The writer Grace Paley once talked in an interview about the fact that many women missed the sense of boyhood when they were children, "the freedom and excitement of boyhood," and that girls would try "to invent some kind of risky, boyhood life for [their] girlhood -- which creates imagination, which means imagination."
Patti Smith -- poet and rock-and-roll star -- accepted her boyhood life right from the beginning. "Female, feel male," she wrote in her little book "Seventh Heaven." "Ever since I felt the need to choose / I'd choose male." And her concomitant childhood imagination was apparently both overstimulated and overstimulating. As her hyperkinetic Arista Records biography describes her: "It's nigh irrelevant knowing that this child visionary, Patti Smith, is by birth one of December's children -- Chicago, '46; that she grew up a gawky, shy, spaced-out schoolgirl, eldest of four, in South Jersey; . . . that she'd hallucinate kelly green tortoises which materialized out of viscous azure air and encounter extra-terrestrial wayfarers, so beset by hallucinations she'd blank out and lose all track of time. . ."
A kind of cross between Alice in Wonderland and Huck Finn -- a working-class kid who took off from the New Jersey backwater to become a poète maudit in New York City -- Patti Smith seems to have nurtured her contradictions not so much with "joy and terror" -- as Baudelaire said he nurtured his hysteria -- but with a tomboyish sense of comedy and curiosity. "When I was young," she told Dave Marsh in Rolling Stone, "what we read was the Bible and UFO magazines. Just like I say I'm equal parts of Balenciaga and Brando, well, my dad was equal parts God and Hagar the Spaceman in Mega City. My mother taught me fantasy; my mother's like a real hip Scheherazade. Between the two of 'em, I developed a sensibility."
Her sensibility is one that borrows and embraces Gnostic-tinged, heterodoxical ideas and feelings that have appeared in the cosmogony of William Blake, the ritualism and paranoia of Baudelaire, the illuminations of Rimbaud, the menacing sexual fantasies of Lautréamont, Bataille and Genet. And her esthetic program is one that owes an incalculable debt to Antonin Artaud, who, in the words of Roger Shattuck, "concocted a magic amalgam of theatrical style, occult and esoteric knowledge . . . antiliterary pronouncements, drug cultism and revolutionary rhetoric without politics."
Patti Smith has taken this magic amalgam and manifested it in what she calls "3 chord rock merged with the power of the word," claiming that rock-and-roll is "the highest and most universal form of expression since the lost tongue (time: pre-Babel)." Certainly, since the 1960's, rock-and-roll has been a perfect arena for sympathetic magic and convulsive theatrics, for ecstatic poetry and collective transcendence. As with Artaud, however, it is hard to separate Smith's poetry and recordings from her public persona, for she has been producing -- as Susan Sontag has said of Artaud -- not so much a literary and musical body of work as a "self." And it is a self that consciously draws on the mythological presence of rock stars such as Jim Morrison and Lou Reed (both of whom are also published poets), Mick Jagger, Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix.
As an intense, thin, almost etiolated figure -- performing on stage in black (pegged pants, ribbon satin tie, silk shirt) and white (cotton-T shirt, shoes) -- she imitates and mirrors the images of the androgynous male rock-and-roll hero, which allows her to avoid the stereotyped victim-or-vamp role-playing of most female performers. And by adopting a paradoxical theatrical stance -- one that confuses male and female roles and that combines the acoustic magic of Rimbaud and the Ronettes -- Patti Smith has been able to develop, explore and create a certain shamanistic presence that has eluded many aspiring rock-and-roll seers and heroes. In the words of critic Robert Christgau, she has become "the first credible rock shaman, the one intelligent hold-out/throwback in a music whose mystics all pretend to have IQs around 90."
And in the role of shaman she bridges this world, the underworld and the heavens, and brings back news from the shadows; she contacts ghosts, makes love with the dead and transforms herself into animals (a black-haired, blue-eyed skunk dog in one poem). As she said in an interview with Amy Gross in Mademoiselle: "I get into so many genders I couldn't even tell you. I've written from the mouth of a dog, a horse, dead people, anything. I don't limit myself. Some of the best sex I've ever had was with Rimbaud or Jimi Hendrix. I call them my brainiac-amours. Nothing sick about it, ya know. I get me a lot of good poetry out of it. Me and Rimbaud have made it a million times."