Patti Smith - Babel

I feel under Patti's spell once I first heard Horses and  bought everything the Patti Smith Group did in its first incarnation and saw them as often as I could. I truly enjoyed her merging poetic imagery with garage rock'n'roll and while I think that the poems may work better when put to music, her written words have always been pretty damn dynamic. I bought this when it first was released due to my fascination with her other work and still dig her fairly unique word play.

This book combines various imagery - Patti's own photos and artwork along with those of friends, peers and those she admired (Mapplethorpe is, of course, represented a few times, as are other friends) - with her poems, prose and wildly imaginative short stories. Babel is, as anyone slightly familiar with religion knows, the tower that men built to bring themselves closer to god who then, in his anger at their hubris, destroyed it and took away man's common language, causing chaos and confusion among men, which stopped them from working together. So, communication is one key theme in this book, loosely speaking, and free association and wordplay - "atrophy a/trophy" being an example - is a favorite tool, as well. 

It's kinda fun to guess who she is referring to in various writings - "neo boy" is Tom Verlaine, natch - and what parts ended up on her recordings - quite a number of bits'n'pieces here as this was written about the same time of the first few records - there's even some writings that became Blue Oyster Cult lyrics (she helped them a number of times). She is certainly a sexual being and writes of many fantasies with both men and women, among other fantastical tangents and her personal, nonlinear fairy tales.

Truthfully, there are times when her free association loses me, but the power of her words on paper is undeniable and always worth perusing. Fans should positively own this one.