Patti Smith

"In lyric essays, a story, poems, and photographs, Smith illuminates the whirl of chance and choice that stokes a writer's imagination, recounting her fascination on the eve of a trip to Paris with Simone Weil and an evocative, accidentally discovered film about Stalin's mass deportation of Estonians. In France, a gravestone, a televised figure-skating competition, a meal, and a garden all converge in what becomes Devotion, [a] ... fairy tale about a young, displaced Estonian skater and a solitary dealer in rare objects and arms. This ... fable about creativity and obsession, possession and freedom is followed by a meditation on how a work of art is, for other artists, a call to action"--Booklist, 08/01/2017.

Devotion

From the renowned artist and author Patti Smith, a rare and generous look into the creative process A work of creative brilliance may seem like magic--its source a mystery, its impact unexpectedly stirring. How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture's beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections. Patti Smith first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession--a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus's house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil's grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano's novels. Whether writing in a café or a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book on writing. The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

eryc

I felt helplessly at peace. The rain dissipated. My shoes were muddied. There was an absence of light, but not of love.

Why do we write? Because we cannot simply live.

And that’s how I became Philadelphia, she wrote later in her journal. Like the city of freedom. Yet I was not free. Hunger is its own warden.

It cost me a lot, she was thinking, not with regret, but with pride.

The confession booth is not wide enough to hold my sins. It is but a small boat in the center of a terrible sea.

Stirred by a chorus of sensations, she was at once liberated and trapped.

The unexpected gift suggested small hopes, a vague but promising human connection. She felt a delight but also a fear of it, for it momentarily seemed to eclipse her impatience to skate. She lived only for skating, she told herself; there was no room for anything else. Not love, school, or scraping the walls of memory. Negotiating a bouquet of confusion, the lace on her skate broke in her hand. She quickly knotted it, then unfastened the skirt of her new coat and stepped onto the ice.

-I am Eugenia, she said, to no one in particular.

Theirs was a story that could not resolve, only unravel.

He wrote of lifting her in the air and delighting in the fact that she had his mother’s eyes, deep brown eyes that seemed to contain everything.

I remember seeing Voltaire's cap in a glass case in a museum somewhere. A very humble flesh-colored lace cap. I harbored an intense desire for it, a strange fascination that lingered coupled with a superstitious notion that the wearer might access the residue of Voltaire's dreams. All in French of course, all of his period, and at that moment it occurred to me that dreamers through time dreamed of those in their own epoch. The ancient Greeks dreamed of their gods. Emily Bronte of the moors. And Christ? Perhaps he did not dream, yet knew all there was to dream, every combination, until the end of time.

kite

What is the dream? To write something fine, that would be better than I am, and that would justify my trials and trials and indiscretions. 

🧃

“We were in our early twenties, when everything, including the sentimental head of the poet, was a revelation.”

“I imagine writing a story guided by the atmosphere conjured by the resonance of a particular human voice. Her voice. No plot in mind, just trailing her tones, timbres, and composing phrases, as if music, and superimposing them, transparent layers, over hers.”

“The dance is over and the face of love is nothing but the wide skirt and burnished heels of winter.”

“Inspiration is the unforeseen quantity, the muse that assails at the hidden hour. The arrows fly and one is unaware of being struck, and that a host of unrelated catalysts have joined clandestinely to form a system of its own, rendering one with the vibrations of an incurable disease—a burning imagination—at once unholy and divine.

What is to be done with the resulting impulses, these nerve endings flickering like an illuminated map of thieving constellations? The stars pulse. The muse seeks to be vivified. But the mind is also the muse. It seeks to outsmart its glorious opponents, to rewire such sources of inspiration. A crystal stream suddenly dried. A thing of beauty joyless, defiled. Why does the creative spirit turn on itself? Why does the maker twist all drama? The pen is lifted, guided by the shattered muse. Without discord, it marks, harmony passes unnoticed, without discord, it continues, Abel is rendered no more than a forgotten shepherd.”

