1Patti Smith’s multiple identities as musician and actor, artist, author and poet, have fascinated fans and critics, fellow performers, and the broader world of the left-field avant-garde, in almost equal measure, since her artistic emergence at the beginning of the 1970s. Her ability to move through a range of creative practices and negotiate the evolving demands of her domestic life—marriage, motherhood and the loss of key significants—has seen her interweave her professional and personal résumés in a wide range of creative settings, candid, essentially autobiographical reflections presented in a number of fashions and formats over more than four decades—on record, in theatres, in interviews, on film and on the page.

2We should also reflect on the fact that maturing, the onset of age, less usually considered in the realm of male practitioners, has also been addressed and managed with remarkable and admirable aplomb. When I witnessed a live appearance on her UK tour of spring 2007 in Sheffield, England,2 I was struck by the extraordinarily youthful vivacity of the woman, impressed by the on-stage energy of a, by then, 60-year-old, one-time punk provocateur. It was hard not to believe I was witnessing a performance by a player at the height of her powers. She patently transcended any preconceptions that rock’n’roll was no place for a middle-aged singer-songwriter to roam.

3Perhaps Smith has pulled off the ultimate sleight of hand, the androgynous pose of her early career seems preserved in aspic. The unconventional, ambivalent appearance, frozen, for example, in photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1975 cover shot for her debut album Horses, has, we might argue, worn much better than the peroxided glamour of that other, and rather different, CBGBs goddess Deborah Harry. This is not to deride the attraction and appeal of the Blondie frontwoman, rather to argue that Smith’s original persona has provided a more serviceable vehicle for this veritable Patti Pan, there is no sense that Smith’s enduring kudos in the early twenty-first century is premised on nostalgia or revival, a rare feat of longevity in a musical terrain usually fixated on youth.

4Smith’s ideological position seems broadly wed to the bohemian impulse—that abiding spirit of subversive creativity that stretches from 1830s Paris to the Downtown traditions of New York City in the latter decades of the twentieth century and beyond. She cites guiding beacons as diverse as Arthur Rimbaud, Lotte Lenya and Jackson Pollock, reflecting this historical and geographical sweep. But her interest in the Beat Generation writers, the celebrated Greenwich Village bohemians of the 1940s and 1950s, is frequently evidenced.3 Their confessional mode shaped Smith’s poems and her lyrics to an extent that we might consider her an heir, in various ways, to Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. This chapter will explore Smith’s status as Beat or, indeed, post-Beat, an appellation her life and work has sometimes attracted. It will attempt to understand in what ways the term post-Beat has been applied and to what degree Smith can be identified as part of that later tradition or leaning. Further, it will reflect on the values and dangers of such association and absorb and test criticisms that such forms of appropriation lack substance and that name-dropping illustrious antecedents is a modus operandi that is not always positively acknowledged.

5This account will draw on two principal sources, the main biographical texts by Bockris and Johnstone, Shaw and Tarr, and a body of newly collected primary materials, for which the author has drawn on ethnographic techniques, approaching a number of informants with insight into Smith and, particularly, her overlap with Beat culture. The latter includes interviews with surviving Beats and post-Beats (writers Anne Waldman, Joyce Pinchbeck and Steven Taylor, among them) exchanges with biographers (Victor Bockris and Philip Shaw, for instance), journalists and cultural historians (Holly George-Warren, Harvey Kubernik and Bart Bull), academics (Sheila Whiteley and Lucy O’Brien), and poets (Jim Cohn and David Cope), which explore the notion of transgenerational influence and also attempt to locate Patti Smith within this fluid field of activity, this matrix of interpersonal connection. What the piece will not attempt, for reasons of space, is a close examination of Smith’s poetic and rock output in relation to Beat effect, this piece is about traces in her style and life and to what extent these traces are exaggerated or over-played, by her or by others.

6However, I would like to begin this enquiry with some recent comments that have fired a number of critical arrows at Patti Smith, questioning her motivations for pinning her colours, so often and so enthusiastically, to the ethos of the Beat community and its output. These remarks will be utilised as a starting point for contextualisation, a platform from which established commentators are later able to provide their own readings and insights into Smith’s status and behaviour, particularly in respect of the perceived homage that she has paid to this earlier gathering of writers.

7Three web reviewers, considering Curt Worden’s documentary One Fast Move or I’m Gone, Kerouac’s Big Sur, all felt uncharitably disposed to Patti Smith’s presence as an interview subject, a talking head, in this 2009 production, a feature which considered the circumstances surrounding Jack Kerouac’s 1960 stay at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Californian hillside cabin as he bid to escape his deepening alcoholism and, additionally, the novel called Big Sur that followed, a work which endeavoured to capture the asphyxiatingly depressing impact of the writer’s, ultimately fatal, addiction during this period.

8In Slant magazine, Joseph Jon Lanthier commented on the film-work:

. . . a sincere, dumbstruck passion for Kerouac’s rhythmic confessions pervades the majority of the interviews and, despite some spacey misinterpretations (who keeps inviting Patti Smith to these Beat docs?), the on-screen readers persuasively remind us of how the syntactical spell of Big Sur managed to hypnotize our impressionable, undergraduate selves in the first place (Lanthier).

9Lydia Kiesling, writing in The Millions about the same documentary, remarked, ‘Patti Smith, whom I suspect [was] brought in because [she is] perceived as having a never-ending fund of “cred”’ (Kiesling). Just over a year on, Bill Morris, also in The Millions, concurred with Kiesling about Smith’s appearance in the production, ‘That must be it’, he said, ‘It can’t possibly be that anyone still cares that she used to have a crush on William S. Burroughs’ (Morris).

