Daniel Kane Finds the Poetry in Patti Smith's Rock 'N' Roll

Hooray: An excerpt from Daniel Kane's Do You Have a Band?: Poetry and Punk Rock in New York City (Columbia University Press, 2017) is up at LitHub, bringing to our attention the hero-worship of one Patti Smith. “I’m not interested in meeting poets or a bunch of writers who I don’t think are bigger than life. I’m a hero worshipper," Kane quotes. "Smith’s candor here was refreshing. " More from "How Patti Smith Brought Rock 'N' Roll to New York Poetry":

[W]hat is revealing and useful in her account is how Smith marked the purported rebirth of muscular performance poetry. Ginsberg, perhaps the most recognizable American poet of the 1960s, was synthesized with Bob Dylan, the pop star most aligned, if problematically, to poetry. The two men had been friends for years, forming a kind of mutual-appreciation society that found Ginsberg handing the mantle of Beat spokesperson over to Dylan. Dylan, for example, famously featured Ginsberg in the opening credits to D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back (1967), which situated Ginsberg all the more firmly in the pop firmament. In 1975 Ginsberg took Dylan to Jack Kerouac’s grave in Lowell, Massachusetts, where the two men read from Kerouac’s 1959 poem Mexico City Blues and sang together, a scene that was included in Dylan’s film Renaldo and Clara (1978).

These kinds of exchanges blurred the lines between poet and pop star all the more, as each figure profited from the cultural and popular capital attendant to their increasingly fluid roles. Who was the pop star? Who was the poet? Could we—should we— even bother separating the two roles anymore? “I don’t want to get away from poetry,” Smith insisted to Lisa Robinson in early 1975, “but there’s no reason why the two have to be separated. I think I’ve proven it with what I do with ‘Land of a 1000 Dances’ . . . it’s totally impossible to distinguish what is poetry from the poetry in that and the rock and roll. They’re so integrated.”

Yes, you may find the piece entire at LitHub.