Patti Smith

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.

Devotion

🧃

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

eryc

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Devotion quotes

Join the club