Watch Patti Smith Learn from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Solely Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice
Within the video above, poet, artist, National Ebook Award winner, and “godmother of punk” Patti Smith reads a selection from Virginia Woolf’s 1931 experimalestal novel The Waves, accompanied on piano and guitar by her daughter Jesse and son Jackson. The “learning” marked the opening of “Land 250,” a 2008 exhibition of Smith’s photography and artworkwork from 1965 to 2007, on the Fondation Cartier pour l’artwork contemporain in Paris.
I put the phrase “learning” in quotes above as a result of Smith solely reads a very quick passage from Woolf’s novel. The remainder of the dramatic performance is Smith in her personal voice, possibly improvising, possibly reciting her homage to Woolf—occasioned by the truth that the beginning of the exhibition fell on the 67th anniversary of Woolf’s dying by suicide. Of Woolf’s dying, Smith says, “I don’t consider this as unhappy. I simply suppose that it’s the day that Virginia Woolf decided to say goodbye. So we’re not celebrating the day, we’re simply acknowledging that that is the day. If I had a title to name tonight, I might name it ‘Wave.’ We’re waving to Virginia.”
Smith’s selection of a title for the night is significant. She titled her 1979 album Wave, her final report earlier than she went into semi-retirement within the 80s. And her exhibition included a set of beautiful photographs taken at Woolf’s Susintercourse retreat, Monk’s Home. Her performance looks as if an unusual confluence of voices, however Woolf may need loved it, since a lot of her work explored the uniting of sepacharge minds, over the barriers of house and time. Whereas Smith specifices her indebtedness to Woolf, one receivedders what the upper-class Bloomsbury daughter of a well-connected and artistic family would have considered the working-class punk-poet from the Lower East Aspect? It’s impossible to say, in fact, however somethe way it’s matchting that they meet by means of Woolf’s The Waves.
Woolf’s novel (she known as it a “playpoem”) blends the voices of six characters, however Woolf didn’t consider them as characters in any respect, however as features of a higher, ever-shifting complete. As she as soon as wrote in a letter:
The six characters had been supposed to be one. I’m getting outdated myself now—I shall be fifty subsequent yr; and I come to really feel increasingly more how difficult it’s to collect oneself into one Virginia; despite the fact that the special Virginia in whose physique I dwell for the second is violently susceptible to all kinds of sepacharge really feelings. Therefore I would likeed to offer the sense of continuity.
Speculation over Woolf’s malestal well being apart, her references to voices in her letters, diaries, and in her eloquent letter to Leonard Woolf earlier than she died, had been additionally statements of her craft—which embraced the interior voices of others, not letting anyone voice be dominant. I wish to suppose Woolf would have been delighted with the fierceness of Smith—in some methods, Virginia Woolf anticipated punk, and Patti Smith. In her personal voice beneath, you possibly can hear her describe the phrases of the English language as “irreclaimable vagabonds,” who “in case you begin a Society for Pure English, they’ll present their resentment by begining another for impure English…. They’re excessively democratic.”
The reporting beneath comes from an essay published in a collection—The Dying of the Moth and Other Essays—the yr after Woolf’s dying. The discuss was known as “Craftsmanship,” a part of a BBC radio broadsolid from 1937, and it’s the solely surviving reporting of Woolf’s voice.
Word: An earlier version of this publish appeared on our web site in 2013.
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Josh Jones is a author, editor, and musician based mostly in Washington, DC. Follow him @jdmagness
