poetry

“Bread of Angels,” Patti Smith’s mesmerizing new memoir, only deepens the mystery of who this iconic artist is and where her singular vision originated. I’ve long been struck by her magnetism on stage, her fearless approach to her craft, and the stark beauty of her words on the page, including the National Book Award-winning “Just Kids.” She has a preternatural belief in her own instincts and a boundless curiosity that, taken together, help explain the extraordinarily rich life and oeuvre she’s constructed. This transcendent — and at times terrifying — account of that evolution enriches that understanding. And yet, Smith’s persona remains veiled — sphinx-like — an ethereal presence whose journey to fame was fueled by her questing spirit and later detoured by tragedy.

Like Jeanette Walls’ classic, “The Glass Castle,” Smith’s saga begins with a hard-scrabble childhood she relates as if narrating a Dickensian fairy tale. In the first four years of her life, her family relocated 11 times, moving in with relatives after evictions, or into rat-infested Philadelphia tenements. Smith’s mother was a waitress who also took in ironing. Her father was a factory worker, a World War II veteran scarred by his experience abroad. They shared their love of poetry, books and classical music with their daughter, who was reading Yeats by kindergarten.

Smith, who was born in 1946, was often bed-ridden as a young girl, afflicted with tuberculosis and scarlet fever, along with all the usual childhood ailments. She writes: “Mine was a Proustian childhood, one of intermittent quarantine and convalescence.” When she contracted Asian flu, the virus paralyzed her with “a vise cluster of migraines.” She credits a boxed set of Puccini’s “Madame Butterfly” recordings her mother bought with tip money for her return to health.

As a 3-year-old, Smith recalls grilling her mother during evening prayers, posing metaphysical questions about Jesus and the soul, immersing herself in Bible study and later joining her mother as a Jehovah’s Witness. She didn’t confine herself to a single religious discipline, though. For example, while still a young child, she saw the movie “Lost Horizons” and became entranced by Tibet and the teachings of Buddhism — “an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things.” While “this seemed beautiful,” she writes, “it nonetheless troubled me.”

There is a romantic quality even to the deprivations Smith chronicles, an effect heightened by what she chooses to highlight or withhold. With little money for toys, she and her siblings entertained themselves using the knobs on a dresser as instruments on a ship, sailing on faraway seas. She and her younger siblings regularly set out with their mother to the nearby railroad tracks, where they harvested leftover lumps of coal to fuel their pot-bellied stove — the apartment’s sole source of heat. Under the floorboards of her closet, Smith conceals “glittering refuse I had scavenged from trash bins, fragments of costume jewelry, rosary beads,” along with a blue toothbrush she’s invested with magical powers.

Their apartment building overlooks a trash-strewn area dubbed “the Patch,” which is bordered by “the Rat House.” There, Smith proclaims herself general of the neighborhood’s Buddy Gang, fearlessly fending off bullies twice her size, while at school, she was viewed as odd by her teachers, “like something out of Hans Christian Andersen.”

Within this urban setting, Smith often paused to marvel at nature. Taking a short cut on the long walk to school, she stumbles on a pond in a wooded area. A snapping turtle emerges and settles a few feet away. “He was massive,” she recalls, “with ancient eyes, surely a king.”

It’s impossible to know if Smith was really this self-possessed and ruminative as a child or if nostalgia has altered her perspective. What’s undeniable, though, is that her extraordinary artist’s eye and soulful nature emerged at an age when the rest of us were still content to simply play in our sandboxes. She recollects fishing Vogue magazines out of trash cans around age 6 and feeling “a deep affinity” with the images on their pages. She’s immersed in Yeats and Irish folk tales while being bored at school reading “Fun With Dick and Jane.” On her first visit to an art museum, viewing Picasso’s work produces an epiphany: She was born to be an artist. A decade later, she boards a bus bound for New York City.

At this point, about a third of the way into the book, we enter the vortex that is Patti Smith’s talent and ambition on fire. The pace of the memoir accelerates. An alchemy infuses each chance encounter. Opportunities abound. Everywhere she turns there are talented photographers, poets, playwrights and musicians encouraging and supporting her. She writes poetry and finds a soulmate in Robert Mapplethorpe. She meets Sam Shepard, who features her poem in a play he’s writing. She meets William Burroughs, performs a reading with Allen Ginsberg. She forms a musical partnership with Lenny Kaye, and begins performing her poetry, with the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud as her spiritual inspiration.

Smith’s story unfolds as a bohemian fairy tale. Luck is with her, bolstered by a fierce conviction in her own bespoke vision. “There was no plan, no design,” she writes of that time, “just an organic upheaval that took me from the written to the spoken word.” Bob Dylan becomes a mentor. Her fame grows enormous with the 1975 release of “Horses” and the international touring that followed, yet she retains the bearing of an ascetic. She writes: “We hadn’t made our record to garner fame and fortune. We made it for the art rats known and unknown, the marginalized, the shunned, the disowned.”

