A Language of Ciphers: On Patti Smith

I’ve spent a good part of my life loading and unloading U-Hauls stuffed with band equipment around the United States and overseas. The forty-five minutes of performing music each night was the bonus in between. I caught the music bug early: The Doors, Sabbath, Hendrix, Zeppelin, etc. Eventually that led to The Stooges, Betty Davis, Bad Brains, Gun Club, Mudhoney, Suzi Quatro, and more obscure music for the heads.

But my first exposure to Patti Smith wasn’t her music; it was her poetry. When I discovered she was co-lyricist for Blue Öyster Cult’s (all hail the umlaut!) “Career of Evil,” and was personally and artistically involved with Fred “Sonic” Smith of the MC5/Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, I became curious. Then I discovered she was a poet. This being pre-Internet times, I sprung into action, except, and importantly, instead of record bins, I went straight for the bookstore shelves.

I was as into poetry as I was into music, but I didn’t know where to go beyond my English textbooks. 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. And she could be so direct, owning her space and power like in these lines from her poem “jeanne d’arc,” “I want my cherry/squashed man/hammer amour,” or from “k.o.d.a.k,” “pleased to leave my monogram. close up shot/of my steady fist. I’m cool as menthol.” Smith was my gateway to contemporary poetry. She changed my life with her unabashed and lyrical honesty.

Smith has done it all—music, poetry, prose, visual art, black-leather lifestyle—on her terms. With every literary or rock and roll breakthrough she’s made, she’s won something for us. She brought us along with her. Her poem “A Pythagorean Traveler” from Auguries of Innocence: Poems (2005) holds the secret of the universe: “Beauty alone is not immortal/It is the response, a language of cyphers.”

This past fall, she read in my hometown. A friend attended with her mother. My friend told me—more like testified to me—how Smith had been a lifelong gateway between herself and her mother. How Smith’s words were part of them, and that they felt they were a part of her words. Her words had given their relationship shape and strength, and, as individuals, sanctuary and confidence against the world. Thank you, Patti Smith, for giving us so much beauty, and most of all, for giving us the cipher for all the things we have a hard time sharing with each other.