10Why should three reviewers, two men and one woman, feel the need to be critical of the inclusion of Patti Smith in this film? Each had slightly different takes on the subject—Lanthier was rather dismissive of her reading of Kerouac’s words; Kiesling was somewhat dubious about her inclusion as an example of token credibility in the piece; while Morris insinuated that Smith’s addition to the cast was merely because she had expressed feelings of affection towards Burroughs. But their comments, in all cases, framed a somewhat jaundiced view of Smith’s presence in Beat scenarios. There was a real sense that these online writers felt uncomfortable with Smith’s involvement in a celluloid celebration that looked back on a key moment in Kerouac’s alcohol-soaked early 1960s, post-fame life through a documentary lens. I do not want to make direct comment on the trio’s positions, journalists, particularly critics, are driven by many motivations, professional and personal. These individuals may not be fans of Smith; they may have felt a vocational need to find fault with the artistic project and justify that reservation; they may have wished to make small waves in their circle or within their readership. But the gathering of these comments made me wonder further about the Smith-Beat nexus and contemplate more general ideas about artists constructing an aspect of their own cachet on the attainments of the past. Is name-checking mere tribute, the valid gesture of a new generation tipping its hat to an older milieu, or can it be cloying, even exploitative?

11So, firstly, what have biographers said about Patti Smith’s Beat Generation tastes and affiliations? Victor Bockris’ biography of Smith, which simply carries the artist’s name, appeared in 1998. It is interesting to note how Bockris’ account begins by stressing the presence and potency of poetry in Manhattan at the time that Smith was beginning to make a mark among New York City’s radical subterraneans at the very start of the 1970s:

In the early seventies in New York a poet was one of the coolest things you could be. You can’t imagine how many people who are successful people now started their lives as New York poets—something that is almost unimaginable today. In those days the St Mark’s Poetry Project was on a par with Warhol’s Factory, Mickey Ruskin’s Max’s Kansas City4 and the Gotham Book Mart as a bastion of the influential underground art movements that were the emotional engines of New York, just as the city was on the verge of becoming the cultural capital of the world. (Bockris, 348)

12So poetry, an obvious connection with many Beat writers (Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Amiri Baraka, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure and Kerouac, too, though one not generally made with Burroughs, interestingly),5 is at the core of Smith’s surge from her life as a novice, harlequin painter-actor-journalist at the end of the previous decade to an existence as a rising versifier and spoken word practitioner. Her celebrated debut at the St Mark’s venue, arranged by project director Anne Waldman on 10 February 1971, when she first read her poetry live as a support to Warhol scenester Gerard Malanga, remained an oft-cited event by those present for decades afterwards. But its nervy verve and spiky power, nonchalant confidence and irreverent humour, was finally confirmed for a general listenership when it was eventually released on CD in 2006 (Smith, February 10).

13Yet, in the midst of this ‘obvious connection’ with the Beat idiom, we should beware the dangers of building a seamless narrative history retrospectively, what we see, with the benefit of hindsight, is not always as continuous when we examine the contemporaneous details that are later shaped as a smooth, undisrupted stream of activity. Nonetheless, it appears that Smith had been impressed by an essay of the time by another poet Andrew Wylie,6 published in the Philadelphia magazine Telegrams. Explains Bockris:

. . . Wylie was direct and forceful in summing up where he stood on the poetry field. . . he could no longer relate to long works like Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ or Pound’s Cantos. Living, he felt, in an extremely violent, fragile time, he was drawn to short, almost amputated works. The essay went on to express an intellectual’s interpretations of the current vibrations he felt surrounded by, concluding that just to be alive in these times was an act of violence. The essay, which Patti received a copy of, most likely impressed her, as Wylie did, for its sense of urgency about making it now, about doing something now. (Bockris, 4–5)

14But if Wylie may have deterred Smith to an extent from looking back to, say, an epic and masterful work like ‘Howl,’ the tremors of which were still present on the US arts radar a decade and a half after its 1955 performed premiere, how can we identify ways in which the Beat legacy impacted on a newly recognised talent, the young woman who had made a mark at her St Mark’s reading?

15One of the more intriguing clues that appear not long after are ideas she expresses to Bockris in an exchange he describes as ‘her first in-depth interview’ (Bockris, 249) as she published her verse collection Seventh Heaven in 1972. She makes reference here to Ginsberg, Beat follower Bob Dylan and Beat associate Frank O’Hara, plain evidence that they were on her wavelength, affecting her thinking as an artist. She remarks:

I’m not a fame fucker, but I am a hero worshipper, I’ve been in love with heroes, that’s what seduced me into art. . . But poets have become simps. There’s this new thing, the poet is a simp, the sensitive young man always away in the attic, but it wasn’t always like that. It used to be that the poet was a performer and I think the energy of Frank O’Hara started to re-inspire that, I mean, in the sixties there was all that happening stuff. Then Frank O’Hara died and it sort of petered out and then Dylan and Allen Ginsberg re-vitalised it, but then it got all fucked up again because instead of people learning from Dylan and Allen Ginsberg and realising that a poet was a performer they thought a poet was a social protestor. So it got fucked up. I ain’t into social protesting. (Bockris, 249)

16Smith’s position here is expressed revealingly as she confesses a near-spiritual allegiance to certain figures of the past, but she is keen to deflect allegations that it is merely the cup of fame from which she drinks. Instead she appears to bow at the altar of some (she only hints at whom these may be)7 and certainly acknowledges that Ginsberg and Dylan, perhaps the two most powerful figures in the original Beat then less defined post-Beat moments, are names she reveres. It is notable that ‘social protestor’ is a tag she rejects, especially as Dylan wrestled with similar tweaks of conscience in the mid-1960s as he moved from youthful Civil Rights troubadour to world-weary rock’n’roller within months in 1965. Yet Ginsberg would surely have no problems with the epithet, he spent more than 40 years, to his death in 1997, on the political soapbox. Non-doctrinaire, perhaps anti-doctrinaire, the Beat guru fought issues with words—campaigns against the war, struggles against discrimination of all kinds—with a sustained vigour for most of his adult life.

