1One of the questions we may ask, when looking at Patti Smith’s career, is whether her meeting with success as a rock star was only the result of a succession of chance encounters, which she describes in her recent autobiographical book Just Kids (Smith), or rather the logical ending of her search for an artistic medium and identity.

2Why did Patti Smith, who was a poet at heart, a great admirer of William Blake, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud among many others, choose the way of rock and roll and song-writing, instead of the world of poetry properly speaking whose doors seemed to have been opened for her in the 70s by such poets and writers as Gregory Corso or William Burroughs?

3When she landed in New York as a young woman to escape from the factory in which she had to work against her will, and which she depicted in her song ‘Piss Factory’ (Smith), Patti Smith struggled for a living, working at Brentano’s where she met Robert Mapplethorpe. After they settled together at the Chelsea Hotel, she spent her free time drawing. Writing poetry would come later. In a passage from the documentary film Dream of Life (Sebring), she tries to depict, in her own words, the process that led her from drawing to singing:

I had to find my beat... Standing in front of sheets of paper tacked to a wall, reciting Sylvia Plath, Vachel Lindsay... frustrated with the image, I drew words instead, rhythms that ran off the page into the plaster, writing lyrics from the physical act of drawing words and later, refining this process led me to performance, to collaboration, to playing with a rock and roll band.

4Her saying that she was ‘frustrated with the image’ and that the words she drew ‘instead’ gave birth to ‘rhythms that ran off the page’ suggests that words, if they initially resembled ‘images’ or drawings for her, necessarily inscribed themselves in a signifying and rhythmic chain, thus overpowering the frustrating fixity and limitation of the ‘image’. ‘Find[ing] [her] beat’ implied this necessary displacement from the sheet of paper and the drawing, meaning spatial limitation and immobility, to linguistic composition producing ‘rhythms’ themselves calling for performance. This displacement is, also, the endless search for a personal artistic voice, as the adjective ‘my’ (‘my beat’) suggests, a search that is inseparable from rhythm itself. Performance is seen as the ‘refinement’ of the physical process of drawing words. What links the two activities is the physical involvement of the artist. The body becomes the meeting ground of language and expression. Such ‘refinement’ consists in abandoning material inscription (‘drawing words’) and transmuting the physical strength which had made it possible, into the immaterial inscription of performance in which inscription and delivery seem to coincide. The word ‘refinement,’ as Patti Smith uses it here, could be understood as the process leading to a form of ideal purification of writing from its material constraints. But of course inscription never disappears, however powerful the ‘refining fire’1 produced by the performance is. Because performance is neither writing nor reading, rhythm and words seem to be no longer determined by those material limits Patti Smith had always been so eager to transgress. (‘rhythms that ran off the page into the plaster’).

5This image of the ‘sheets of paper tacked to the wall’ invites us to question her apprehension of space itself. What about the displacement from the limited space of the sheet of paper to the limited space of the stage on which she was to perform her songs? If the stage seems to offer more room than the sheet of paper and gives the performer the opportunity to explore the limits of her ‘physical involvement,’ isn’t that space allotted to the singer and musicians always meant to be wishfully reduced and annihilated?

6The experiencing of his/her own voice by the speaker, or ‘hearing oneself speak’ or sing, is ‘pure auto-affection’ according to Jacques Derrida in Voice and Phenomenon. The subject gets a feeling of unity, of an absence of separation between him/herself and the world. For Derrida, such ‘self-proximity... would be nothing other than the absolute reduction of space in general’ (Derrida, 79). The idea of an ‘absolute reduction of space’ is interesting in the perspective of Patti Smith’s relation to the ‘piece of paper tacked to the wall’. The overflowing of her written words can be seen, paradoxically, as a manifestation of a desire to reduce space. Jacques Derrida explains how the experience of hearing oneself speak operates a form of fusion of the signified and the signifier: ‘The signified or what I want to say is so close to the signifier that the signifier is “diaphanous”’ (Derrida, 80). He adds that such a proximity no longer exists when the subject, instead of hearing him/herself speak, sees him/herself write.