Smith’s rock star trajectory is diverted by her love affair with Fred Sonic Smith, for whom she ditches her career at its height, against the advice of many of those closest to her. But as with every decision she’s ever made, she can’t be dissuaded. In this intimate portion of the book, we receive glimpses of two passionate artists hibernating, in love. They marry, have two children, and cultivate an eccentric version of domestic bliss. But harsh reality intervenes and the losses begin to accumulate. One after the other, Smith loses the men she loves most — Robert, then Fred, then her beloved brother, Todd. These losses haunt the memoir; she grapples with them by returning to the stage with a fierce new hunger.

The book’s final pages reveal Smith continuing to grieve, mourning the loss of other loved ones — her parents, Susan Sontag, Sam Shepard. I wish I could simply reprint those pages here — they moved me deeply. At 78, she reflects on the process of “shedding” — which she describes as one of life’s most difficult tasks. “We plunge back into the abyss we labored to exit and find ourselves within another turn of the wheel,” she writes. “And then having found the fortitude to do so, we begin the excruciating yet exquisite process of letting go.”

“All must fall away,” she concludes. “The precious bits of cloth folded away in a small trunk like an abandoned trousseau, the books of my life, the medals in their cases.” What will she retain? “But I will keep my wedding ring,” she writes, “and my children’s love.”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

At a time when its leadership is in question and its mission challenged, the Library of Congress has named a new U.S. poet laureate, the much-honored author and translator Arthur Sze.

The library announced Monday that the 74-year-old Sze had been appointed to a one-year term, starting this fall. The author of 12 poetry collections and recipient last year of a lifetime achievement award from the library, he succeeds Ada Limón, who had served for three years. Previous laureates also include Joy Harjo, Louise Glück and Billy Collins.

Speaking during a recent Zoom interview with the Associated Press, Sze acknowledged some misgivings when Rob Casper, who heads the library’s poetry and literature center, called him in June about becoming the next laureate.

He wondered about the level of responsibilities and worried about the upheaval since President Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in May. After thinking about it overnight, he called Casper back and happily accepted.

“I think it was the opportunity to give something back to poetry, to something that I’ve spent my life doing,” he explained, speaking from his home in Santa Fe, N.M. “So many people have helped me along the way. Poetry has just helped me grow so much, in every way.”

Sze’s new job begins during a tumultuous year for the library, a 200-year-old, nonpartisan institution that holds a massive archive of books published in the United States. Trump abruptly fired Hayden after conservative activists accused her of imposing a “woke” agenda, criticism that Trump has expressed often as he seeks sweeping changes at the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian museums and other cultural institutions.

Hayden’s ouster was sharply criticized by congressional Democrats, leaders in the library and scholarly community and such former laureates as Limón and Harjo.

Although the White House announced that it had named Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche as the acting librarian, daily operations are being run by a longtime official at the library, Robert Randolph Newlen. Events such as the annual National Book Festival have continued without interruption or revision.

Laureates are forbidden to take political positions, although the tradition was breached in 2003 when Collins publicly stated his objections to President George W. Bush’s push for war against Iraq.

Newlen is identified in Monday’s announcement as acting librarian, a position he was in line for according to the institution’s guidelines. He praised Sze, whose influences range from ancient Chinese poets to Wallace Stevens, for his “distinctly American” portraits of the Southwest landscapes and for his “great formal innovation.”

“Like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Sze forges something new from a range of traditions and influences — and the result is a poetry that moves freely throughout time and space,” his statement reads in part.

Sze’s official title is poet laureate consultant in poetry, a 1985 renaming of a position established in 1937 as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress. The mission is loosely defined as a kind of literary ambassador, to “raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.”

Sze wants to focus on a passion going back more than a half-century to his undergraduate years at UC Berkeley — translation.

He remembers reading some English-language editions of Chinese poetry, finding the work “antiquated and dated” and deciding to translate some of it himself, writing out the Chinese characters and engaging with them “on a much deeper level” than he had expected. Besides his own poetry, he has published “The Silk Dragon: Translations From the Chinese.”

“I personally learned my own craft of writing poetry through translating poetry,” he says. “I often think that people think of poetry as intimidating, or difficult, which isn’t necessarily true. And I think one way to deepen the appreciation of poetry is to approach it through translation.”

Sze is a New York City native and son of Chinese immigrants who in such collections as “Sight Lines” and “Compass Rose” explores themes of cultural and environmental diversity and what he calls “coexisting.”

In a given poem, he might shift from rocks above a pond to people begging in a subway, from a firing squad in China to Thomas Jefferson’s plantation in Virginia. His many prizes include the National Book Award for “Sight Lines.”

He loves poetry from around the world but feels at home writing in English, if only for the “richness of the vocabulary” and the wonders of its origins.

“I was just looking at the word ‘ketchup,’ which started from southern China, went to Malaysia, was taken to England, where it became a tomato-based sauce, and then, of course, to America,” he says. “And I was just thinking days ago, that’s a word we use every day without recognizing its ancestry, how it’s crossed borders, how it’s entered into the English language and enriched it.”

Italie writes for the Associated Press.

