Book review: 'Just Kids' by Patti Smith
By Elizabeth Hand
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, January 26, 2010; C04
JUST KIDS
By Patti Smith
Ecco. 279 pp. $27
"I want to be a poet," Arthur Rimbaud wrote in May 1871, at the age of 16, "and I'm working to make myself a visionary: you won't understand at all, and I can hardly explain it to you. . . . The sufferings are enormous, but you have to be strong, to be born a poet, and I've realized I'm a poet."
Almost exactly 100 years later in New York City, Patti Smith stood in front of an audience at St. Mark's Church as part of the Poetry Project and chanted the opening lines of "Oath": "Christ died for somebody's sins/But not mine." The audience included poets Anne Waldman and John Giorno; Warhol Factory luminaries like Lou Reed, Gerard Malanga and Warhol himself, as well as members of the music intelligentsia such as Lillian Roxon, Todd Rundgren and Harry Smith. Rock-and-roll critic-cum-guitarist Lenny Kaye provided musical accompaniment, the first time the church's rafters echoed to an electric guitar. After that night, Smith was a star, "bombarded with offers" from magazines, publishers, a record company.
"It came, I felt, too easy," she observes in "Just Kids," her beautifully written new memoir, a haunted elegy for both her soul mate Robert Mapplethorpe and a lost New York City. In fact, fame didn't come easily at all, but only after a young lifetime's immersion in "the radiance of imagination," a childhood fueled by books and Sunday school, poetry and prayer and pop music.
When she was a very young girl, the sight of a swan produced a transcendent moment of being: "The swan became one with the sky . . . and I felt a twinge, a curious yearning, imperceptible to passersby, my mother, the trees, or the clouds." This hallucinatory clarity stayed with Smith, a precocious reader punished by her teachers for daydreaming, but encouraged by her working-class parents with art books and supplies.
(More here.)
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, January 26, 2010; C04
JUST KIDS
By Patti Smith
Ecco. 279 pp. $27
"I want to be a poet," Arthur Rimbaud wrote in May 1871, at the age of 16, "and I'm working to make myself a visionary: you won't understand at all, and I can hardly explain it to you. . . . The sufferings are enormous, but you have to be strong, to be born a poet, and I've realized I'm a poet."
Almost exactly 100 years later in New York City, Patti Smith stood in front of an audience at St. Mark's Church as part of the Poetry Project and chanted the opening lines of "Oath": "Christ died for somebody's sins/But not mine." The audience included poets Anne Waldman and John Giorno; Warhol Factory luminaries like Lou Reed, Gerard Malanga and Warhol himself, as well as members of the music intelligentsia such as Lillian Roxon, Todd Rundgren and Harry Smith. Rock-and-roll critic-cum-guitarist Lenny Kaye provided musical accompaniment, the first time the church's rafters echoed to an electric guitar. After that night, Smith was a star, "bombarded with offers" from magazines, publishers, a record company.
"It came, I felt, too easy," she observes in "Just Kids," her beautifully written new memoir, a haunted elegy for both her soul mate Robert Mapplethorpe and a lost New York City. In fact, fame didn't come easily at all, but only after a young lifetime's immersion in "the radiance of imagination," a childhood fueled by books and Sunday school, poetry and prayer and pop music.
When she was a very young girl, the sight of a swan produced a transcendent moment of being: "The swan became one with the sky . . . and I felt a twinge, a curious yearning, imperceptible to passersby, my mother, the trees, or the clouds." This hallucinatory clarity stayed with Smith, a precocious reader punished by her teachers for daydreaming, but encouraged by her working-class parents with art books and supplies.
(More here.)
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