The singer, songwriter, poet, author, and musician Patti Smith was in residence at Penn’s Kelly Writers House for two days, telling stories about the people in her life throughout the decades, reading passages from her books, and performing her songs.
Smith, who rose to fame in the 1970s through the New York City punk rock movement, gave two public appearances to capacity audiences but most important was meeting with the 22 undergraduate students in the unique Kelly Writers House Fellows course, now in its 27th year and taught by Al Filreis, Writers House faculty director.
“Joy. Joy, and the future,” Smith said about her Writers House experience, noting the “sense of curiosity and community. We’re all different ages sitting here, but I got to talk to young students. Everyone that was here was either thinking, working, writing, and then, of course, making food. All the things that people were doing here, every moment has been great.”
Fellows program
Funded by an endowment from an anonymous donor, the Fellows course makes it possible for Penn students “to have sustained contact with authors of great accomplishment in an informal atmosphere.” Three Fellows are invited each spring semester. Following Smith’s visit on Feb. 24 and 25 will be author Carmen Maria Machado March 31-April 1 and poet Alice Notley April 28-29.
Fellows spend Monday afternoon in class with the students and hold a public reading in the evening followed by a private dinner; Tuesday features a one-hour public conversation with Filreis, along with brunch, all at the Writers House.
The program with three guests started in 2000; the first Fellow, in 1999, was journalist Gay Talese. The roster of 70-plus Fellows is a who’s who of authors, poets, journalists, writers, and musicians, including June Jordan, Tony Kushner, Edward Albee, Susan Sontag, E.L. Doctorow, Joan Didion, John McPhee, Joyce Carol Oates, Ian Frazier, Grace Paley, John Edgar Wideman, Rosanne Cash, and Charles Blow.
“The Writers House has always been known as a place for new, emergent, and even unknown writers,” said Filreis, the Kelly Family Professor of English in the School of Arts & Sciences. “But our visiting Fellows each year remind us that super-eminent writers are excellent guides and advisors and, even as famous as they are, they all fall into the scene and become teachers and mentors.”
“The Fellows seminar is my favorite teaching experience. We are reading the work of living artists. We are not there to tell the literature what it means. We are there to prepare to meet the person who made it. As a matter of learning, it’s a hugely important distinction.”
In preparation, the class reads and discusses the Fellows’ work, writing reflections each week. In the case of Smith, the more than 1,000 pages they read included her nonfiction book “Just Kids,” which won the National Book Award in 2010, about her relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. They also read her “Woolgathering” (1992), “M Train” (2015), and “Year of the Monkey” (2019) and “listened closely to, sang with, and in one case danced with” her albums “Horses” and “Easter,” and watched videos of performances, Filreis said. This semester’s teaching assistants are Penn alum Sophia DuRose and poet Laynie Browne.
Students spent three hours in class with Smith, along with her longtime collaborator guitarist Lenny Kaye. “It was like a dream,” Filreis said. “We talked with her about absolutely everything we read, heard, and felt in her books and songs. We spent a good deal of time reading her gorgeous, meandering, evocative sentences aloud to each other.”
Meaningful food and conversation
Students described Smith as “humble,” “down-to-earth,” “personal,” “wise,” “genuine,” “effortlessly funny,” and “like a normal person despite being so famous and an iconic superstar”
Students Kyle Grgecic and Natalia Castillo were seated next to Smith at Monday night’s event, which featured an 11-course dinner, prepared and served by Writers House students and staff.
From Carmel, New York, Grgecic is a second-year majoring in English and communications with a minor in data science and analytics. Smith’s 1975 song “Gloria” popped into his music streaming a few years ago, and he was hooked. “She’s one of my favorite musical artists. Her debut album, ‘Horses,’ is probably my favorite album,” Grgecic said. So, he made sure he signed up for Fellows: he hadn’t previously read her books, and now the memoir “M Train” is his favorite.
Grgecic said he talked with Smith about his love of writing comedy sketches with the Mask and Wig Club. “She was very affirming of that and was talking about how important it was to write comedy. It was surreal,” he said. “She really listened to everything that we asked and everything we had to say and took the time to really address what we did.”
Castillo is a fourth-year from Corte Madera, California, majoring in philosophy, politics, and economics with a minor in English. She had read two of Smith’s books before coming to Penn: “Just Kids” in high school and “Year of the Monkey” during a gap year.
“Every time that I am kind of going through something in life, I am always returning to Patti’s work,” Castillo said. “It’s just been an unreal experience the last month of going through her work and knowing that we were getting the opportunity to interact with her.”
