhythms and new poetries was a

prophecy that made the bond Smith and Rimbaud even stronger (ibid., p. 59). There

were other women and there were women in literature, but the lasting bond that had

28
connected Smith with the French poet since she was sixteen years old, leads Smith’s

achievements to a much greater level of resonance.

Patti Smith had accomplished her goal and, with that, established more links.

Her success made her the saviour she looked so incessantly for; she had been the leading

figure in the discovery of a new rhythm. The poet, considering herself now more of a

language architect rather than a poet, had found her own rhythm, her own beat—and

the one of a new generation. Horses’ seventh track, “Land: Horses/ Land of a Thousand

Dances/ La Mer(de)”, recollects this idea when Patti Smith declaims “From the other

end of the hallway a rhythm was generating” (Smith 2015, p. 47). Never wishing to be

a martyr for her own cause like many had been, Smith endeavoured to take on a colossal

task and did it successfully, and while she might not have indeed been a martyr, a

parallel between her and one of her heroines, Joan of Arc, could be easily established.

In “to the reader,” from her book Early Work: 1970-1979, Patti Smith declares

that “[a]n artist wears his work in place of wounds” (1994, p. x). Her work involved

saving rock and roll from the values that threatened to swallow America and its society.

She had seen many voices shut forever in the search for a way out of conformity,

understanding the struggle, and believing that, if alive, they would be dangerous. Her

vision of a generation slowly coming apart and disappearing is equivalent to the vision

expressed by Allen Ginsberg in the very first two lines of Howl and other poems: “I

saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by/madness, starving hysterical naked,”

(1957, p. 9). Rock and roll was her religion, and so her wounds were spiritual, inflicted

by a dissolution of the genre. Her work was its salvation.

29
 2. Neo-Beat

2.1. Poet and musician

When 1970 arrived, societal values had mostly stayed identical to those that had

marked the previous decade and a half. The 1970s still presented New York with a

stalled economy, and they revealed themselves as a very complex transitional period,

due to those same values that had kept society ubiquitously motionless (Hermes 2012;

Bockris 1998, p. 5).

With her debut album Horses, Patti Smith was on the forefront of radical

change. Since the beginning, Patti had always been one to not silence herself and not

give voice to the problematics that afflicted her and society. One of her first pieces, that

she later recorded in a bebop style, “Piss Factory” reflects on her journey working in

New Jersey and manifested her destiny of coming to New York and never returning

with a prophetic voice, mirroring the struggle of many like her who wanted to break

through. The other side of that single included a version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe.”

Smith had adapted the song, adding a spoken section in the beginning, where she

commented on the case of Patty Hearts, who had been kidnapped and abused by the

Symbionese Liberation Army, an American terrorist group, and months later had joined

it. Patti Smith, through a Beat tradition of commentary poetics on cultural development,

created a fusion between pop culture references and her poetry and music, and, with it,

conceived a new layer of Beat social and political commentary. Equally, she made use

of her poetry readings infused with music to give similar remarks; Mark Paytress recalls

how, during a New Year Day’s performance in 1975, she introduced the song “Land”

with a reference to the Vietnam War, pondered on the power of violence and on the

need of expunging it (2010, p. 121-122). Through her poetry readings and music

performances she hoped to, much like the Beat Generation in the 1950s, incite a shift

30
in consciousness that would lead to greater awareness and greater individuality, and

“create a space for people to express anti-corporate feelings” (Bockris 1998, p. 89).

In her performances Smith also privileged nakedness. Though not physical, her

energy and snarling attitude on stage allowed space for a rawness of spirit that pulsated

through the crowd. Performing was, much like writing, a rather physical act in its

intensity and nature for Smith, and a exorcising of demons too. After once having seen

Mick Jagger perform, she was dramatically changed (ibid., p. 63), and her

performance’s fierceness tried to encapsulate exactly the same energy of nakedness that

she had felt during that experience, culminating with her own description of Horses as

a naked record (ibid., p. 120). The Beats also, in turn, held nakedness as sacred. Another

meaning for communion, nakedness—both physical and psychological—, opened the

doors to the veracity of the word, to the rawness of its truth, and it meant a drop of all

defences (Skerl 2004, p. 38).

2.2. The female Beat

Consistent with Rimbaud’s prophecy that women would come across great

artistic achievements in the future, there were, as a matter of fact, developments within

the bohemian culture of the Beat Generation that could prove this. Many women, as

aforesaid, had rejected the vested ideals that society imposed on them and, very much

like Smith and Mapplethorpe would do decades later, had willingly decided to live on

the margins of society in order to be active members in the fight for a new

consciousness. Patti Smith, appearing in the cultural scene in the late 1960s, it was only

in 1971 that, with her first public poetry reading, she began her ascendance. Negotiating

the thick cultural atmosphere upon her arrival, reading her poetry on a major forum

helped Smith launch her own new movement.