7The idea of a ‘diaphanous’ signifier seems to conflict with Patti Smith’s attachment to the materiality of phonemes and to the pleasure she obviously takes in voicing them. This paradox is present in Derrida’s analysis of voice. To become ‘diaphanous,’ the signifier needs to be voiced. It needs a voice, and a body.

8The singing of a song is an endless repetition of writing’s own difference, of the fact that ‘the “presence”... has already started to be self-deficient’ (Derrida, 87), which is paradoxical since singing supposes the presence and energy of a singing body. One often mentions the singer’s ‘stage presence’ as if the presence of the singer, his/her energy, could make us forget that the song, as a text, as writing, has always already been deprived of presence. What remains, still, is a singular voice which itself can never be reduced and which affects the listener.

9‘Gloria’ (Smith) is a hybrid song, since only the chorus has been retained from the original song composed by Van Morrison in 1964 while the rest of the text is Patti Smith’s own production. The song has been covered by many singers and bands since, notably by The Doors and Jimi Hendrix who mingled verses of his own with the original song.

10Patti Smith’s version of ‘Gloria’ is far removed from the original one. Her own version is an appropriation of the original song, starting with an excerpt from one of her poems called ‘Oath’:

Jesus died for somebody’s sins
but not mine
melting in a pot of thieves
wild card up my sleeve
thick heart of stone
my sins my own

11The lines of verse she recycled are followed by lyrics to which she added a narrative thread and in which the speaking subject (‘I’) is much more present than in the original version:

And I go to this here party and I just get bored
Until I look out the window, see a sweet young thing
Humpin’ on the parking meter, leanin’ on the parking meter
Oh, she looks so good, oh, she looks so fine
And I got this crazy feeling that I’m gonna make her mine

12The rewriting of the initial lyrics relies on the recycling of a few signifiers she incorporates into her own syntax and narrative. ‘At just about midnight’ (Van Morrison’s version) becomes, ‘And I look up into the big tower clock/ And say, “oh my God here’s midnight!”’ ‘she knocks upon my door’ becomes ‘and then I hear this knocking on my door/ Hear this knockin’ on my door.’ The repetition of ‘hear this knocking on my door’ reminds us of the first stanza of ‘The Raven,’ by Edgar Allan Poe:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
‘T’is some visitor’, I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door;
Only this and nothing more.’
(Poe, Poetry, Tales and Selected Essays, 81)

13Repetition of words or phrases, creating a trance-like atmosphere is inherent to Poe’s poetry, and is one of the most striking features of this song too. The line ‘and say, “oh my god here’s midnight!”’ is also reminiscent of Poe’s first line. Obvious references or possible allusions to famous poems are to be found in other of her songs. We can mention here the following lines from ‘Kimberley’, ‘So I ran through the fields as the bats with their baby vein faces/ Burst from the barn and flames in a violent violet sky,’ undoubtedly inspired by the famous lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: ‘And bats with baby faces in the violet light/ Whistled, and beat their wings’ (T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962, 67) Powerful repetition is dear to Smith as a principle of composition, and intertextuality plays a role in this process, adding repetition of external signifiers that can be recognized by listeners to internal repetition of signifiers actually present in her text.

14In ‘Gloria’, repetition, which is specific to the chorus in the original song, becomes, in Patti Smith’s version, a distinctive feature of the whole song and its personal signature. The repetitive process is extended to the rest of the song and is no longer limited to the chorus. The repetition of ‘here she comes,’ for instance, gives its structure to the following passage:

Here she comes
Walkin’ down the street
Here she comes
Comin’ through my door
Here she comes
Crawlin’ up my stair
Here she comes
Walkin’ through the hall
In a pretty red dress
And oh, she looks so good, oh, she looks so fine
And I got this crazy feeling that I’m gonna make her mine

15Near the end of the song, the repetitive process generated by the chorus spreads to the whole text and the first line of the song is itself repeated, bringing the song to a full circle before the final repetition of the spelling of the name that gave it its title:

I let my eyes rise to the big tower clock
And heard those bells chimin’ in my heart
Going ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong,
Ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong
Counting the time, then you came to my room
And you whispered to me and we took the big plunge
And oh you were so good, oh, you were so fine
And I gotta tell the world that I made her mine made her mine
Made her mine made her mine made her mine made her mine
G-L-O-R-I-A Gloria G-L-O-R-I-A Gloria G-L-O-R-I-A Gloria,
G-L-O-R-I-A Gloria
And the tower bells chime, ‘ding dong’ they chime
They’re singing, ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.’

