Among Friends: Engendering the Social Site of Poetry

Two | I Just Got Different Theories: Patti Smith and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church

t wo | daniel k ane I Just Got Different Theories Patti Smith and the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church from her time as a young performance poet in New York in the late 1960s to her current position as punk rock’s éminence grise, Patti Smith has foregrounded the image of the poet as privileged seer. Simultaneously , Smith’s emphatic rejection of stereotypically “feminine” personae in favor of an at-times masculine performative stance has placed her outside normative gender categories. I want to read Smith’s romantic impulses alongside her willingness to stir up gender trouble within the context of Smith’s activity in the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church, the preeminent public face of the Lower East Side poetry scene of the 1960s and 1970s in which second generation New York School poets (among them Anne Waldman, Lewis Warsh, Bernadette Mayer, Michael Brownstein, and Gerard Malanga) held sway. The Poetry Project, after all, is where Smith gave her first (and now practically mythological) poetry performance with Lenny Kaye on 10 February 1971, introduced by poet and Poetry Project Director Anne Waldman. And yet, as I will discuss shortly, the site for Smith’s coming out party—a site she has returned to repeatedly1 —was and is in many ways temperamentally opposed to the heroizing discourse Smith insisted on. Particularly given Just Kids, Smith’s recently published memoir looking back on her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, I want to look at how Smith’s friendships with and evocation of male artists played alongside her critique of the female. I believe there is a connection between Smith’s negotiation of male and female performative roles and her repeated insistence on the Poet as divinely inspired. It is that connection that I want to read together with what I call a poetics of sociability typical of the Poetry Project scene at the time. Ultimately, this essay will show how Smith’s gendered play 44 | daniel k ane between male and female, vatic authority and sociable lighthearted writing , proved crucial in informing her own brand of proto-punk rock. The Poetry Project was not just the place that Smith first made a public name for herself. It was a site where she negotiated friendship literally and metaphorically as a way to establish herself in New York’s downtown scene, from which she launched herself into the overground world of corporate record labels and rock ’n’ roll concert arenas. Smith’s negotiating friendship with Project-affiliated poets was equal parts targetbased ingratiation and strategic distantiation verging at times into overt disrespect. This distantiation, performed fairly consistently in interviews during the early 1970s and reinvoked (if in a much tempered version ) in Just Kids, successfully kept Smith from becoming fully absorbed into the Poetry Project scene. Why this “both/and” approach to becoming friends with Projectaffiliated poets? Friendship, as the editors of this collection rightly insist , can for women poets prove a site for “intersubjective becoming” that serves as a buffer against and wedge into masculinist avant-garde poetic communities (Among Friends, Introduction). Friendship can also be used in wholly opposite terms. Smith’s aching toward and achieving stardom was predicated partly on an invocation of the authority of poetry to further burnish her spectacular aura, an aura gained in part by being associated with the coolest downtown poets around. Intuiting the cultural capital to be gained from an alignment with avant-garde poetic communities fairly oozing with street cred, Smith engaged with the Poetry Project scene in part to wedge herself not into a localized, collaborative poetics community, but into the then hypermasculine world of rock ’n’ roll. Smith danced a complicated dance, simultaneously pantomiming and becoming that heroic, markedly male divinity whose authority she consistently celebrated both on and off the page prior to and during her big break out. Making a Mark at St. Mark’s Smith moved to New York City in the late 1960s not to be a musician but to be a poet. She soon began frequenting the vibrant literary scene based at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in New York’s East Village. Smith cultivated friendships with writers including Waldman I Just Got Different Theories | 45 (Director of the Poetry Project from 1966 to 1976), Brownstein, and Mayer, as well as Beat figures committed to the Project including Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Her 10 February 1971 reading found her sharing a bill at the Poetry Project with...