17But how do the historians of her life and surveyors of her output connect Smith to the Beat œuvre? It does appear that Ginsberg and Burroughs are the principal members of this literary community to whom she turns for creative succour or artistic assurance.8 It is not insignificant, for instance, that Kerouac is not mentioned in either Bockris’ or Tarr’s account—the third corner of the most discussed triumvirate in the Beat canon is not present in these two overviews. We could speculate further on Kerouac’s absence, although it is worth remembering that the author of On the Road had entered a period of self-exile in the 1960s, occasionally reappearing to share Republican, anti-hippy and even anti-counter-culture views, before his lonely and addicted death in 1969.9 His star had sunk at the start of Smith’s rise to prominence while Ginsberg and Burroughs—who had each experienced quite different relationships with the post-Beat, anti-Vietnam, hippy decade—would each become objects of veneration to the emerging punk scene in New York City of which Smith was a germinal seed.

18To visit a number of biographies of Smith or written accounts of her recorded work, there is hardly a consistent thread or clear pattern: some make more of her Beat associations than others. Nick Johnstone’s 1997 volume, Patti Smith, A Biography, opens with the claim that his subject ‘has measured her own life against the lives of those who have influenced her’ (Johnstone, 1) and proceeds to demonstrate this trend with accounts of many examples of poets, artists and singers—from Arthur Rimbaud to Jean Genet and Jim Morrison—who have played muse to Smith’s output but the Beats themselves are less frequent, less defined visitors to the narrative he offers. He makes reference to Smith’s Chelsea Hotel period and introductions to Burroughs (Johnstone, 38). Later he discusses the influence of that author on the poem ‘carnival! carnival!’ which ‘projects violent often anonymous sexuality against a backdrop of phrases that recall William Burroughs’ (Johnstone, 120). Another important, if somewhat circumstantial, reflection on the Beat effect on Smith is also outlined when Johnstone points out that two of her greatest influences—Dylan and the Doors’ Jim Morrison—had explicitly referenced Beat writers as shaping their own art. Thus we might argue that Smith has, by reifying the two singers, also paid her own homage, if once removed, to Kerouac, Ginsberg and others. As Johnstone explains:

The rock’n’roll influence was inevitable and when Patti became a renowned rocker and poet, she was following in the footsteps of other musicians who had also been published or whose lyrics were considered to have merged poetry with rock’n’roll. Her primary rock influence was Bob Dylan, who has himself acknowledged Rimbaud as well as the Beat writers as influences. . . Secondary to his influence, but often more important, is the effect Jim Morrison had on Patti. Morrison was also a rabid Rimbaud fan and, like Dylan, name-checked the Beat writers. . . as influences. Patti’s visit to Morrison’s grave in 1972 was also the moment she claims to have committed her life to art.
(Johnstone, 123)

19Johnstone further draws attention to Smith’s involvement with a Kerouac benefit in the writer’s hometown of Lowell in 1995, when she was joined by regular guitar collaborator Lenny Kaye and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, and also a then forthcoming collection which would pay tribute to the Beat novelist, Kerouac: Kicks Joy Darkness (Various Artists), a spoken word venture incorporating rock contributions from Morphine, Lydia Lunch, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and others. Released in 1997, this homage recording featured Smith reading the Kerouac-based work, ‘The Last Hotel,’ when she was again joined by both Kaye and Moore.

20Bockris’ biography of Smith, which followed the year after Johnstone’s in 1998, emerges from a different place, a different position. While Johnstone is a British rock journalist and biographer, Bockris, although born in England,10 was, by the start of the 1970s, a writer and member of that very Manhattan scene from which Smith arose. He has been a friend of Andrew Wylie; he publishes some early Smith poems; and he is a noted documenter of the Downtown milieu through numerous histories. He therefore has the benefit of close proximity to the artist—an advantage in some ways, a disadvantage in others. This biographer may have the connections to the inner circle; he may also be too close to the flare of talent to be able to look beyond its hypnotic heat. That said, his volume sometimes, though not always, carries the franking ‘unauthorized’11 which at least moves it outside the sphere of simple hagiography: Smith has not had copy approval, so to speak, nor has she been a cooperative collaborator on the venture. Nonetheless his closeness to the epicentre, at crucial moments, must also allow him, we can perhaps presume, to build a convincing impression of the Smith persona. In that sense, his more conscious referencing of Burroughs and Ginsberg in his text may have a convincing ring, his role as an eye-witness may help to build a more plausible case for the reader as jury member. Bockris describes various connections between Smith and the two Beats—Ginsberg’s attendance at the St Mark’s debut, for example, shared book signings and live appearances, a two-way conversation with Burroughs for a magazine, not to mention the impact on Smith of the two writers’ deaths in the same year of 1997. But here, allow me to just home in on a few, more pertinent samples of evidence of Smith-Beat interaction.

21At the height of Smith’s engagement with the Chelsea Hotel crowd, from the end of 1969 and through 1970, she would encounter a visiting Burroughs and he plainly had an impact, artistically and sartorially, on the nascent star. Bockris reports Smith’s personal recollection of the celebrated author of such radical titles as Naked Lunch and Soft Machine.12 ‘Burroughs showed me a whole series of new tunnels to fall through. He was so neat. He would walk around in this big cashmere overcoat and this old hat. So of course Patti gets an old black hat and coat, and we would walk around the Chelsea looking like that. Of course he was never too crazy about women, but I guess he liked me cause I looked like a boy’ (Bockris, 50–51). Imitation, we can surely identify, as a form of flattery. Later Smith would attend, and contribute to, the Nova Convention (Bockris, 153), a 1978 conference in New York City which paid tribute to Burroughs, and, in 1990, Burroughs would return the compliment by praising Smith’s new collection The Coral Sea. ‘It rings the bell of pure poetry,’ the older man said of the younger writer’s verse (Burroughs quoted in Bockris, 72).

