Patti Smith: Selections

[Jump to poems by publication year: 1994, 2005]

Though known primarily as a rocker, Patti Smith (1946–present) creatively blurs the boundaries between poetry and song, memoir and lyric. Smith is a recipient of a 2022 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and many other honors, including the 2010 National Book Award for her memoir Just Kids, four Grammy nominations, and a Golden Globe nomination for her song “Mercy Is,” co-written with Lenny Kaye. Smith has published more than 10 books, including the poetry collections Auguries of Innocence (2005) and Woolgathering (1992). Smith's songs, including “Because the Night,” co-written with Bruce Springsteen and included on her 1978 landmark album Easter, are infused with poetry; so are her personal journals and social media accounts, with which she advocates for human and environmental rights.

When I devoured Smith’s words, high school me experienced the same thrill as reading William Blake, Sylvia Plath, and John Keats. But there was something more. Smith’s poems name-checked Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, and Judy Garland, alongside Rimbaud and Voltaire. This was poetry I understood.

—from “A Language of Ciphers: On Patti Smith,” by Chet Weise, published in Poetry, April 2023

Patti Smith’s selected poems in order of publication

1994

“seventh heaven”

Eve’s was the crime of curiosity. As the saying
goes: it killed the pussy.

Its title an idiom for euphoric experiences, this poem moves associatively among seven figures—six from the Bible and one, Sinbad the Sailor, from One Thousand and One Nights—to consider “love and crime” and “desire and murder” as bedfellows. From sin, the poem reflects, comes ecstasy: “think of Satan as some stud.” Smith encourages readers at the poem’s climax, positioning the biblical Eve’s betrayal as an erotic seduction and original sin as the “first shudder” of orgasm. As the erotic scene unfolds, the poem’s lines become shorter and more heavily enjambed, which gives the poem up to the non-capitalization that, in the first stanza, occurred to introduce many of the titular sevens. As with Cain’s post-murder inspiration, when pleasure and sin come together, the ecstasy they create is an experience as valuable as any knowledge that a forbidden fruit can offer.

“the sheep lady from algiers”

the cradle rocks a barren song
she’s rocking w/her ribbons on

This poem is far less direct than Smith is known for being and relies instead on formal clues for its content. By repeating nodding as the first two lines’ beginnings, it invokes a lullaby’s round structure of repetition. It also uses archaic shorthands such as tho’ and fro, the image of a bonnet, and, in the final stanza, explicitly refers to a baby, a cradle, and rocking. Slips in direct repetition create associative meanings: the yarn goes from “weeping” to “bleeding,” the song from “broken” to “barren.” The poem’s repetition acts as a formal “darning” or mending alongside the titular lady who, intentionally or not, no longer has a baby who can receive a lullaby.

“rape”

Content warning: sexual violence

I’ll never forget how you
smelled that night. like cheddar cheese melting
under fluorescent light.

In this poem, the speaker can be read as a rapist daydreaming about a rape they committed. The cognitive dissonance immediately created between the poem’s title and its first words continues throughout as the speaker’s causal syntax and easygoing diction acts in tension with the scene described, suffusing the poem with a tonal insidiousness. The poem’s images further that tone, with “a wolf in a lamb skin trojan” making the violence of the fairy tale even more violent. The poem moves quickly, the sentences clipped and quickening predatorily until the end of the first stanza, where “nothing. can. stop me. now.” acts as a climax. The stanza breaks. The victim’s humanity and reaction to the violence live in the space that break creates, the poem “deodorize[d]” like the ending’s night.

“picasso laughing”

picasso hoax: don’t nobody tell when he dies.
continue let time continue and move like myth.

Each stanza of this poem acts as a notebook or diary entry. The first stanza tells readers that love is “invisible”; how, then, is love amid mortality marked? One way is through time, as with an entry date in a diary. The final stanza of the poem, which quotes T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, connects Picasso and Eliot through April, the “cruelest month,” per Smith. The final stanza also answers the question “what remains?” amid time. By referencing a range of dead artists, actresses, and writers, from musicians Jimi Hendrix and singer Edith Piaf to sculptor Constantin Brancusi and actress Judy Garland, Smith catalogs objects tangibly associated with each figure: a hand mirror, a bandana, and Picasso’s “boatneck shirt.” These objects, which serve as shorthand, as a date does, for memories, are what remains to make the invisible visible, much like each figure's body of work, like markers of life and death, and like the poem itself.

“jeanne d’arc”

I need a
I need a drink
and not vinegar neither
I don’t want to die

Titled for and spoken by Joan of Arc, the cross-dressing, vision-having, martyred French saint, this poem occurs in the moments before Joan burns at the stake. Her imagined preoccupation in this moment is not her imminent death but sex: “I wasn’t cut out / to go out virgin / I want my cherry / squashed.” In short lines with clipped, repeated phrases “cut so close / [the] scalp is nicked,” Joan of Arc moves frantically between freedom and fear. Her question “what the hell / […] am I ending here,” intercepted by two lines, refers to her life, her sexual status, and the political end to which her execution is a means. As her time draws nearer, rather than asking someone to “get the guard to” let her go, Joan seeks a different release. The increased density of repetition in the poem’s last moments culminates in a single utterance, “god,” which for history means a plea but in the moment Smith offers through the saint seems like erotic pleasure.

“k.o.d.a.k.”

...16 millimeter.
ebony and ivory. the purest contrast. iris closed.
open sesame.

This poem casts its speaker in a Georges Franju film. Franju is a French filmmaker known for his blend of horror and social history. As in the poem “rape,” the speaker here is insidious and predatory, “as sinister as the law allows,” peeping in on a woman in a window. The speaker plays with gender, first explicitly in the first stanza’s “if I’m male it doesn’t matter” and more subtly throughout, playing with classic cinematic archetypes of the darkly clothed man as murderer and lipsticked woman as victim. “Perched on her,” which is a meaningful enjambment, the dedication’s “plea” as echoed in lines such as “it’s me see,” “but there I am,” and “I can do it" seems to be to let the speaker recognize herself on screen, to “play the killer” as herself “in a black silk suit,” authentically.

2005

“Worthy the Lamb Slain for Us”

She had a beautiful name: freedom.
Pretty little chop. Unmarketable, light
the bleating of new life.

This poem, from Smith’s Auguries of Innocence, takes its title from the Bible’s book of Revelations 5:12 and invokes “Little Lamb” from Songs of Innocence, by William Blake, who is directly referenced in the second stanza. An extended metaphor, the poem describes a lamb named Freedom who, unable to be sold, is slaughtered. The farmer-slaughterer, described as “governed” in contrast to slaughtered Freedom, loves and mourns the sheep as “he [rips] her apart,” an act seemingly in answer to Blake’s question “Little Lamb who made thee.” The worthy lamb is born from “an indifferent hell” and, like a flower plucked from the wretched and bitter Earth, is pulled from life “by the stem / of her throat.” The farmer, in the poem’s second half, confronts the harm done in the name of freedom, humanity “abandon[ing] the farms [it] culled” for a pursuit as elusive as the bleating of a sheep.