16One feature Patti Smith retained from the original version of the song is the fact that the name ‘Gloria’ is voiced by the other members of the group, and not by the leading singer. The cry itself is only ‘announced’ by the leading voice, through the spelling, but it falls to the other members of the group to unleash the cry itself, as if the climax of the song was delayed by the main singer and eventually abandoned to other voices. By repeating one-syllable words to excess, Patti Smith reinforces the impression we get that the song is broken into a succession of beats, which is what happened in the original song through the spelling of the name ‘Gloria’ which sounded like a final countdown before the release—left to other voices—of the name itself. The sense of momentum is made more powerful in Patti Smith’s version of the song. By grafting the distant echoes from Van Morrison’s song onto her own narrative—oriented lyrics, and by enclosing those lyrics in one of her own poems, whose first line is repeated at the end of the song, she appropriates the song and distances herself from it at the same time. The turning of the poem ‘Oath’ into a frame has something to do with the transformation of the original lyrics. In Patti Smith’s song, the stress is put on action whereas the original song was focussing on the name ‘Gloria’ itself. The ‘action’ in question is an act of appropriation (‘made her mine’). One echo of the original song is meaningful in that respect, ‘I’m gonna shout it all night’ (‘her name’) becomes, ‘and I’m gonna tell the world that I made her mine made her mine’. The ‘message’ to be delivered is no longer the name itself, but the acknowledgement, by the subject, of his/her appropriation of the person supposedly bearing that name. In the poem ‘Oath,’ the speaker takes responsibility for his/her actions, and recognizes his/her own sins. In that respect, it sheds some light on the lyrics it announces:

Adam placed no hex on me
I embrace Eve
and take full responsibility
for every pocket I have picked
mean and slick
every Johnny Ace song
I’ve balled to
long before the church
made it neat and right
So Christ
I’m giving you the good-bye
Firing you tonight
I can make my own light shine
and darkness too is equally fine
you got strung up for my brother
but with me I draw the line
you died for somebody’s sins
but not mine

17In the spelling of the name (‘G-L-O-R-I-A’), the pronunciation of ‘I’ is much insisted upon. The sound is stretched and fragmented, which was already the case in the version of the song performed by Van Morrison’s band, Them. Such insistence is given full meaning in Smith’s version of the song. The repetition of the phoneme /aI/ goes along with the assertion of the self (‘I’) which develops throughout the song. Her cover of the song appears as an appropriation in both senses of the term. The singer takes possession of an existing song and suggests her own reading of the original text, turning it into the place where a subject is born and may assert itself as a subject of desire and action. The focus is no longer the eponymous ‘character,’ as in Van Morrison’s song, but the subject (‘I’) who takes possession of her. The focus has been displaced. The spelling of the name (‘G-L-O-R-I-A’) which is also the creation of a particular beat, gives birth to a personal voice. The finding of her own ‘beat’ and the experiencing of her own voice appear as interdependent processes. The assertion of one’s ‘beat’ had to be supported by the vocal testimony of its existence. This may explain why Patti Smith had to ‘refine’ the process of ‘writing lyrics’ through performance, why she had to discard poetry in favour of performance. More than a question of opportunities, the choice of song-writing and performance thus seems to have resulted from an artistic impulse which poetry alone could not satisfy. The creation of her own rhythm, the finding of her own beat, was inseparable from the act of voicing. She had to write with her voice, so to speak.