22What of Ginsberg’s presence in Bockris’ account? As early as 1971, her biographer reports, Ginsberg was telling a journalist that he recognised something both original and engaging about Smith:

What Patti Smith seems to be doing may be a composite—a hybrid—of the Russian style of Declaimed Poetry which is memorized, and the American development of Oral Poetry that was from coffee houses now raised to pop spotlight circumstances and so declaimed from memory again with all the art-form—or art-song—glamour. . . Then there’s an element that goes along with borrowing from the pop stars and spotlight too and that glitter. But it would be interesting if that did develop into a national style. If the national style could organically integrate that sort of arty personality—the arty Rimbaud—in its spotlight with make-up and T-shirt. (Bockris, 197)

23Almost a quarter of a century later, in 1995, Ginsberg was still showing his support for Smith the poet when he invited her to join a sold-out benefit for Tibetan Buddhists in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Recent losses in Smith’s life—her husband and brother—had left her bereft and Bockris believes that Ginsberg’s gesture to include her was a bid to coax her back from the edge of emotional devastation. He told the audience that the second half of the show would include ‘an important rock-and-roll poet who took poetry from the lofts, bookshops and gallery performances to the rock-n-roll world stage. We’re really pleased and happy that Patti Smith is able to join us’. He generously added, because the event had been sold-out in advance of Smith’s late involvement on the bill: ‘I see we have a full house, and I think that’s down to her charisma, glamour and genius’ (Bockris, 209). Prior to her reading, Smith had paid Ginsberg warm compliments, too, confirming the transgenerational bond: ‘Allen is such a good man,’ she remarked.

Look at what he did for the Beat movement. He made sure the work of Kerouac and Burroughs wasn’t lost in obscenity, or a heap of vomit. He’s so unjealous, he wanted all of them to do well. He doesn’t want to be a big kingpin writer. He just wants everyone who deserves to, to excel. He’s so generous. (Bockris, 209)

24Shaw’s later account of Smith, her life and art, is shorter but denser: a 2008 critical reading of the artist’s creative powers—contemplating both catalysts and outcomes—with Horses as its ultimate fulcrum. He is not slow to claim her attachments to Rimbaud as crucial. Among ‘several significant literary influences’ he feels the French Symbolist poet is most notable, his ‘provocative life, art and opinions provided a model of Smith’s self-fashioning’ (Shaw, 30). But the author also talks about his young subject as ‘a decadent beatnik type’ while in college and cites a 1975 Mademoiselle article in which Smith is rendered thus: ‘Black energy, black clothes. A skinny black jacket. A black shirt buttoned up to the neck. Black peg pants. Black hair, shaggy, coarse’ (Gross, 75), an archetypal Beat vision if there ever was one.

25As for Horses, the album itself, Shaw offers an insightful summary of the binary oppositions at play within the record, tensions that have powerful echoes of the terrains that Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac had boldly explored in an earlier period. The recording is ‘concerned with testing limits, the boundaries of the sacred and the profane; between male and female; queer and straight; the poetic and the demotic; self and other; the living and the dead’ (Shaw, 98). In works from ‘Howl’ to ‘Kaddish,’ Naked Lunch to Big Sur, to identify just a few obvious examples, the Beat writers, too, address these potent intersections of personal and psychological, sexual and spiritual paradox.

26Further, the actual form of Horses is linked by Shaw to the practices of a wave of pre-modern and modernist artists who adopted bricolage methods as mirrors of a fractured age. He comments:

In the literary sphere, Smith’s heroes, Rimbaud,13 Eliot14 and Burroughs, had each attempted to create multivocal, layered forms of expression. Via symbolism, collage and ‘cut-up,’ all three had sought to challenge the hegemony of conventional literary narratives, allowing for the eruption of unconscious connections, and for the creation of random, aleatory meanings. (Shaw, 130)

27He supports this analysis by quoting Tony Glover’s review of the album in Circus in 1976, in which the journalist suggests it could be considered ‘the aural equivalent of a William Burroughs book’ (Shaw, 130).

28Yet Shaw is wary of undermining Smith’s originality and talent by over-playing her sources, her guiding lights, whether Beat, rock’n’roll or otherwise. He comments: ‘But while Patti Smith’s fame can be traced to her strategic place in a chain of makers and shakers, her vision remains unique, a product not merely of her times, but of the shaping spirit of her imagination’ (Shaw, 25). And he adds: ‘For as much as Patti Smith is motivated by the spirits of Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, and Jim Morrison, her deepest love is reserved for the dead poets, the cracked actors, and the darkling chanteurs’ (Shaw, 25).

29Tarr, too, returns to the notion of antecedents in his comprehensive survey of Patti Smith’s recorded canon. He says that ‘even as a star, she has found herself engrossed by the work of others’ (Tarr, 3). Smith, in a 2007 interview, reveals: ‘I’ve always been an iconographer. . . I was always a big fan. . . By the time I was enjoying a certain amount of popularity I was 29 years old and so had already tasted what it meant to be a devoted fan, a documenter or reviewer of other people’s work.’15 Tarr comments on this idea:

Smith was never content to merely admire, however. Her obsessions with icons pushed her to become one herself. Although the imagining of fame has been played out countless times, it is mostly a fantasy of self-creation and identification. Rarely does the dreamer make it public through performance. It’s even rarer that the dreamer makes any music or art of any significance. In the twentieth century as music became the realm of professionals, most Americans settled for vicarious thrills with no risk involved. But although pop art is an extremely elite club, anybody can force their way through its doors, if they have enough verve, talent or chutzpah. (Tarr, 3–4)

30As for key Beat references, Tarr homes in on two important later details on the album Peace and Noise from 1997. Smith’s dedication of the album to the recently deceased Burroughs and her setting of Ginsberg’s ‘Footnote to Howl,’ itself a homage to the poet whose death had also been recorded a little earlier that year (Tarr, 84).

