“The ultimate language”: how Patti Smith discovered Rimbaud
Sometimes our lives are changed serendipitously. You meet someone by chance, you hear a song in passing, you see some moving film you’ve never heard of before, you buy a book purely based on the cover—and that’s it, everything is different. Some would say it’s fate, others would laugh at that claim. But given the gravity of the moment that Patti Smith discovered Arthur Rimbaud, it surely cannot just be called a coincidence.
There is no Patti Smith without Rimbaud, that’s certain. As a teenager, Smith was aimless. She sensed that maybe she was meant to do something special, but had no guide on that path. She’d read books that moved her before and left her wondering whether she perhaps had the mettle for that, but in small-town Philadelphia, she lacked a guardian angel.
“I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one,” Smith recalled of her youth in her memoir Just Kids. “I wondered if I had really been called as an artist,” she writes about always desiring a sense of higher purpose, continuing, “I didn’t mind the misery of a vocation, but I dreaded not being called.” But the calling didn’t seem to come. She simply went to school, took a dull job in a factory and burned for more.
Maybe she would have found a way regardless, but the Patti Smith the world might have known then would have looked very different. She always nursed a love for rock stars, so perhaps she could have just been that—all punk, no poetry. But in this story, and in the making of the Patti Smith we do know, something, or rather someone else, had to step in.
“I found him in a Philadelphia bus depot when I was 16”. That was it—everything changed. On a pile of old, used books, Smith judged one by its cover: “I remember seeing a copy of Illuminations for sale on a table of used books. Of course, illuminations is a great word, but what I was really taken by was the cover. It was a beautiful picture of Rimbaud. That’s why I got the book,” she told Interview, where her life-changing moment came down to a nice design choice.
But there was something about it that surely had to be more than just chance. Even the way Smith talks about it speaks to that, as this book seemed to call to her. “When I opened it up, I didn’t really understand it. It didn’t compute,” she admitted, “But still, somehow, I knew this was the perfect language. It looked like it glittered. I knew someday I would decipher it. So I carried the book around with me.”
Over time, Rimbaud’s writing revealed itself to her, giving her what she called “the ultimate language.” It was more than just a good book to get into. It was an inspiration, a new world opening up, a new perspective on how language could be used and how a person could share things. Rimbaud quickly became the ultimate muse for Smith and one who has endured and pioneered her career as she launched herself with the Rock and Rimbaud performances. The rebellious French writer gave her the spark to be a rebellious American writer and fuck with the boundaries of artforms, just as he did back in the 1800s.
I discovered Patti Smith in an HMV in my rundown hometown when I was about 16 myself. I knew nothing about her, but the cover of Just Kids spoke to me—the stark black, the shiny photobooth image of her and a sailor. It was on sale, £4, so I bought it—everything changed. As the primary inspiration behind my own writing, discovering her felt too like finding “the ultimate language”, and so the cycle goes on.
