Patti Smith Handed Rimbaud to a Generation

Spain’s Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts goes to Patti Smith this week. The jury praised her “impetuous creativity” connecting rock, symbolist poetry and the spirit of counterculture. That’s accurate. It’s also the kind of sentence that makes a thing sound safe.

Here is the unsafe version. Smith’s actual method was reading. She found a dead teenage poet, believed him, and pointed him at her own century. Punk gets told as a story about three chords. Smith’s version is about a bookshelf.

The book that started it

Arthur Rimbaud wrote nearly everything he’s remembered for as a teenager, then quit poetry and left. A Season in Hell and Illuminations are the receipts. He was furious, he was formally reckless, and he treated “this is how poems are supposed to go” as an insult.

Smith found him young and never put him down. That is the pedagogy here, and it isn’t a classroom one. Nobody assigned Rimbaud to her. She went looking for permission, and a book gave it to her.

When Horses opens by announcing that Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not hers, that’s Rimbaud’s posture with an electric guitar. The line refuses the inheritance. It is also a lesson plan: you are allowed to argue with what you were handed.

The book she’d press into your hands

Most of us were taught to read in order to comply: find the theme, name the symbol, fill in the worksheet. Smith treats reading as a way to get dangerous.

Just Kids is her memoir of New York in the late 1960s and 1970s, and of Robert Mapplethorpe, and it is a book about two broke people teaching each other what art is for. Nobody in it has a credential. They have library cards, a borrowed room, and a conviction that making things is a form of seriousness.

That is the curriculum P&P keeps circling. Not “be creative.” Be serious about making something, and find the people who take you seriously back.

The book she’d slip you when you’re ready

The Thief’s Journal is Jean Genet’s account of a life lived among beggars and thieves, written by a man who refused to be ashamed in the way respectable people required. It’s a hard, strange, beautiful book, and it’s the one on this list I’d hand over only when someone is ready for it.

This part is speculation, and I’m owning it. Smith is on record as a devoted reader of the French rebels, and the line from Rimbaud to Genet to a kid in a bedroom with a notebook is one a good book-pusher would draw. I’m arguing she’d draw it too.

The book for the long haul

M Train is what a punk looks like in later life: wandering, drinking coffee, grieving, reading, making. It is the answer to the question every politically awake parent asks themselves at 2 a.m.: what does it look like to keep going when the fury has to last decades?

The answer is not a clenched fist. It’s attention. You keep reading, you keep noticing, you keep making the thing.

What a parent can steal

You don’t have to raise a poet. You have to be the person who leaves a strange, wonderful book where a kid will trip over it, and doesn’t ask for a book report.

Smith got to Rimbaud because somebody, or some shelf, let a teenager read something that wasn’t meant to be safe. That is the whole job.

Royalty is giving her a prize this week. The better tribute is a shelf. Put a dead teenage poet on it where a living one can find him.