Burmese Days: Catch It. Draw It. Mark It Off, To Keep It Holy

by Holly Anderson

She borrows, buys, steals books: Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifixtion and the Tropics, Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book, Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa and Seven Gothic Tales. Lots of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Romantic girls all read the dark-haired suicides avidly but then she finds a book published by Gotham Book Mart in 1973. Titled Witt by a NYC poet named Patti Smith — this slim book is closer still: no pregnancy, no birthing blood, no nursing milk but plenty of semen spilled stars, spilled seeds, deep space and prayers set in taut language or musing, messy language. Soon after, the girl stumbles to Virginia Woolf and The Waves. The first chapter’s italicized prologue is read and reread in disbelief. She can’t move from the opening page and keep breathing. How can this fathomless way of seeing be laid so lightly on paper? And what about those 6 very young voices waking up (or is it 6 different strands of a single consciousness weaving itself back to whole as morning arrives?) Was this what a mind could be like, what it was capable of when it was all alone? Is this what got made from pared, plucked clean perception when the writing self stood apart and watched itself write? Fucking hell. Something is bound to happen. Right?

The needle drops on "Gloria." That small, emptied room piano figure starts up and then that halfspokenhalfsung voice comes in, keeps winding up ...thick heart of stone, my sins my own they belong to me... and a shuddering, shattering shift takes place in the little art guard before the band even finishes off the song. Fucking hell. It’s like Woolf’s Orlando is fronting a band from NYC and all 5 are so stringy fine, so androgynous that she wants them. All. Now. Third track in, "Birdland" with its blue fields and greased stars, little boy crying Daddy take me up, shouting I am helium raven this movie is mine scorched her burned her with its rightness. She plays this meticulously wrought hallucination over and over. A bolt of cognition falls fast and pierces core as Patti’s voice flies out of the shitty little speakers in the diamond-paned room. Witt had a shimmer but leaping up and dancing to the poet until sweat drizzles the old lady’s carpet is cathartic. She gets it. There is a thrumming, humming, loud clanging consciousness to delineate. To finger and fondle on the page. So go pull it out. Go let this divinely discursive soundtrack run off the reels if it wants to, needs to. She can chase it. Catch it. Draw it. Mark it off, to keep it holy.
Masked Holly
I was 20, ok? This record, Horses, was a seismotic holler and shout. An orbiting hailstorm in a 12x12-inch cardboard sleeve. This was definitely as transfiguring as the sacramental elements found deep down in sexing. Another discovery that had blown all circuitry and reconfigured all vision.

3 months later Patti Smith Group plays Horses live at the Guthrie Theater. Hands down, Patti is the girliest girl in the full house, skipping and twirling across the stage, both guileless and guided. But Patti must have the biggest dick, too, as she pumps and thrusts her boney pelvis, growling and spitting between verses. Playing guitar like she’s 14, alone in front of a fine crazed mirror. She’s sending smoke offerings up to heaven with her crow black voice. I dance myself into a trippy trance in the back of the theater and then run 2 miles home through drifts of star spit moon-spangled snow. Gut shot by her electrified enchantment and leaking a blind new ardor all over the fast asleep frozen neighborhood.

That was the awakening. Patti on stage, pulling out her own glistening guts. Singing the signs out loud, sending prayer flags via her voice, her guitar and clarinet. And Virginia on the page, speaking in tranced, perfectly nuanced passages after bending low to breathe the smoking laurel leaves in the oracular pans.

After that wherever the winds took me I had these ink-eyed guides; my 2 lodestars to navigate the bloodshot, broken bone oceans of an interior life made manifest in fits and starts as I shambled east hoping to become yet another New York City poet.

all lyrics quoted © Patti Smith
‘Mark it off, to keep it holy’ attributed to Ad Reinhardt, American abstract expressionist painter
Photo: Jonathan Kane
New Randy and elegant portrait photo: Bridget Barret, www.bridgetbarrett.com

Share