31So, a summary of some of the ways in which the Beat writers, and wider concepts of influence, have been addressed in biographically based works that attempt a consideration of Patti Smith as woman and artist. But what about more recent, more individual, reflections on the Smith-Beat confluence: its relevance and importance and the perceptions that might arise from that relationship. I contacted around 20 established figures who were linked in some fashion to this intersection of rock and literature, historically or critically—associates who knew or who had worked with Smith; academics and journalists interested in Smith as an artist and particularly as a female artist; and poets and novelists who had feet in either the original Beat camp or might be regarded as growing out of that earlier tradition. Most of those I approached were happy to comment on this link; in the end, more than half of my correspondents did share views.16 The questions I raised were these: Where do you feel Patti Smith’s art and life rest in relation to Beat culture? To what degree do you perceive Beat influence on Smith’s work? Might we justifiably call Smith a post-Beat? To what extent might commentators critical of later musicians/artists associating themselves with earlier writers/movements have a valid case? The next section of this essay gathers an edited collection of answers that were gleaned.

Q.1 Where do you feel Patti Smith’s art and life rest in relation to Beat culture?

32One respondent Victor Bockris, commenting some 13 years after issuing his life story of the singer, recalls a seminal moment when the connection to the Beats and the cultural power the movement still possessed was patently expressed. He remarks:

In 1974 from the stage of the St Mark’s Poetry Project at Second Avenue and 10th Street she asked the audience: ‘Do you know who just moved back to New York? William Burroughs just moved back to New York! Isn’t that great. . . fucking great!’ I remember thinking, ‘Thank God! This punk movement isn’t going to have to kill their fathers, they’re going to use them.’ And that was the beginning of the alliance between the Beats and Punks that put such firm ground under the movement. And turned it from a pretentious political movement to a movement based in tribal song.

33Philip Shaw, author of Horses, states: ‘Through Dylan in the 1960s she was drawn to Rimbaud. Burroughs et al., presented Smith with a contemporary American take on Rimbaud’s poetics: the ‘cut up,’ the interest in transgression, and the fascination with the outlaw figure can all be traced back to French avant-garde practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Therefore, in this sense, Smith owes a great deal to the Beats. The poetry collection called Kodak, for example, owes much to Burroughs’ ‘cut up’ technique and you can hear this as well in the multi-tracked vocals of ‘Land’ from Horses. But she also draws on other, non-Beat influences, rock’n’roll and Pop Art. As for her life, the cultivation of an unkempt, roguish look is very much in the Beat tradition.’

34Ginsberg guitarist for two decades, the New-York-based musician and writer Steven Taylor, has also shared stages with Smith and expresses this view:

She learned her trade and style from Rimbaud and Ginsberg and Corso and Dylan. She embraced that vagabond aesthetic, or outsider, marginal style, and the black–white crossover of the mid-twentieth century, a major cultural trend in which the Beats played a part.

35Taylor adds:

The whole poetry scene she emerged out of in the early 70s was heavily Beat influenced. Just the fact of getting up in a club and reading your poems to music is a Beat thing. She was in the same scene as Lou Reed, who had studied with Delmore Schwartz—a kindred spirit to the Beats, writing dark, post-Holocaust realist American fiction. And Richard Hell, who read Baudelaire and Rimbaud and the Surrealists. It was a whole complex of influences, a big atmosphere that was cooking downtown with connections back through the American moderns to the French avant-garde.

36But he makes this further point about straightforward interpersonal reasons for this apparent artistic alliance:

Also, it’s personal—you walk into a cafeteria and Ginsberg offers to buy you a sandwich because you look hungry and broke (Patti relates this in her book, Smith, 123). People often miss that personal connection. Ginsberg was in the neighbourhood, and he knew everyone, or talked to everyone, like a chatty old aunt. It wasn’t a grand academic tradition that you are supposed to get licensed into by some professor or critic. It was buying your groceries on First Avenue. As Allen would say, it was a matter of ‘gossip’ or ordinary personal connections.

37Sheila Whiteley, formerly Professor of Popular Music at the University of Salford, UK, and gender specialist, comments:

What I find interesting is that the Beats were men and she embraced a similar ‘on the road’ attitude in her bohemianism. It’s perhaps because she took on board the marginalised in society, the outsider, the misfit that aligns her with Beat culture. I think, too, that her androgynous body also challenged the sexual certainties of mainstream society, not least while with Mapplethorpe. Her move to New York in 1967 is obviously significant, in that its poetic communities were built around the existential values of Kerouac, Corso et al., not least in the blend of anarchy and individualism found in Warhol.

38Poet-songwriter Jim Cohn, part of the gathering of contemporary versifiers who are linked to Ginsberg’s Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and self-identify as ‘Postbeats’ says this:

Patti Smith had strong affinities with Allen Ginsberg. After the death of her husband, Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith, in 1994, her already established demotic and shamanic style took on a greater, generational significance, incorporating death, making death a meditation, bringing comfort to people, mainlining the essential energy of life. She was with Allen at the end of his life, with him when he died in 1997. Since then, she has performed with Philip Glass around the world, celebrating Allen’s life and spirit, and evolving a spontaneous trust in herself as a channel from the Spirit World. She has lived a bohemian life as avant-garde poet/songwriter/performer in the manner laid down by the Beats and, like many rock and rollers who came of age in the 60s, her art was deeply informed by the Beats.

