THE
CORAL SEA / WOOLGATHERING
PATTI SMITH
I always felt Patti Smith's great curse - the cross she's had to bear
- is in being born American. She was like a strange and exotic flower
growing in a cabbage patch. The cuckoo in the nest.
She grew up in New Jersey before moving to New York where she met
Robert Mappelthorpe, and it was her relationship with him that
crystallised her destiny to be what she's now become: a near-holy
person, as near to a saint that anyone can be in this day and age.
I'll admit it now - I've always been a bit of a fan of Patti Smith.
She was influenced by the best - the Stones, Dylan, Hendrix, The
Doors, etc - and she's never been shy of citing those influences but
it was Mappelthorpe who cemented her will to be an artist. He was her
friend, her mentor and her comrade-in-arms. Being American, however,
was like an obstacle to overcome because the themes she was always
aiming for were so un-American. She had so much more to prove and had
a much harder battle to show she was serious. America has Walt
Whitman but France has Baudellaire and Rimbaud, and England has
William Blake. Of the four, it would probably have been easier for
her to have Whitman as a spiritual guide but instead she chose the
European poets and in doing so aimed far beyond her own culture.
In Europe she's now recognised as an absolute artist but I suspect
that in America she's not viewed in quite the same way. What is it
they say? A prophet is never recognised in their own land?
What Patti has built up over the decades is a huge canon of work and
it's this that is going to be her legacy for humankind when she
passes. I remember her once saying that in the end, you won't be
remembered for your looks or for taking a lot of drugs; only the work
will remain - so make it good.
Patti has stayed faithful to this idea and when it comes to her
recorded output the only dud album she's ever made (in my opinion) is
Twelve, her covers album. I remember her also saying about when she
met William Burroughs when she was very young and him telling her to
build up her name by the merit of her deeds and her work. Again, this
is what she's stayed faithful to (which is why Twelve is a dud album
- the songs are all straight covers and there's nothing really of
herself put into them, so consequently they have little artistic
merit).
Her recorded output is, however, just one aspect of her work. There
is also her photography and her written work. Of her books, there's
one in particular with the title Complete that I can always go to if
ever I need inspiration as it contains both her lyrics and her
photographs. It never fails. And then there's her memoir, Just Kids,
of course. And then her lesser known books such as The Coral Sea and
Woolgathering.
The Coral Sea is basically an ode to Robert Mappelthorpe,
composed after his death in 1989. It's a deeply personal collection
of poems - a season in grief, Patti describes them as - telling the
story of a man on an ocean journey to see the constellation of the
Southern Cross. The man is called simply 'M' and he's fighting an
illness that's consuming him. Mappelthorpe, of course, died of AIDS.
"When he passed away I could not weep so I wrote,"
says Patti as an introduction, so as you might imagine it's not a
light or an easy read. An interesting thing is that Patti makes no
attempt to be communicative and instead it seems that the poems are
the point in themselves. She's not trying to talk to an audience, a
readership, or to anyone, really; and to understand The Coral Sea, it
helps if you can recognise this.
Some years later, Patti performed it live at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
in London accompanied by Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine on
guitar, later releasing it as a double CD. Like the book, it's not an
easy experience but it's brilliantly mesmerising in its intensity and
in many ways works far better than the printed version.
Woolgathering stems from 1992 and is another collection of
Patti's prose poems, this time being a meditation on her childhood.
Quite simply, it's accessible, it's beautiful and it's sublime. It's
a joy to read.
One of the pieces by the name of Nineteen Fifty-Seven concerns itself
with the year that Patti's younger sister, Kimberley, was born,
beginning with the subject of her neighbour - an elderly man who
would sit out in all weathers outside his house selling fish bait. As
a child, Patti believes there are people out in the field near her
home at night, working away at some strange task. She can see
movement in the grass and she can catch glimpses and hear the sound
of talking but can never fully see them. One day she asks her
neighbour who these people are and he replies "They be the
woolgatherers...", and from this Patti's imagination is
fired. She goes on to describe the death of her pet dog and the fire
that consumes a large black barn near to her home one night. She
stands watching the fire as she holds her baby sister in her arms,
knowing that the woolgatherers will protect the field from the fire
just as she was protecting her sister.
If you know Patti Smith then you'll know this is connecting to the
song Kimberley, from her Horses début album: "The wall is
high, the black barn, the babe in my arms in her swaddling clothes.
And I know soon that the sky will split, and the planets will shift.
Balls of jade will drop and existence will stop. Little sister, the
sky is falling, I don't mind, I don't mind. Little sister the fates
are calling on you... The palm trees fall into the sea, it doesn't
matter much to me, as long as you're safe, Kimberley. And I can gaze
deep, into you starry eyes, into your starry eyes."
There's a line in one of the poems, Barndance, that catches childhood
so well: "The child, mystified by the commonplace, moves
effortlessly into the strange," and when you juxtapose this
to, as an example, her indictment of George W Bush in the film Dream
Of Life then you can see the sheer breadth of her consciousness.
There it all is. A beautiful and clear insight into innocence and a
scathing, coruscating anger against the abuse of power.
I rest my case: Patti Smith is as near to a saint that anyone can be
in this day and age.