18Her very physical relation to words as she utters them and shouts them on stage appears to us as a possible displacement of her very sensual apprehension of writing itself. The importance attached to textures, materials, papers, writing tools and her fetishism of objects broadly speaking seem to have been displaced onto the stage, becoming the pleasure of performance itself, of cutting and spacing the text, of creating a rhythm which is always slightly different from one performance to the next.

19The pleasure of voicing poetry is palpable also in the readings of her poems she has given from a very early date, with the same unalterable exaltation and attraction to the materiality of words. We can trace here the influence of Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg, who gave numerous public readings of their works, following the inaugural 1955 ‘six Gallery Reading’ in San Francisco, during which Ginsberg read his poem ‘Howl’ for the first time.

20Saying that the question of the voice is central to the understanding of a singer’s career is tautological. Yet, in the case of Patti Smith, the importance and relevance of the voice was not obvious from the start, and appears as an object of personal discovery rather than as a natural gift she would always have been aware of. And this sounds almost paradoxical when we listen to that wild, at times whining voice, which is over-present, always in excess of itself, always overflowing its naturally tenuous nature, always working itself out.

21What is interesting in Patti Smith’s career is that different forms of art were considered at some point, and abandoned in turn. Again, this is not specific to Patti Smith. But the reading of Just Kids, focussing on both Smith’s and Mapplethorpe’s quests for their respective artistic selves invites us to reconsider the differences between artistic media and genres, and more specifically the relation or interconnection between poetry writing and song writing. We could argue that she had the possibility to voice her personal beat by simply reading her poetry, as she did during the St Mark’s Poetry Project in New York. But obviously, she could get no satisfaction from such a tuneless experience.

22Voicing and reading were not enough. The coexistence of speech and voice was not enough. To be fully, excessively itself, the voice needed to be fused with something which was not itself, to be subjected to a tune and accompanied by instruments.

23Only a fusion of that kind could give birth to the Smithian gush of words, overflowing its matrix in just the same way as the ‘rhythms’ she drew on her white pages tacked to the shabby walls of the Chelsea Hotel, ‘ran off the page [into the plaster]’. Many of her songs contain, or end with such uninterrupted, breathless flows of words. One can think of the end of ‘Easter’ (Smith), which sounds like a psalmodic reading of a long series of powerful signifiers, largely borrowed from the Christian symbolic:

I am the spring, the holy ground,
The endless seed of mystery,
The thorn, the veil, the face of grace,
The brazen image, the thief of sleep,
The ambassador of dreams, the prince of peace.
I am the sword, the wound, the stain.
Scorned transfigured child of Cain.
I rend, I end, I return.
Again I am the salt, the bitter laugh.
I am the gas in a womb of light, the evening star,
The ball of sight that leads that sheds the tears of Christ
Dying and drying as I rise tonight.

24‘Piss Factory’ (Smith), composed in 1974, is speech following more or less the rhythm created by a piano playing a jazzy tune, but the monologue itself and the melody seem to be disconnected. ‘Babelogue’ starts with a very rapid flow of words, a long monologue progressively growing into a song. Here, reading and performing poetry end in singing. The same phenomenon occurs with songs that first appear as readings of her poems, such as ‘Dylan’s Dog, ’ which we can find on the album called Paths That Cross (Smith), a collection of live performances and duets with Bob Dylan recorded during the ‘Paradise Lost Tour’ in December 1995. ‘Dog Dream’ (Smith, Early Works, 22–23) was a funny poem she wrote about Bob Dylan in the early 70s. When we listen to that piece featured on the album, we can feel the drive towards song. The vowels are stretched and slightly distorted, and the reading never really sounds like one, until, as expected, it actually becomes a song, meeting the path of a tune which had somehow been prepared from the very beginning of the performance.

25Patti Smith’s voice can be a source of discomfort for some listeners who find it excessive. It is always a surprise, in that respect, to hear her speaking voice, especially in the first interviews she gave when she was still in her twenties. It is very childish, tenuous, fragile, and singing as she does appears, from the outset, as a real challenge. She herself acknowledges the fact that she had no real voice. So why such a desire to shout so loudly when the vocal instrument she possessed was so shabby?