39Rock journalist and biographer Lucy O’Brien has a particular interest in the place of women in popular music’s history. She reflects:

It is interesting that when she started out she presented herself as almost androgynous and asexual and most of her heroes (Camus, Dylan, Coltrane) were male. Probably a sensible move on a post-Beat scene that was still very male, viewing its women as muses or sex objects. Her feminism and sense of autonomy really stood out. She loved romantic poets like Rimbaud and William Blake, and took a Beat-inspired approach to her poetry—exuberant, spontaneous creativity with a cool swagger.

Q.2 To what degree do you perceive Beat influence on Smith’s work?

40Victor Bockris responds:

The point is that Patti Smith’s art and life relates to Beat culture in a friendly way. Her poetry is not Beat poetry. Her prose is not Beat prose, but when she sings, ‘the boy looked at Johnny,’ she’s channelling Burroughs. She’s also advertising Burroughs. We need a new way to talk about these relationships. They don’t fit into the academic form of artistic influence, it’s more Warholian culture communication of signs and signals.

41Noted rock’n’roll and spoken word historian Harvey Kubernik expresses this opinion:

I do think there is a link of the legacy of the Beat to Patti. Perhaps in terms of the printed page to the audio/recording world and then the subsequent stage performance of her material. The aspect of improv that informs her work and particularly her live repertoire. In 2011, I had a series of conversations with Dr James Cushing, a Professor of English and Literature at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and a long-time DJ on radio station KCPR-FM. All through the late 1970s and well into the 1980s we attended several Los Angeles and Hollywood Patti Smith recitals and heard her early Arista record offerings.

42He adds:

Cushing told me in 2011 that Just Kids is authentic belated Beat literature in the same sense as Dylan’s Chronicles or Ginsberg’s Death and Fame. Belated in the sense that these books do not document the beginning of a sensibility as On the Road or ‘Howl’ did, but authentic in the sense that the values these later works assume are Beat values, articulated in ways most associated with Beats, resistance to middle-class conformity, trust of the spontaneous, pursuit of altered states of consciousness, preference for termite-art over elephant-art, and above all the spirit of Whitman and his urban embodiment of Transcendentalism.

43Cohn remarks:

Her poetry incorporates elements of Surrealism, free association, surprising juxtapositions, political consciousness and heartfelt emotion— going back to Ezra Pound’s notion that ‘only emotion endures’. She was part of the great ’60s wave where rock and roll was seen, mostly as a result of Allen Ginsberg’s advocacy, as ‘high art’. One of Ginsberg’s sense of Beat ‘effects’ was this very fact—that Beat language arts and cultural life affected the lyric quality, the openness, critical social eye, visionary epiphany, that became the content of works of popular art that have transcended the immediate period of their creation.

44David Cope, another ‘Postbeat’ poet, says this:

she is, as a true artist, fiercely original while maintaining those connections to the lineages of which her work is a part—and the Beats are among those lineages, along with Rimbaud, Whitman, Dickinson and others. Her work has its own savage experimental quality that breaks bounds as the Beat writings did in the ’50s, but she is also part of a later generation that defined itself in terms of its own experiences, and, as a rocker, she has more in common with Bob Dylan, the MC5, Lou Reed or the Clash than with poet predecessors who dabbled in music rather than using it as the primary vehicle for the words.

45Beat commentator Holly George-Warren sees the influence ‘particularly on Horses and Radio Ethiopia’. She explains,

Burroughs’ cut-up technique can be seen in Smith’s lyrics; some of the homoeroticism of Ginsberg’s work is also reflected here. In her artwork, you can find hints of Brion Gysin and another Beat influence, Jean Cocteau. Her live performances have always included spoken word/poetry—hearkening back to Ginsberg’s reading of ‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery.

46O’Brien states:

It’s very much there in her early work, particularly the album Horses, which combines jazz, rock and spoken word poetry. I interviewed her once about this, and she said that for the album she worked with a range of her poems, experimenting with words—‘I was creating a sort of William Burroughs cut-up. . .’ Smith described working with producer John Cale as like ‘having two crazy poets dealing with a shower of words’.

47Taylor comments:

Broadly, the idea that you can get up and read your poems in public, and with music, affiliates her with the oral poetry renaissance of the ’50s. She’s in the lineage of that, from Langston Hughes reading to jazz in the ’20s, on down through Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, di Prima, Baraka. It’s a broad scene, I’m sure you could see connections by looking at her choice of words, her themes, her verse forms.

Q.3 Might we justifiably call Smith a post-Beat?

48Cohn says:

I do. Although key poets such as Anne Waldman as well as musicians like Dylan and Smith are often identified by their relation to the Beats, if one considers the mid-’50s as the apex of the Beat period, with 1956 as the defining moment—I’m speaking of the Six Gallery or Six Angels reading where Allen debuted ‘Howl’—Patti Smith was ten, Anne Waldman 11 and Dylan an elder at 15 years old.17 Clearly, they, like many younger people, were influenced. If one accepts the notion that these three artists were part of something generational, some kind of movement, it was something that would be more accurately described as after the Beats, based upon Beat influence, but ultimately, what I have argued is Postbeat.

49Cope remarks:

All the outrider poets who came after the Beats were influenced by them, but the differences are just as significant. We ‘make it new,’ in Pound’s words, but any poet worth his or her words knows that one builds a foundation out of the work of those who came before, as well as from the historical particulars and cultural influences from one’s own time. Patti and other ‘post-beats’ are children of the atomic age cold war, of King and Kennedy, of television, the Beatles and the Stones, and all the horrors of Vietnam; the Beats, by contrast, came out of the Great Depression, the Second World War, radio, jazz and the McCarthy era. We may share common concerns as writers and thinkers, but there are also very different historical or cultural influences at work in each generation and, notably, in each individual artist. Thus, if one needs such labels, she would certainly be a ‘post-beat’ poet.

