'Outcast, sinful ex-columnist' finds words she can still use

Hank Stuever, 08-22-1998.

In a prickly summer of humiliation, here is Patricia Smith, a poet. And, more infamously, here is Patricia Smith, the ex-Boston Globe city columnist, who was fired in June after it was discovered that some of her journalism was peppered with people from the urban streets who rang true but, in fact, did not exist.

Timidly at first, and then in the angry and tearfully hoarse voice that has made her one of the country's best-known ``slam'' poets, Smith re-entered the public world of writing Friday on the second floor of Book People, as part of the 1998 National Poetry Slam contest being held this week in Austin.

Her hands trembled while she held ripped-out pages from her notebook. She read several poems that she has written in the wake of her firing by Globe editors, which has put her at the sad center of a media cyclone of credibility concerns and scandal.

``Perhaps you gotta understand, I am the face of American journalism slapping journalism's American face,'' she said in one poem. ``A source of shame and embarrassment for those who dutifully keep up the mortgages on their (expletive) glass houses.''

Smith, 43, read poems filled with a fallen reporter's rage and shame, of wanting to kill herself, of being labeled ``unrepentant.''

In the conversational, kinetic, bare-all style of slam poetry, she told how the beauty of words seduced her to write newspaper stories that weren't true, at a newspaper where one colleague, Smith bitterly declared in one poem, considered her ``the nigger who came to dinner and just wouldn't leave.''

During this week's poetry festival, Smith said, she has found that while journalism has labeled her a pariah, her fellow poets still love her.

``I want to thank the slam family for being so incredibly loving and supportive in the last month or so,'' Smith told the 75 people who came to her Book People appearance. She is also emceeing several of the poetry competitions, which conclude tonight.

``I also want to say that I have written something that is from me to you; it's personal to me; it's something I feel like I need to say. ... For the first time in my life I'm going to say this and really mean it: This is our life, this is off the record, all right? Please.' '

So already, another journalistic problem: A public reading of poetry isn't exactly off the record. Can a roomful of people be expected to keep such a confidence?

``There are people who don't even need to talk to you, and you can close your eyes and feel that they are in your corner,'' Smith told Friday's crowd. ``And then there are people whose lives will not be complete until they have some real evidence that you are suffering. I've had people say (things like), `How could you have a party at your house the week after (being fired)?' It was my (expletive) birthday. `How could you smile, how could you look like nothing happened?' These poems are a little bit of what was going on with me. ...''

What was going on with her, according to her poems, was that she wanted to drown in Boston's Charles River. Or she would caress the gun she kept upstairs in her home.

``... For five days straight I practice seducing the slick barrel; I close my lips around the gun's hot eye and breathe in hard ... knowing that this is the only cleansing the world will accept,'' Smith read. ``Or perhaps it will just be what it will be, a well-timed and gruesome hallelujah ... Or better yet my body will refuse to die, I will spend eternity pumping bullets into my head. ... My penance is that I will keep living to see myself keep dying. I can see the headlines, `Disgraced, outcast, sinful ex-columnist just doesn't get it.' ``

Smith also read from her last Globe column, called ``A Note of Apology, '' which she wrote the day her editors fired her. At least four of her twice-weekly columns last spring contained make-believe -- a cancer patient, a city worker, other plain folks whose stories Smith purportedly specialized in. After her departure, a further investigation at the Globe found as many as 52 of Smith's columns since 1996 were in some way fabricated.

Another Globe columnist, Mike Barnicle, was recently fired, rehired and suspended, and then he resigned after it was learned that he plagiarized lines in an Aug. 2 column and probably made up characters in a 1995 column.

After Smith was fired, critics complained that Globe editors had gone easier on Barnicle because he is white.

``I will write as long as I breathe,'' Smith said in her Globe column, ``despite dire predictions that this indiscretion spells the end of my career.''

On Friday, toward the end of her reading, Smith produced a poem that begins, ``These are words I can still use.'' She read dozens of words in a teary-eyed, stream-of-conscious swirl: ``Man did not give me this gift. Man cannot take it away.''

Many people in the audience, most of them poets in town for the national contest, cried as Smith concluded her reading. They rushed up front to hug her.

``She's a superstar, someone with just a lot of charisma,'' said Vince Anzalone, from New York. ``(The Globe scandal) is sort of like a downer. I don't see anything wrong with (using) composite characters, really. She knows the town, she knows what real life is, and what she was writing was real. I guess that's what put her in harm's way. Performance poetry was a hazard to the journalistic profession.''

``I'm really proud of her,'' said another poet, Meliza Baales of Santa Cruz, Calif. ``I don't agree with what she did (in her columns) ... but I don't think it's the end of her career. I think it's a beginning. It takes a lot of guts to admit she's done something wrong. I think she didn't need to win the Pulitzer Prize, because she's won people' s hearts and their friendship, and when she's dead and gone, that' s what people are going to remember.''

That's what Smith wants them to remember. As she picked up her purse and her half-finished iced coffee, signed her books and gave hugs to her fans and ``family,'' Smith fretted that the reporters in the room would quickly disseminate her rawest emotions.

``I almost didn't come to the (poetry slam). But the support here has just stunned me. I've got (reporters) on either side of me, but I said, `Well, I've got to do these poems,' '' she said.

``It's just like dragging myself back into the muck. Every time I get free of it, this big hand come out and goes, `We're not done with you yet.' The whole thing that happened with Barnicle is such a closure for me. And people call me and say, `Does this make you feel (good)? Are you going to sue the Globe?' and all this (expletive), and I'm like, `No.'

``I have to let it go.''

Copyright © 1998, The Austin American-Statesman