Students asked Smith questions about specific passages in her books and music and about her experiences writing in cafes while living in the Chelsea Hotel in New York in the late 1960s. The conversation became more personal as the session went along, the students said. They took copious handwritten notes, pages and pages.
“I remember exactly how that moment felt when she was giving us advice. My hand hurt from writing down all of what she was saying in my notebook,” said Erin Jeon, a second-year from Queens, New York, who is majoring in English and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies.
“At the end, we all really opened up to her and shared how her work has impacted us and moved us and why she just meant so much to us and how this past month and a half was just so moving,” Jeon said. “She was giving us such great advice and approaches to life.”
Reading from his notebook, Grgecic said, “I really loved the quote, ‘Crying is good, and so is laughing. I recommend both.’ And, ‘If you’re bad, get good.’ She’s one of those people who can take something so simple and turn it into something so profound.”
Abdullah Alfaresi, a fourth-year from Kuwait majoring in political science and Middle Eastern studies, had written down her quote, “It’s hard not to mourn when losing something, but don’t because more will come,” adding, “I think I’m definitely going to take that with me.”
Smith’s description of how her writing evolved and the discipline in her practice impressed fourth-year Lila Shermeta, an art history major and creative writing minor from Philadelphia who has always wanted to be a writer.
“Being able to bring the topics that we talked about with her, such as dreams, loss, mourning, art, what it means to be an artist and a writer, especially when you’re younger, all of that, being able to actually discuss it with her was incredible for me,” Shermeta said.
Echoing other students, Shermeta said she has learned from her classmates through close-reading of text and close-listening to each other, becoming close friends. “You gain so much more from a work of literature when you talk about it collaboratively than if you just read it by yourself,” she said.
The students collaborated to make and bring in dishes that Smith referenced in her books, like apple pie, cinnamon buns, chicken pot pie, green tea noodles. During a snack break, they asked Smith to guess the reference in her books for each. “It was so fun. She got a lot of them right,” Jeon said.
Personal stories and performances
Castillo introduced Smith Monday evening before a packed-in crowd. “We have experienced Patti’s art intimately by exploring themes of memory, the sublime grief and loss, and of course, dreams,” she said. “In this collaborative process, Patti’s brilliant light is refracted each class discussion, forming a mosaic of our lived experiences.”
Afterwards, Castillo said that “getting to listen to her sing and share some of her work and read the words out loud that we had been reading for the past month was just the ultimate experience.”
Smith told stories about people she has met and worked with throughout her life: about first seeing Bob Dylan sing with Joan Baez; about hearing Kris Kristofferson sing “Me and Bobby McGee” for Janis Joplin for the first time; about her relationship with the actor and playwright Sam Shepard, and how she typed his final manuscript, reading it back to him, finishing it just days before he died.
And she told the story of writing the lyrics for Bruce Springsteen’s “Because the Night” while waiting by the phone for a call from Fred Smith, who would become her husband. She then sang that song, which hit 13 on the Top 40 charts in the summer of 1978, with Kaye playing guitar, prompting the audience to sing along.
She also described how she fulfilled a promise to Mapplethorpe just before he died in 1989 that she would write their story. “Our bond was a vow that we took together to be true to ourselves and to give our life to art,” she said. With no formal education beyond high school, she taught herself to write. Living with her husband and their young son and daughter in Detroit, Smith wrote for three hours every day, from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., for 16 years. Eventually that effort would become “Just Kids,” her most successful book.
“Writing is a discipline,” Smith said. “I was never a prodigy myself. I was just a person who wanted to write, liked to write, had a powerful imagination. And so, discipline is very important, to write every day, to just make it part of what you do.”
Smith has been writing poetry her entire life, and some of those poems became songs. “I am a poetry person at heart,” she said. “I hear the poetry.”
She wrote “People Have the Power,” her encore on Monday night, as a poem, she said, describing how her husband said that phrase to her while she was peeling potatoes for dinner. “And what I realized was the things that I wanted we didn’t have yet,” she said. “And I thought, well, I’ll make it as a dream, within a dream but projected with the strength that the people unified can make these dreams come true.”
Filreis asked her to read a passage from “Year of the Monkey” about the people she cared about who had died. “Yet I still keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen, maybe tomorrow, a tomorrow, following a whole succession of tomorrows,” she read, a sentence the students discussed in class.
Filreis asked, “How do we go from all that loss to tomorrow?” And Smith replied. “Well, I mean, I love life. I love to work, and work keeps me going,” she said. “I’m here, you know, for some reason. All those people didn’t make it. I made it so I can sing their songs. I can sing of them, talk about them, write about them, and keep them with me and give them to other people.”
