Early Work, 1970-79 (1994)
Early Work, 1970-79 is a 1994 poetry (poetic works by one author) book written by Patti Smith.
Selections from Patti Smith's writing across the decade she spent shaping New York's underground. The book collects poems and prose from her chapbooks Seventh Heaven, Ha! Ha! Houdini!, and Witt, plus pieces from her landmark Babel, with a quarter of the material drawn from unpublished performance transcripts and notebook pages. In her introduction Smith places the work in the seventies, when living on the edge carried lighter consequences than it later would. The pieces move from the meditative to the explosive, gathering the many sides of one restless voice. Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Judy Linn, and others run alongside the words.
Quick answers
What is Early Work, 1970-79 about?
Selections from Patti Smith's writing across the decade she spent shaping New York's underground. The book collects poems and prose from her chapbooks Seventh Heaven, Ha! Ha! Houdini!, and Witt, plus pieces from her landmark Babel, with a quarter of the material drawn from unpublished performance transcripts and notebook pages. In her introduction Smith places the work in the seventies, when living on the edge carried lighter consequences than it later would. The pieces move from the meditative to the explosive, gathering the many sides of one restless voice. Photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, Judy Linn, and others run alongside the words.
When was Early Work, 1970-79 published?
Early Work, 1970-79 was published in 1994.
Who made Early Work, 1970-79?
Early Work, 1970-79 was written by Patti Smith.
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A few thoughts on Early Work, 1970-79
Read this beside Horses, the 1975 album that grew out of these same pre-punk years. Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids tells the story of the Mapplethorpe photographs that fill the book. For the downtown scene these poems came from, Jim Jarmusch's Permanent Vacation captures the same wandering, low-rent New York restlessness.
The albums she was recording while she wrote these poems
Early Work gathers Patti Smith's chapbooks and unpublished pages from the same decade she cut Horses, Easter and Wave, so the two bodies of work were made side by side. Patti Smith Complete lines the lyrics up against these same years, letting the handwritten poem and the recorded song sit as one continuous act of writing.
The Mapplethorpe-era memoirs behind these same poems
Early Work comes from the same seventies downtown scene that Patti Smith later put into prose. Just Kids and The Coral Sea both return to her years with Robert Mapplethorpe, Permanent Vacation drifts through the same broke, restless New York streets, and The Book of Repulsive Women carries the same bohemian, unbothered voice from an earlier downtown generation.
Confessional poets who turned rough years into craft
Smith's introduction places these poems in a decade when living on the edge cost less than it later would, and these five collections come from poets who made hard years into exact, unsentimental lines. Larkin's The North Ship, Lorde's Coal and Dove's Grace Notes each turn private struggle into disciplined verse, alongside Merwin's Unrecounted and Transtromer's The Half-Finished Heaven.
More of Patti Smith's own prose and poetry
Early Work is an early snapshot of a voice that kept writing for decades, and these five books follow it forward. Woolgathering and Strange Messenger stay close to memory and quiet grief, while M Train, Year of the Monkey and Devotion carry the same plain, wandering candor into her later, more settled years.