You can't write about the lyrics of Patti Smith in ordinary language. To do so is to apply the wrong tool. To do so is to fail to understand her revolution. To quote from a few well-known songs - "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine" or "Outside of society they're waitin' for me" - and to evaluate these lines by comparing them with some well-known word guy, a Leonard Cohen or a Bob Dylan: that just wouldn't do! Smith comes out of an adjacent tradition, and "Jesus died for somebody's sins" suggests the parameters of that tradition - dread, religious ritual, intoxication - which follows in the numinous footsteps of the Romantics. If Dylan comes out of Woody Guthrie, via Kerouac, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, then Patti Smith's lyrics, especially on her first three albums, emerge from Verlaine, Rimbaud, Blake and Shelley, via Burroughs. (And don't overlook Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath.)

But, still, that's to leave out the issue of performance. As the tale goes, Patti Smith, youthful poet and dreaming citizen of lower Manhattan, had her epiphanic moment when she took along an electric guitarist for support at one of her poetry readings. If that is different from the bongo or saxophone accompaniment that had long been a part of the Beat scene, it's mainly different in terms of decibels. These were chords that were borrowed from Van Morrison. Or from the garage rock of the 60s. She was using the vocabulary of rock'n'roll as it already was.

What was different was the way she said it. What was different was the absolute commitment to the performance itself. Here's a passage from Land, a representative lyric:

There's a little place a place called space
It's a pretty little place it's across the track
Across the track and the name of that place
Is I like it like that I like it like that
I like it like that I like it like that

And the name of the band is the Twistelettes
Twistelette twistelette twistelette
Twistelette twistelettes twistelette

Doesn't look like much on the page! How is it then that this passage, and others like it on Horses, Radio Ethiopia and Easter, spawned an entire era of performance, not only among a great number of rock'n'roll singers (you can hear echoes of Patti's delivery in people such as Michael Stipe, Bono, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love), but among an even larger number of New York poets. The entire Nuyorican Poets Cafe movement emerged from a back pocket in Patti's black jeans. Part of that has to do with her being a woman. In this regard, she remarked at one point that all she'd done was imitate Mick Jagger. But I don't think that fully explains the legacy. True, it's political to claim for the feminine what was hitherto the province of the boys. Before Patti Smith, women were either the transitive object of songs made by men, or they were purveyors of a far milder (if frequently moving) and more introspective pop. Patti Smith single-handedly changed this, and in the process made everyone from Lydia Lunch to Diamanda Galas to Karen O plausible ...

Listen to Patti sing "... and the name of that place / Is I like it like that I like it like that / I like it like that I like it like that" and think of the repetitions of Ecclesiastes ("To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted"). Or of the Ginsberg of Kaddish, or of the repetitions of gospel and soul music, or think of Van Morrison singing "the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love" on Astral Weeks. The lyrics mean something to the performance - this meaning requires a commitment, and the commitment in turn engenders the occasion of the lyrics, and therefore the meaning. Patti altered Springsteen's lyrics for Because the Night when she sang them because she needed to be able to perform the song, and her approach to the ethics of performance - in which only the possibility of change is enough - made the song her own. And if you don't believe me, try listening to Springsteen's recordings of it.

When Artaud advocated a theatre, a performance, in which actors and audience are as "victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames", he got closer to that place of Patti Smith's poetical voice. And the name of that place, indeed, is I like it like that.

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