50Kubernik reflects:

she might be viewed as a current Beat because she still puts words and her voice with a musical instrument like a drum that beats to propel her long, hand-written lyrics and poems. Post-Beat? I like belated better than post. The Beat movement/moment is historical, approximately 1948–1961 (when did Maynard G. Krebs start up?), but these values go from Blake into the cyberfuture.

51Taylor comments:

Not if that means turning against or in opposition to Beat. I saw her read a month ago. It could have been 1955. I think of the Beats as the last Romantics. She’s right there. ‘Post’ can get you into trouble, academic squabbles. Even the designation ‘Beat’ is a problem. Who’s in? Who’s out? It’s more fluid than that. These terms of convenience can get awfully stiff and fixed over time.

Q.4 To what extent might commentators critical of later musicians/artists associating themselves with earlier writers/movements have a valid case?

52Victor Bockris comments:

I think it’s great if musicians want to associate themselves with the Beats or other writers or movements. It’s natural, it’s recognition. Art is not pretentious; politics is, academia is, trying to be what is not. The greatest thing we had in 1977–82 in New York was cross-referencing between fields and generations. There was a wonderful openness and sharing. Today everybody is so scared they all stay in their own foxholes trying to not to be killed. No growth that way. I think Patti’s vital contribution to the global culture was that she travelled around lighting a fire of inspiration and wide open celebration of the key artistic spirits, the Beats, the British Invasion, Warhol, the Counterculture.

53Magazine journalist and rock critic Bart Bull remarks:

Patti Smith is the single biggest name-dropper in the history of rock’n’roll. Bar none. But because the names she tended to drop early on were Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Blake, Bowles, Gysin, Godard, Bresson. . . well, most of those she was talking to (or at, actually) didn’t have a clue, other than the weightiness of name-drop’s avoirdupois. You’d have to use a scale and a yardstick and a snow-shovel to see whether or not she was the single biggest name-dropper in the history of poetry, or whether that would be Allen Ginsberg.

54He continues:

But you’d definitely want to factor in Anne Waldman, who functioned as the Don-Doyenne of the St Mark’s Poetry Project and then of the Naropa Institute. These three all understood the accruable power that could come from fingering the rosary beads as loud as possible, that to publicly recite repeated litanies of the saints would serve to get you canonised yourself.

55Cohn says:

Commentators can claim anything, but they would be hard pressed to explain Patti Smith’s emergence as a significant Beat artist in her own right. As is well known, the women poets of the Beat Generation did not break out as did their male counterparts. Only Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger and Janine Pommy Vega made it in the white male poetry world. The Beat women were perhaps the last generation of women having to face a male world of patriarchal convention without comprehensive feminist theory, which did not really hit the mainstream until 1963 when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Poets like Anne Waldman and Patti Smith were benefactors as much as agents of conventional change, implementers of feminist poetries, feministos. Their achievement really is at the heart of the realisation that times had changed and with them, new forces, forces of the Postbeat period, were at work.

56Cope states:

I think those who try to cut themselves off from their predecessors in the name of some ephemeral ‘originality’ are losing out on all those connections with elder brothers and sisters who came before. Allen’s work, for example, is loaded with references to earlier writers and movements, and even the wildly original Whitman occasionally sounded his ‘barbaric yawp’ with a nod to those who preceded him. Barring works that are mere slavish imitations of an earlier style, commentators who find fault with a poet acknowledging or associating with her/his elders really don’t understand the nature of the art.

57He adds:

Whitman and Dickinson can still speak to us as friends who bore their own struggles into words; all we have to do is read them aloud together, and they can instruct us as to how they made it through even as we learn to sing their songs. There’s also the fact that already-established poets have always helped younger geniuses find their way: Pound helped Eliot and the Objectivists Reznikoff, Rakosi and Oppen, just as Allen ‘distributed monies to poor poets & nourished imaginative genius of the land,’ helping countless younger writers into print or with a helpful word that could sustain them as they grew. Thus, you could not have a Patti Smith without an Arthur Rimbaud or an Allen Ginsberg or a Bob Dylan to open the doors that made it possible for her to enter the next room and make it her own.

58George-Warren comments:

Yes, Patti Smith lived the life of a Beat as a young artist, but has also retained her allegiance to the Beats and their heroes; her close relationships with Burroughs, Ginsberg (she was at his deathbed), and Gregory Corso reflect this. There’s a great portrait of Patti (wearing what looks like a black leotard) reclining and reading The Soft Machine, with a pair of shades next to her, that says it all. I think that artists who wear their influences on their sleeves—and while doing so, bring the work of their own influences to a new generation/ audience—serve an important role. Obviously, those artists who use earlier writers’ work as a jumping-off point, to create new work with a new vision/style/voice, can create their own legacy, which can become just as important as those who came before them. Patti Smith has done this.

59Novelist Joyce Pinchbeck (née Glassman, then Johnson) is the author of Minor Characters, a Beat memoir detailing a romance with Jack Kerouac, and the author of a forthcoming Kerouac biography.18 She says:

I admire her as a performer, of course, and I hear that she has written a fine memoir, which I intend to read. I have to say that I do have some uncomfortable feelings about her portrayal of herself as someone who has taken on the mantle of Ginsberg, and I have it on good authority that she did not really have as close a relationship with Allen as she suggests. Frankly, I wish she would stop publicly weeping at the graves of departed male poets.
She also of course keeps invoking Kerouac with whom she had no relationship at all. In the liner notes that accompany the DVD of the documentary Big Sur, in which she appears, she expresses her admiration for Jack as a writer who ‘simply spewed his words on paper’. I can assure you that he did not spew, and that if he had, we would not be reading his works today. This is the kind of wrongheaded opinion that obscures Kerouac’s artistic achievement. She also indicated that she herself has not read Kerouac, and that the reactions of her male friends were enough for her to go by. Really!! I throw up my hands! Such careless statements would have horrified Allen. But of course identifying with the Beats has been an excellent career move for Patti Smith. I am also troubled by the fact that Smith shows no interest in female artists, apart from herself. Apart from all these objections, she’s obviously a very gifted woman.

