Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance

I wrote ‘Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance’ before Just Kids came out in 2010. Thus, I was not able to include and make sense of Smith’s important meditations on Rimbaud found in that book. In 1993 (when I began writing my essay), my primary intention was to challenge the way French poetry was—and still, largely, is—studied in the academy. It seemed to me important at the time to ask whether a reader beyond the academy had something to teach someone in the academy about a canonical literary figure. I was inspired to write about Patti Smith’s relationship to Rimbaud in particular when I was flipping through a pile of second hand records in a small shop on Bleecker Street and my eye fell on the album cover of Easter. Suddenly, my life as an Assistant Professor chasing tenure at Columbia University did not seem utterly divorced from my punk/rock-filled high school days. I could perhaps recognize something of myself in Smith’s fascination with the figure of Rimbaud. In the end, I think I learned a lot about Rimbaud by reading him through Smith’s eyes. In addition, I believe I revealed some of the impulses residing within Smith’s work, impulses that also inhabit the lyric tradition to which Rimbaud belongs. A few years after the essay was published, my mother (inspired by my interest) went to a poetry reading by Patti Smith at the New York Public Library. After the reading, she walked up to Ms Smith with a copy of my essay, held it out to her, and said ‘My daughter wrote this for you.’ Smith exclaimed with pleasure that indeed, she knew of the article and was happy to meet ‘the author’s mother’. Then she signed a copy of Early Work (from which she had been reading) and handed it to my mother. My mother died just a few months ago (October 31, 2013). I treasure her gift—and Patti Smith’s gift—to this day.