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This Just In: Media

Patricia Smith -- hot, cool, and creepy

By Dan Kennedy

There was something a bit creepy about watching Patricia Smith last Saturday evening at Harvard Square's Club Passim, where for an hour and a half she emoted her way through a work-in-progress about her downfall as a Boston Globe columnist.

What do you make of a woman who's allegedly ripping her heart out on a hot, light-drenched stage, yet never so much as breaks a sweat? Who, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a howl, reads from poems she wrote about humiliation and anger and thoughts of suicide, all the while maintaining a countenance of smug self-satisfaction? Who projects such an aura of charisma that you literally have to leave the room before you can entertain any doubts about what you've just seen and heard?

The subject of Smith's poems -- woven over and around the accompaniment of a guitar, a saxophone, and a singer -- was her fall into despair and rage, and her search for redemption, following her June 18 resignation from the Globe, which was prompted by revelations that she had fabricated characters and quotes. For a journey of personal discovery, Smith's was awfully short: by late August, barely two months after her resignation, she was already performing early versions of the poems she read at Passim.

The sellout crowd on Saturday adored her and reacted most enthusiastically to her cheapest stunts. Such as her bitterness at being labeled as "what affirmative action has wrought" -- followed by "Thanks, Eileen," a reference to an extremely critical column on Smith by Globe columnist Eileen McNamara. (Hisses all around.) Or her audience-participation recitation of random words, closing with an overly dramatic, barely audible "Man did not give me this gift. Man cannot take it away."

But Smith is a fine poet, and there were moments that were genuinely moving. Her poems about her murdered father -- a theme in some of her best work for some years now -- were especially chilling, as was her recitation about nearly going one-on-one with a handgun she bought after her newspaper career came crashing to a halt. ("I close my lips around the gun's hot eye and breathe hard.")

A few cynics have questioned whether she really did come as close as she claims to buying the farm, but that misses the point: this is poetry, not journalism. It no longer matters whether her writing is factually accurate as long as it speaks to larger truths. If Smith is not fully contrite about her failings as a journalist, at least she understands that she failed, and why. That's a lot more than you can say about that other ex-Globe columnist, Mike Barnicle.