‘The feel of horses’: The poem that introduced Patti Smith’s masterpiece
When Patti Smith released Horses, it was the start of something. Not just her debut and the literal start of her recording career but the beginning of her immeasurable impact—ushering in a wave of poetic punks she would go on to inspire. It was the start of something, but really, Smith had heard the sound of the hooves racing towards the line long before then.
It was the start of something because it was the moment Smith crossed over. Before she had even had the chance, or even the idea, to merge her words and music, she had long since admired artists. “He was beautiful, intelligent, hungry. Just to look at him was an experience,” she once said about Jimi Hendrix, remembering her obsessive younger years.
In her book Just Kids, she writes about specifically cutting her hair to look like Keith Richards while Bob Dylan was her “idol”. She even briefly worked as a music journalist, all to get closer to the music and the people who made it. In short, Smith was a music fanatic worshipping at the altar of rock stars.
So when she finally started making her music, she finally crossed over a threshold into the realm of her heroes. But it was more than that. In the poem that sat in the album’s liner notes, its more spiritual stance is revealed.
“The feel of horses long before horses enter the scene.” That sits as the main line and the most emotive statement. You could get caught up on its literal meaning, but it’s a feeling: a thumping in your chest, a sense that something is coming, and tension building.
It’s a feeling Smith seemed to live her whole life with. Or, initially, yearning for. “I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one,” she wrote in her memoir about her younger years. It was something she’d always wanted, sensing, or at least hoping, that she’d been called for more as she said, “I wondered if I had really been called as an artist. I didn’t mind the misery of a vocation, but I dreaded not being called.”
But perhaps the feel of horses began the day she got on a bus. Running away to New York, fate stepped in and got her there as she discovered she didn’t have enough money for the ticket but then found a purse containing exactly what she needed, writing, “I accepted the grant of the small white purse as the hand of fate pushing me on.”
From there, she was off to the raises. No doubt when she arrived in the city, almost instantly met Robert Maplethorpe, fell in with the city’s artist crowd, moved into the Chelsea Hotel and existed in the artistic eco-system there, that feeling of tension was building and building. It grew louder when she did her first reading, louder still when Lenny Kaye first accompanied her on guitar, and then, as her band came together, it grew deafening.
“Charms, sweet angels – you have made me no longer afraid of death,” another key line reads. To record her debut album, the debut album of a woman who had spent a life admiring rockstars, Smith went to Electric Lady, Jimi Hendrix’s studio. He wasn’t there. Hendrix, like so many others that Smith loved or admired, had already died. Already witnessing the consequence of her era, where drugs were taking so much talent from around her, this was another push. Right when she could’ve faltered as the building tension of the hooves grew closer and closer, it was the influence of these lost heroes that spurred her on to run with them, crashing into the music world with their legacy to honour as well as her own, screaming, “horses, horses, horses, horses” as she stampeded with them.
Though abstract and needing a moment to chew over, Smith’s introductory piece seems to hold an emotional key to Horses, to what it means to her and the role it plays in honouring so many different lives and legacies, including her younger self’s desire and the now lost missions of the heroes that raised her up.