31
 Poetry readings, however, as previously discussed, became quite common

within the Beat movement, even with musical accompaniment. Madeline Gleason, a

precursor of the movement, created and organized the San Francisco Poetry Festival in

1947, the first of its kind, where poetry was performed by their authors (Knight 1996,

p. 30). In addition, it was with ruth weiss that poetry readings with jazz accompaniment

first arrived at San Francisco, changing the public reading panorama of that bohemia

(ibid, p. 242). Interestingly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, a seminal figure in the birth of the

Beat literary movement, with his bookshop and publishing company City Lights

Booksellers &Publishing, had been influenced by those jazz and poetry readings and

organized a great number of them (Lawlor 2005, p. 105). Many of these women had,

though less frequently than men, for many years participated in public readings,

evidently—with Helen Adam, Madeline Gleason, and Dianne di Prima as part of that

list.

ruth weiss is, most probably, the one female Beat poet with which Patti Smith

holds the biggest number of similar characteristics. Firstly, weiss believed in language

as “a free flowing force” and as sacred, expressed through her experiential verses, alike

Smith, who not only recognized the powerfulness of language but also decided to

elevate it through the might of music. To her, language fused with music served as a

vehicle for communication and for message, an instrument for a wake-up call for the

social consciousness, in the same way Denise Levertov’s poetry did. As it was for

another Beat poet, Lenore Kandel, Smith cared for poetry as a phenomenon that could

lead to liberation, to cultural emancipation (Skerl 2004, pp. 58 & 100). Next, when it

comes to performance, weiss had established herself as a performance poet, and her

performance attitude was frequently collaborative, with the audience participating in

the reading, calling for specific poems, in an attitude of pure interaction and discussion,

32
emanating the spirit of a regular Beat gathering. Patti, in turn, let much of her attitude

as a poet be defined by her strong dependence on performance. She thought the poet

inherently a performer in itself, and, pondering on it, declared Frank O’Hara, Bob

Dylan, and Allen Ginsberg’s energies as essential to the reawakening of such a

distinctive feature—stressing the importance of performance on the two levels: poetry

and rock and roll. For Smith, physical performance was essential, which was reflected

later through the magnetism of her own performances (Bockris 1998, p. 63-64). In

addition, when performing, Smith did feed from the audience’s energy too, leading a

type of performance on a distinct level of collaboration, that, though there was no

dialogical exchange, revealed ultimately the same degree of interdependency between

artist and public (ibid., p. 140). Lastly, regarding weiss, the Beat poet published in 1959

a book entitled GALLERY OF WOMEN, which celebrated different women that she

admired and felt a kinship with (Knight 1996, p. 245), much like Patti Smith did,

regarding her heroes and heroines, with her first book of poetry, Seventh Heaven

(1972).

Patti Smith has a great deal in common with the women affiliated with the Beat

literary movement that might appear at first glance. In the same vein of Janine Pommy

Vega, who understands the power that travel holds in one’s self-discovery and

delineates it in her poetry (ibid., p. 223), Smith often travelled to Paris (or in other

occasions to locations closer to New York) as a way of looking inward and

understanding her position in the world. Time and again, Patti filtered the results of

those trips into her poetry, looking at the past with a certain sense of nostalgia, but

above all looking to the future, in an attempt to decipher it. In fact, the second to last

song in Horses, “Land: Horses/ Land of a Thousand Dances/ La Mer(de)”, performed

33
in a mix of declamation and singing, had been in fact a salute to both past and future

(Smith 2015, p. 52).

Rather interestingly, overlapping Patti Smith’s chronology of deconstruction of

the gender rulebook in the United States in the 1970s, with her defiant poetry and

ingenious debut album and cover picture, in France originated a strain of feminist

theory entitled écriture feminine. This theory explains the importance of language for

the way the human psyche understands their social roles; concentrating on how society

is ruled by phallocentric tendencies, with men being regarded as superior as women,

this theory instigates women to reclaim their position in the world by means of

engagement with their current role but through the mean of literature. One of the

authors of the essay which coined the phrase écriture féminine, Hélène Cixous declared

that “[t]he future must no longer be determined by the past,” refusing to engage with

that same phallocentric language, and celebrating the rich individuality and imaginary

of women (1976, pp. 875-876). However, while Cixous is speaking of women and to

women, explaining that women’s “language does not contain, it carries; it does not hold

back, it makes possible,” a writing that “can only keep going, without ever inscribing

or discerning contours” (ibid., p. 889), Mark Paytress explains that, however it may be,

écriture féminine was not strictly associated with literature written by women, with the

cases of Genet, Joyce and Mallarmé reflecting a non-phallocentric literary work (2010,

p. 184).