26When she tries to justify the choice of rock and roll over poetry, she invokes a need for ‘immediacy’: ‘I wanted to infuse the written word with the immediacy and frontal attack of rock and roll’ (Smith, Just Kids, 180). In this striking remark, the transformation of poetry into song appears as a mysterious alchemy that would do away with the division and separation inherent in writing. Yet such immediacy can only be illusory and this is suggested by her somehow contradictory statement, if immediacy is fused with something other than itself (‘the written word’) it cannot be called ‘immediacy’ anymore. Singing at the top of one’s voice is a desperate attempt at reinvesting language with an immediacy it has never possessed.

27Patti Smith’s hybrid artistic status may thus stem from her ambiguous relation to presence and immediacy. The voice, even if it can be seen as the manifestation of presence, is always voicing something. It can be heard by the audience and by the singer only thanks to that material it is voicing, and which is always writing. The voice keeps on chanting the loss of the presence it is supposed to manifest. Its song, because it is made of words, is always a dirge addressed to itself. However ‘real’ the voice may be, it is always sustained by a text which robs it of its own presence.

28The written lyrics are what remains of the loss of that unique, physical act that produced them. Yet something of that initial act of creation which has been lost is recovered, or at least summoned, in the physical act of singing. Even if something is always lost on the way, performance offers the possibility of repeating the ‘physical act of drawing words,’ the opportunity of an endless rewriting with one’s voice and one’s body. Performance is, for Patti Smith, a constant and necessary reassertion and redefinition of herself as a subject and as an artist. The dead letters, the lyrics, are constantly revived through physical re-enactment. The role of the body is central here. In that respect, Patti Smith’s impulse could be compared to what Jacques Derrida writes about Antonin Artaud in Writing and Difference:

The work, as excrement, supposes separation and is produced within separation. The work thus proceeds from the separation of the mind from a pure body. It belongs to the mind, and to relocate an unpolluted body is to reconstitute oneself as a body without a work.... My work, my trace, the excrement that robs me of my possessions after I have been stolen from my birth, must thus be rejected. But to reject it is not, here, to refuse it but to retain it. To keep myself, to keep my body and my speech, I must retain the work within me....
(Derrida, Writing and Difference, 229)

29What gives Patti Smith’s trajectory its coherence is not so much the passage from poetry writing to song writing, but rather the physical act entailed by writing itself, which is taken a step further (‘refined’) with singing and performing. During performance, the body is no longer a medium. It is not merely instrumental, but becomes the place where the work is preserved and delivered, ‘retained’ and offered at the same time. If, for Patti Smith, ‘drawing words’ is a physical act, there is, in such an act, an obvious dissociation between the creator and what is created. In the act of singing, something happens inside the body—the subject can feel the vibrations of his/her own vocal chords—and outside the body. Delivery and ‘auto-affection’ (Derrida, Voice and Phenomenon, 79) are simultaneous.

30The artist writing a text can see her own text as it is written, falling out of herself. When the artist reads her poem aloud, she can see the text in front of her eyes. It presents itself as an object and as an image, removed from the subject. When the artist is performing a song, the text as visible object disappears and the singer tries to retain his/her own work of art within his/her body, while offering it to the audience at the same time. The body is no longer drawing something which falls out of itself or reading from an external material. In performance, the body becomes inseparable from the work itself. Its instrumental function is displaced onto the musical instruments present on stage. The end of the ‘process’ she describes is not only performance, but ‘playing with a rock and roll band’. It is also the passage from a solitary activity (writing) to ‘collaboration’. Playing with a band may have enabled her to transfer the unsatisfactory instrumental role so far played by her body in the act of writing, onto the musical instruments, while she herself tried to retain the song, inscribing it inside and outside her own body. It seems she could only have become the singing, or writing body she is, thanks to those chance encounters with musicians who took on themselves the instrumental function her body had been reduced to so far. Crossing their paths enabled her to constantly relocate and dislocate her artistic self and her own body at the crossroads of inscription and delivery, auto-affection and affection, assertion of a subject and communication of an artistic emotion.