" - What do you want of me? I said - language, she said, language."
Any attempt in describing the work or genius of artist Patti Smith, is undoubtedly where continued efforts of description would only be met by a barrage of daunting hindrance. From the likes of Arthur Rimbaud, Alan Ginsberg, W.B.Yeats and Charles Baudelaire, her poetic voice is akin to a lightening strike amid a still expanse of open water. It startles, unsettles, captivates, whilst all the more reassuring readers with a beautiful, yet fluid assemblage of words. Although Smith is renowned for her sonic brilliance in the punk rock music scene, I'd like to shed light onto some of her written material - from poetry to wordy fragments.
Patti Smith - Paris (1969) © image via || The Red List
THE MEANING OF LIFE - AN EXCERPT (1992)
My first sense of life was that of motion, of being lifted, and the beating of my mother's heart. Then, as consciousness pressed, I turned to the radiance of my father's mind. When I closed my eyes, I could feel the world spin. When I reached out I could feel the breath of care. Bound, within my blood, was their love, their burning and their discordant prayers.
Yet time makes ravens of all of us, and swiftly, it seemed, I fled from their grasp. The sea was a glass. The sky, an immeasurable path.
Guided by the knowledge of them I journeyed fettered, free. And as all before me, I have questioned, grateful for the privilege of being able to ask: What is my task? Why do we exist? All answers produce the pain of recognition, emptiness and joy.
To prey upon stillness, to suffer dawn
To bow before God, to administer grace
To unveil space, to be spirited away
To lift a child
into the reigning air
where the voice of heaven
chirps like a bird.
JUST KIDS - AN EXCERPT (2010)
...Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a peal of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just want to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.
ON POETRY (2014)
"Poetry, I think is one of the most difficult of the arts. Maybe even the most difficult...The act of writing poetry is torturous - and sometimes magnificently transporting. But often it's just torturous. But poetry is a very high language, hopefully above all of this. But to me I think of poetry as very pure. There's no real rules. I don't know anything more than anybody else.
ON 'M-TRAIN' (2015)
"It's M-Train like mind train, whatever came to mind. I think that 'M-Train is most like me. Its not a book about the past so much. It's who I am, what I do, what I'm thinking about, what I read and the coffee I drink. The floors I pace, so we'll see. I hope people will like it."