A memory comes to mind from years ago. I am sitting at a desk in a very cold room on a farm. I was invited to go on a writing retreat situated on a farm outside of Makhanda. Things aren’t going so well. I want to write a book on Russia but I am supposed to be writing poems. I think of Boris Pasternak, how I have never read his poems but I am a fan of his nonetheless. I go for long walks. I hide away in my room from the baboons, the host, his wife and the other poets who have been invited to work (see write poems). I eat breakfast and lunch alone trying to find my way, my place in the world. I try to work, I try to work on myself. I wonder about my father’s Makhanda. What he saw, how he felt, how he coped and handled himself in a racist South Africa, a regime that was on tenterhooks.

(I am a writer, a poet writing in a post-apartheid South Africa, a democracy and yet still very much a racist country when aroused, when identified, when fractured.)

I make lots of cups of tea for myself and I eat salads for lunch and scramble eggs with onions in the morning. It becomes something of a mission to get up in the morning. I tell myself it is Russia that is on my mind.

Poetry, reading poetry and writing poetry has taught me not to be angry anymore. It has brought me closer to God, divinity, the spiritual and my own shame.

“If you want to become a philosopher, write a novel,” said Albert Camus.

In response, I say to that that if you want to become poet, become a philosopher. Seek mentors out. Forgive yourself, for a poet writes from trauma, pain and suffering and a minor poet writes about the love they have found, or rather an elusive kind of love that is responsible for their suffering and loneliness.

The minor poet appears at the beginning of his career poised for distinction. He is also a philosopher, schooling the reader on his views of the environment and the circumstances he finds himself in, the lack of common sense in the undisciplined and the degenerate interloper who lives on the fringes of society.

The poet does not write from love although love transforms the poet. When the poet writes with extreme feeling about political undercurrents, human community comes into view and society’s ill feeling is penetrated, then veiled, then cloaked. It is both the minor and the major poets who are heroic in their outlook on life, they want to do away with war, they want to write succinctly about love, the object of their affection (see the third poetry collection Remote Harbour by the South African poet Kyle Allan).

To soak the page with innumerable comments about political standoffs, suns that hover (see the poem Memory Of Sun By the Russian poet Anna Akmatova), the gravitas of the falling leaf, people that exist, hauntings, suicide, insanity, visions and visionaries, inward we turn to find the universe, to make sense of the world and this is a crucial component. That we see this. That life can be beautiful when strangers are kind.

There is substance in being frail and being on the receiving end of pity, understanding, even tolerance. The poet oils death and life with a kind of rational analysis, a perspective that honours the greats and the saints that came before, all that they wrote and said. People and poets aren’t going to live forever. We are all going to die. Nobody will remain at peace or happy forever. Unhappiness and discomfort is unnerving but they are free.

I pluck a meditation from Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius.

Take pleasure out of the simple pleasure of writing. It is dread that drives the pen and not pleasure. Pleasure is the reward but at the beginning of the journey it is dread that drives the pen and annihilates at will.

To aim higher than suspicion, that is what drives the female poet, and that is what drives me who is suspicious of everything. That is why I write. To answer what I question, to find solutions.

In South African Mangaliso Buzani’s poetry collection ‘a naked bone’ there is coherence, a specific timing between humble trusting people and events, virtue, and listening, the kind that trains your brain to become mentally fit when faced with the impossible and daunting. There are mental images that come to mind when I read his poems and I am able to perceive through my own senses and to withstand obstacle and challenge and fear of failure, to be able to face what is left, what you are left with when darkness falls or resentment falls.

Simone Weil asks of us to understand the female philosopher, the feminine mystique and puts us in the position to learn, to teach, to communicate, to be noble, to have the confidence to speak truth into both meaning and memory perfectly and imperfectly with intent and admiration.

What image or component do you conjure up when you think of the female poet, the female philosopher? What is the blueprint for her astonishing and surprising intellectualism? What does she want to achieve, how far does she want to go in life, does she want to have children, a family, stay in one place, travel to exotic locations, what meaning is to be found in the female poet  and female philosopher’s work? The image of this poet/philosopher is turned inward.

Poets are philosophers. Philosophers are poets. The work that is left behind speaks to our past and our future. It is timeless and free, it is of value and it connects us to our childhood where our self-development and search for meaning began.

To put truth first, as South African poets Arthur Nortje and Dennis Brutus did, as South African educationalist George Botha and South African poet Victor Wessels did, as Don Mattera did in his poetry, as the living poet Yusuf Agherdien does is not to be skeptical but to be virtuous and to accept our faults, the faults and our weaknesses, our limitations that we carry within, inherent, that forces us to turn inward, to rid ourselves and to escape ourselves from the irrelevant, from the irrational, to look inward again for coping mechanisms and imagination, illusion and creativity, to look for the real world, normalcy, the betterment of our mind, intellect and psyche in the parasite that is circumstance, manifestation and environment.

It is the poet that yearns for a better world. It is the poet that yearns to live without regret and misery. Misery is a negative emotion. To write poetry is to interact with and to encounter the divine, to collaborate with the universe, to perceive the availability of the recognition of damage, scars, wounding, and frustration. It is when the poet’s anger is justifiable, it is then when they write truth into being.