"Why do we write? A chorus erupts. / Because we cannot simply live."

Besides being a complete BANGER of the ending line, I think this speaks to

1) The deeply human desire to collect, that is, to document, to record. I say collect first because I imagine in the beginning how our earliest ancestors must have drank in the sights of their life, collecting visually as much as they were capable until they perhaps carried around un-useful belongings alongside useful, for the sake of keeping something they liked. So I mean to say, they collected memories too, 

—until they needed a memory that could outlast them: a permanent marking, for instance, on cave walls.

2) Life is not just to be lived! It is to be thought about, to be reflected on, to be changed, to be created from scratch.

My first Patti Smith! One of those reads that I felt an inexplicable urge to pick up – I'm suspecting it has to do with the title – glimpsing the spine in a bookstore-café. Read the blurb and immediately intrigued. Flipped through the first couple of pages. Borrowed a copy from my local library a month later. Didn't read for another month. Only on a random Wednesday night at 1am, inexplicably, once more, picking it up: finished in one sitting.

Without getting into details, this book is one of those pieces, for me personally, that contains moments, modes, motifs reminiscent of what people like to say is the invisible string theory, or the red thread of fate. In both eerie and also silly ways! More proof you don't choose a book, the book chooses you.

 is humbly brilliant. And you know what? I laughed a few times. So it's funny too.

karalea

"Why do we write? A chorus erupts. / Because we cannot simply live."

Besides being a complete BANGER of the ending line, I think this speaks to

1) The deeply human desire to collect, that is, to document, to record. I say collect first because I imagine in the beginning how our earliest ancestors must have drank in the sights of their life, collecting visually as much as they were capable until they perhaps carried around un-useful belongings alongside useful, for the sake of keeping something they liked. So I mean to say, they collected memories too, les souvenirs—until they needed a memory that could outlast them: a permanent marking, for instance, on cave walls.

2) Life is not just to be lived! It is to be thought about, to be reflected on, to be changed, to be created from scratch.

My first Patti Smith! One of those reads that I felt an inexplicable urge to pick up – I'm suspecting it has to do with the title – glimpsing the spine in a bookstore-café. Read the blurb and immediately intrigued. Flipped through the first couple of pages. Borrowed a copy from my local library a month later. Didn't read for another month. Only on a random Wednesday night at 1am, inexplicably, once more, picking it up: finished in one sitting.

Without getting into details, this book is one of those pieces, for me personally, that contains moments, modes, motifs reminiscent of what people like to say is the invisible string theory, or the red thread of fate. In both eerie and also silly ways! More proof you don't choose a book, the book chooses you.

That aside, Devotion is humbly brilliant. And you know what? I laughed a few times. So it's funny too.

It was my first introduction to Patti’s writing, and I now wish to read more of her.

I believe it deserves 5 starts not only for her dexterity with words, but also for the feelings her words sparkled within me.

It was my first introduction to Patti’s writing, and I now wish to read more of her.

I believe it deserves 5 starts not only for her dexterity with words, but also for the feelings her words sparkled within me.

Isabella 

this is my first patti smith book and i really enjoy her writing style. it's so beautiful. loved reading the stories and its creative process. the story in the middle was very uncomfortable and haunting to read.

Mia Caven

This is definitely my least favourite Patti Smith book as of yet. Only because it wasn’t entirely her usual writing style. This book was half memoir, half a fictional story. Yet it was still beautiful and poetic as Patti ever is.

rumbledethumps

This book is apparently part of a series where authors answer the question, Why Do I Write? I don't really care about that question, and probably wouldn't have picked it up if I knew. Part journal entry, part fiction, and part memoir-ish story, it just wasn't for me.

Mahaut 

J'ai peu aimé la nouvelle en elle-même, mais j'aime la manière dont Patti Smith écrit et met en scène sa vie et le donne au lecteur et je crois que je suis plus fasciné par elle que par ses écrits de pure fiction (mais au moins ça l'a donné envie de relire Just Kids)

Devotion

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