Écriture feminine connected powerfully with Patti Smith’s effort as gender

bender, being that she even regarded herself as beyond gender (Bockris 1998, p. 111).

It did not reflect the hope of a non-phallocentric literature, being that Smith explored

her masculine impulses when writing her pieces on women, but it reflected her effort

of subversion of the generally accepted ideals. Weighing on ‘Notice’ from her book

34
WĪTT (1973) during an interview for Mademoiselle magazine, she explained why she

declared herself “without mother, gender or country”: musing about Rimbaud, Smith

stated that “[y]ou can’t worry about gender when you’re doing Art on its Highest Level.

I mean, Rimbaud talked about the male and female within him, . . . every great artist

does” (ibid., p. 189). Her poetics, with a male perspective over her female subjects

reflected that idea, clearly denoting her fluidity and her own attempt at breaking the

gender binary. This was her nature and a major part of her own artistic manifesto—not

conforming to a gender, identifying with both. These poetics, as a last note, also created

a bridge with the writings of Beat poet Anne Waldman, whose line of work rested on

“a poetics of transformation beyond gender” (Knight 1996, p. 289-290).

35
 IV. Conclusion

Developing psychologically and artistically in the 1970s, Patti Smith led a

massive revolution in literature and music directly from the heart of New York.

Negotiating a rather difficult and aloof cultural environment, and to her especially when

it came to music, she took on the burden of being one of the first to produce change. In

The Coral Sea, Smith said “[w]e are the buffalo of a dying breed,” concisely

summarizing the environment in which she lived—barren and inauthentic (Smith

2012b, p. 15).

In that decade, she stood out in the cultural scene. The influence of the Beats

was undeniable in her, with her describing Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and

Gregory Corso as her teachers (Smith 2012a, p. 138), as Smith shared several

characteristics in common with the Beat Generation, not only in her poetry but also in

her values and objectives. From her search for a lost innocence (and with that, for an

authenticity and a nakedness), her attempt at the creation of a new language, and her

recognition of the power language and, therefore, poetry, to her social consciousness

and her poetry readings and performance style, Patti Smith was exactly in line with the

spirit of the Beat Generation. However, common characteristics only did not reflect the

strength of her link with the artists and writers that had helped forge the counterculture

of the 1960s. By way of her quest to save rock and roll from its dormancy, Smith

adapted the Beat angst and characteristics to fit her goals, with poetry readings backed

by electric guitar, a synergistic type of musical performance, and a specific focus on

her search for a lost innocence. A Beat context certainly helped to have a fuller

approach and understanding of her work.

These innovations forged Patti Smith’s name into the history books of both

literature and music, allowing to describe her, rather than Beat, as a neo-Beat poet.

36
Several Beat writers had stated in different occasions that since the mid-1970s, the Beat

Generation no longer existed as a conscious movement (Skerl 2004, p. 87); Smith had

seized the opportunity and had succeeded in the reformulation of the Beat spirit via the

rescue of rock and roll from the hands of corporate liberal values. Her effort, though,

groundbreaking as it was, with her new variant of the Beat spirit, chronologically did

not fit with the Beat Generation, resulting in her denomination as neo-Beat, rather than

simply Beat.

Being a woman, her reworking of poetry and of rock and roll gained another

level of significance, and her artistic work, in the end, actively participated in more

progressive discourses on female emancipation and gender roles, as was the case of

Horses introductory line “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine”, born from her

poem “Oath” (Smith 2015, pp. 7 & 33), distancing herself from religion, declaring her

own emancipation as individual and as an artist, and denouncing and refusing the notion

of the original sin attributed to the woman. With Beat constituting a hallmark of her

vision, her poetry had a certain way of looking into the past with longing while looking

at the future with anticipation, reflecting the progressive and experiential style of poetry

that many of the female Beat writers also had.

An essential name in the history of insurgence, Patti Smith deconstructed and

inspected the 1970s atmosphere through her salvation of rock and roll, establishing

herself as punk rock’s éminence grise by paving the way for the new genre (Kane 2012,

p. 115). “I wanted to be an artist but I wanted my work to matter,” she admitted in Just

Kids. And it did; she had saved rock and roll and was the ultimate rock and roll poet.

She was the “Electric Lady” that named Hendrix’s recording studio, the fulfiller of his

legacy. She was the saint with the cowboy mouth, and she had become beatific.

Physically and psychologically androgynous and not a follower of social and political

37
movements, still she infused the literary and musical panoramas with a female neo-Beat

sensibility that helped American society in its leap out of conformity and into the future.

38
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