60Taylor adds:

To say that any artist doesn’t have a right to draw upon or declare an ancestry is pure dummheit. That’s how art happens. Artistic lineages don’t come with a state-issued (or academic/critic sanctioned) licence. They’re organic. It’s a matter of personal commitments, influences, and who’s around the neighbourhood. I mean, if Charlie Watts thinks he’s channelling Gene Krupa, you going to tell him he’s wrong?

Some Conclusions

61I have attempted to contextualise Patti Smith’s relationship with the Beat Generation writers and their cultural legacy by various means, reporting some recent critical commentary which has appeared on online culture magazines; through a survey of a number of key biographical accounts; and via some newly generated interviews, primary materials in which contemporary opinion on the artist’s status and stature has been invited. This provides us with both historical and current reflections on the links that join Smith and her Beat antecedents. There may, of course, be other ways in such a piece of analysis could be conducted—for example, close textual reading and interpretation of her poetic, musical and lyrical output. We would certainly find themes of the autobiographical and the confessional, work of candour, the search for spiritual and sexual truths, and a tendency to reference influential names, strains recognisable in the Beat ethos. But this particular exercise has been beyond the scope of a chapter of this length.

62In terms of the conclusions we might draw from the information that has been presented, there seems little doubt that the Beats have had a bearing on Smith as a poet and rock musician, yet it is also important to stress that there are individuals—from the worlds of literature, art and music—who may be regarded as more significant still in shaping Smith’s artistic vision, from Rimbaud to Dylan, Brian Jones to Jim Morrison, for example. If some recent web voices have been suspicious of Smith’s willingness to attach her own creativity to the Beats and perhaps other writers, musicians and singers of the past, the voices of authority—from academics to journalists to other poets—seem to feel, in general terms, that there is little surprising, or dubious, about this artist’s desire to see herself as part of a continuum, a carrier of a flame, a latterday vessel who may frequently cite her muses but one also capable of shaping fresh visions from that amalgam of influences. Whether Smith might be regarded as a Beat, a belated Beat, a current Beat or a post-Beat—all terms connected to her at points in this account—is a potential topic for a longer, more detailed work of lexicographical archaeology.

63One thing we can perhaps say is that if Smith has shown, at times, a desire to link herself to that earlier era, a previous literary movement, it is surely not merely premised on efforts to attain fame by association. If we go back to her earliest steps—hesitant, uncertain, unfocused, if we can take her Just Kids recollections at face value—at the end of the 1960s, we can hardly identify an artist with a cynical or manipulative vision or strategy, a player with a clear career plan, determinedly scrambling up the ladder to recognition and success. Her progress as an actor or poet, as the 1970s commenced, seems to have been shaped, to a significant extent, by a series of accidents, perhaps most notably the connections she achieved in the Chelsea Hotel which allowed to her to interact with a network of emerging—and existing—underground talents. Chelsea residents with established reputations from Dylan associate Bobby Neuwirth to musicologist Harry Smith, poet Gregory Corso to Burroughs himself, found her engaging and encouraged her at a time when her intentions were still evolving. Her interest in art and writing was evident but the idea that she might sing, or use rock music as a vehicle, had barely germinated at this stage.

64Further, we should stress the volume of work that Smith has achieved in her own right in the subsequent decades—on record, in book form, on tour and on film. There might be a counter-argument, based on that imposing creative résumé, that the Beats, since Smith’s mid-1970s rise to critical and international acclaim, eventually had more to gain by their associating with her than vice versa.

65We might well propose that by the 1990s, as Ginsberg and Burroughs entered their final years and Smith re-appeared in New York after her home-centred and reclusive 1980s in Detroit, the younger artist’s reputation as multi-faceted writer-performer was now one that the older novelist and poets coveted, to some extent, and it was she who would add to their credibility quotient. Smith’s appearance in the Kerouac Big Sur documentary which raised, as we have seen, a certain disquiet among web critics came, of course, long after the deaths of those two key Beats, so her contributions could hardly be seen as a concerted bid to curry favour with a literary grouping long shorn of most of its key participants (although Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure did also make an appearance in the film in question).

66Perhaps we could best complete this consideration by citing the thoughts of a woman and a poet who is often seen as a vital bridge between the original Beat caucus and the artistic spirit that has followed and survived in its wake. Anne Waldman, of a younger generation to Ginsberg, Burroughs and co., was nonetheless a close associate of the principal Beats, director of the St Mark’s Poetry Project from 1968–78 and therefore a crucial conduit between old and new, a sponsor of young New York voices like Smith and Jim Carroll, and a founding figure in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, that saw Ginsberg bring his literary ideas and spiritual energy to an educational venture with deep Buddhist roots, from 1974.

67What does Waldman make of these debates? How does she see Patti Smith against the backdrop of the Beat community? She comments:

Patti came up through a different trajectory, adjacent to these worlds and dropping in and out of them—her own amalgam of romanticism, Rimbaud (where every poet starts) and Blake—heroes of us all—siphoned thru Allen (later), and her increasing public stature which allowed her to recalibrate and invent herself in relation to various cultural icons and literary movements. She was not inside the Beat literary movement or culture in the early days, except thru encounters at the Chelsea much later that were not particularly literary. But yes, she’s in the post-Beat pantheon. She takes what she can use (like Dylan too). Like all of us poets she’s a magpie scholar.