Free Patti Smith's Horses by Philip Shaw

music, Cavale intones at one point:
    People want a street angel. … Somebody to get off on when they can’t get off on themselves. I think that’s what Mick Jagger is trying to do … what Bob Dylan seemed to be for a while. A sort of god in our image, you know? … in the old days people had Jesus and those guys to embrace … they created a god with all their belief energies … and when they didn’t dig themselves, they could lose themselves in the Lord. But it’s too hard now. We’re earthy people, and the old saints just don’t make it, and God is just too far away. He don’t represent our pain no more. … Any great motherfucker rock and roll song can raise me higher than all of Revelations. We created rock and roll from our own image, it’s our child. … (Shepard, 1972)
    Smith’s intuitive grasp of rhythm is illustrated well here as the speech accelerates, building on the retarding effects of subclauses, linked by connectives (“Jesus
and
those guys …
and
when they didn’t dig themselves …
and
the old saints …
and
God”), only to halt, violently, in the aphoristic proclamation: “We created rock and roll from our own image, it’s our child. …” Resisting Cavale’s incantatory rhetoric, Slim refuses to accept his mantle, and accuses her of “twisting” and “tearing” him up. Stardom is tempting, to be sure, but it comes at the price of one’s humanity. Thus, when the rock ’n’ roll messiah is finally revealed, it is in a form that cannot be sustained, and the play closes with the image of the would-be savior placing a gun to his head. As Shepard would go on to write in his introduction to
Seven Plays
(1981): “to try to acttoo much, to wish to star, the culmination and hypertrophy of the common desire, is a ripeness for disaster.”
Seventh Heaven
    When
Cowboy Mouth
concluded, so too did the relationship with Shepard. Abandoned by the man she loved, Smith was once again entirely at a loss. But rather than withdraw into melancholy, she committed herself to the task of completing a volume of poetry. Some initial efforts, including “Autobiography,” appeared in the rock magazine
Creem
in September 1971, and three poems were included in Anne Waldman’s
Another World,
an anthology of works from the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. But it was in performance that Smith excelled, prompting enthusiastic receptions from audiences not only in New York but also, on one memorable occasion, in London (Bockris, 1998). With her innate grasp of rhythm, her unusual and arresting subject matter, and her streetwise persona, Smith made a lasting impression on audiences everywhere.
    The difference she brought to the poetry scene was her stress on the act of reading. Poems, she believed, were performative, their meaning realized in the interaction between audience and performer. But whether reading or writing, poetry was for Smith primarily a visceral experience, as she explained to an interviewer in 1972: “for me writing is a very physical process. I write with the same fervor Jackson Pollock used to paint.” Elsewhere, the link between writing and the body is elaborated further: “I learned this from Genet, who wrote in prison so he could turn himself on and masturbate—I’d sit at the typewriter and type until I felt sexy, then I’d go and masturbateto get high, and then I’d come back in that higher place and write some more” (Hiss and McClelland, 1976).
    A clue to Smith’s thinking at this time is given in her recollection of a 1972 performance by the Rolling Stones: “What was foremost was not the music but the naked performance. It was [Jagger’s] presence and his power to hold the audience in his palm. He could’ve spoken some of his best lyrics and had the audience just as magnetized. I saw the complete future of poetry” (Bockris, 1998). The stress on “performance” and “presence” is crucial here. It is as if Smith, in defiance of a hundred years of literary theorizing about