“’When (s)he passed away I could not weep so I wrote’: Poetry of Mourning: Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Kaddish’ and Patti Smith’s The Coral Sea”
Résumé
When Fred Smith died, Ginsberg was there reminding his friend Patti she should overcome despair and live to honor those she had lost. The anecdote related by Dave Thompson in his Dancing Barefoot: The Patti Smith Story highlights not only Ginsberg and Smith tender friendship, but also how death and mourning has somehow imprinted their writing in a way that has often been considered anecdotal or a minor theme.
About two months or so ago, as I was listening to Patti Smith’s The Coral Sea record I couldn’t help hearing another text, another voice. And as Patti Smith’s voice proceeded in her “season in grief”, it was Ginsberg’s voice that slowly overlapped Patti’s, his urban recollection data of Naomi that confronted Passenger M’s journey to the Southern Cross. Through these two very different elegies it was a common voice I heard, a common impulse, a common message that prevailed.
This paper contextualizes Ginsberg and Smith’s friendship and collaborations, especially how Ginsberg’s legacy is still very much present in Smith’s present works. It focuses on how these two long poems ("Kaddish" and "The Coral Sea"), written respectively in the late 50s and late 80s, bear similarities and differences that help understand the poets’ grief and their attempt to reconstruct blissful union through the creative process. The oral poetry form of both long poems is conceived as a journey that both poet and subject embark on. Hence, the paper analyzes the language and style used to create a personal prayer for the leaving, a liberating poem and performance tackling the issue of how to deal with suffering. Therefore, the paper engages in a comparative study of both the poems (written form) and their performances (oral and music form).