Devotion by Patti Smith

Devotion is short enough to devour at one enjoyable sitting and thought-provoking enough to deserve re-reading.--Suzi Feay, Financial Times\n\n"Devotion shows rather than tells what it means to give a life to writing. "--Katherine Cooper, Hyperallergic\n\nA 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.\n\nPatti Smith, a National Book Award-winning author, 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 cafÈ 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.\n\nThe 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.\n\nEditorial Reviews\n\nDevotion is short enough to devour at one enjoyable sitting and thought-provoking enough to deserve re-reading. . . . It's a privilege to spend any time with Patti Smith, however brief."--Suzi Feay, Financial Times\n\n"A triptych of compact, heartfelt essays on discovery, solitude and writing."--Darragh McManus, Irish Independent\n\n"By turns allegorical, metaphysical, fictional and factual, Devotion shows rather than tells what it means to give a life to writing. A master of poetic innovation, Smith takes her style to the next level in this slim volume."--Katherine Cooper, Hyperallergic\n\n"Smith, a contemplative writer of gratitude and reverence, . . . deepens her inquiry into the nature of inspiration in this slender, trenchant volume. . . . Gracefully improvisational, as always, Smith offers an unusually poetic, mystical, and transfixing perspective on the mystery of literary creation."--Donna Seaman, Booklist\n\n"The lesson is obvious: that a writer draws on every detail of his or her life for the alchemical, often unconscious process of creation. But seeing the process in action is a profound experience. Smith's writing in the essays is as beautifully structured as her poetry."--Publishers Weekly\n\n"Smith is telling it her way, but also in the ancient way. It's recognizable to readers for its mythic proportion, accessible to all kinds of people for its brevity and intensity--and yet, it's still distinctly Patti Smith."--Megan Volpert, PopMatters\n\n"This is what is so astonishing about [Smith's] career and what motivates Devotion--the way that, as she has gotten older, Smith's vision has expanded, framing her self-awareness not as self-absorption but rather a deep dive into everything, the exhilaration and the terror and the transcendence that we all share."--David Ulin, Barnes & Noble Review\n\n"A creative, graceful and uncommonly beautiful little book about writing from the poet and singer who has, in maturity, become an even richer and more complex artist than she was at her greatest fame. She has become one of the most compelling writers of prose that we have and one of the most arresting about artists and other writers. Follow her here as she deals with Camus, Nabokov, Mishima, Genet, Simone Weil, and Patrick Modiano. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at Yale and artfully illustrated for this edition, this, in book form, is as exquisite as anything published in this season. In her late-life self discovery as a prose master, Patti Smith may have found yet another masterful voice."--Jeff Simon, Buffalo News\n\n"Packed with enough passion and contagious energy to move readers to tune into their own inspirations and--whatever their medium--get to work."--Kelsey J. Waite, AV Club\n\n"In Devotion, [Smith] starkly shares and uncovers, through a spare, haunting prose, the reasons she is compelled to write; so evocative is Smith's writing that we're compelled to read it as her voices transfixes us with its bell-like clarity and ringing passion."--Henry Carrigan, No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music\n\n"An enchanting peek into the mysterious ways of creativity, as Smith immerses in her beloved French literary classics and cites the everyday encounters that can spark inspiration."--Brian McCollum, Detroit Free Press\n\n"This is what Smith does to her devoted readers--she provokes memory, isolation, and the desire to make something out of the mundane. . . . Devotion, though a departure from her previous books, does not deviate from Smith's remarkable gift."--Jerilyn Jordan, Detroit Metro Times\n\n"Through her lyrical and mystical style, Smith gracefully shares her perspective on the mystery of literary creation."--New York Spaces\n\n- From the Publisher\n\nPatti Smith opens Devotion with a riff on inspiration, which she invokes as "the unforeseen quantity, the muse that assails at the hidden hour." Yes, the unforeseen quantity . . . although we might refer to it as the unforeseen quality as well. Who understands how inspiration operates, the way a set of glimmers or observations coalesce inside the mind and are transmuted into image, thought, or narrative? Even those who do creative work are hard-pressed to offer more than homilies. I think of William Faulkner, who once explained that "the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey." Or Albert Einstein, who suggested that "imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world." What they -- and Smith -- are saying is that it's impossible to pinpoint how, exactly, an idea or piece of work comes into being, that if not mystical exactly it is at a level beyond conscious reckoning. "Most often," Smith elaborates, "the alchemy that produces a poem or a work of fiction is hidden within the work itself, if not imbedded in the coiling ridges of the mind." In that regard, perhaps, the most definitive statement she or any artist can make is something like this one: "I had inadvertently produced evidence, annotating as I went along."\n\nFor Smith, that is a matter, as much as anything, of process, the way our work often surprises us as it finds its form. And yet, lest this seem too mechanical, Smith remains attentive to what she might refer to as the holiness of the task. There's a reason this book -- which grew out of the Windham-Campbell Lectures she delivered at Yale last year and kicks off Yale University Press's series "Why I Write" -- is called Devotion; she is, as she has long been, devotional in her approach. Think of that famous opening to her debut album, Horses: "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine." The line projects a tone of punk rock swagger, a sneer in the face of expected pieties -- until the verse resolves in an unexpected couplet: "My sins my own / They belong to me." Attitude becomes acceptance, or better, a posture of responsibility. "[T]here are precious words to grind," she writes in Woolgathering, which is my favorite of her books, an impressionistic anti-memoir in which childhood memories blur into imagination, or spiritual practice, or something that is equal parts of both. I don't want to make too much of this; like all artists, Smith recognizes that what she does is hard work, days and months of staring down both blankness and self-doubt. Nonetheless, as she observes in her poem "The Writer's Song": "it is better to write / then die / a thousand prayers / and souvenirs / set away in earthenware / we draw the jars / from the shelves / drink our parting / from ourselves / so be we king / or be we bum / the reed still whistles / the heart still hums."\n\nDevotion emerges directly from such territory: The book is a meditation on creativity and its (dis)contents. Divided into three parts, it asks us to consider the relationship between inspiration, work, and aftermath -- not by explaining but by illustrating the ways they interact. How does Smith achieve this? She begins with a section entitled "How the Mind Works," which could be a missing chapter from her preceding book, M Train. What makes M Train so vivid is its quality of serendipity, of unfolding in the present; reading it feels like accompanying Smith on a journey, both exterior and interior, physical and emotional, in which neither she nor we are sure where we'll end up. The first part of Devotion has a similar quality, beginning with a description of a film about the 1941 forced deportation of Estonians by the Soviets, then offering a few lines, a few brief sequences, in response. Afterward, we follow Smith to her neighborhood cafÈ, where she reads Patrick Modiano while pondering her inchoate desire to put something on the page. The references to other artists, other work, have long been part of Smith's method; she likes to wear her influences on her sleeve. Here, that means less her usual heroes (William Burroughs, Rimbaud, Robert Mapplethorpe) than a related set of ghosts, mostly French -- Camus and Simone Weil, primarily -- which is only fitting since much of "How the Mind Works" takes place in France.\n\nSmith's point -- that we can never shed the artists who have come before us, nor should we want to, for they make us who we are -- sits at the very center of her project, which has always (among other things) positioned her in a lineage. Thus, she invokes Schiller and Joyce and Goethe, as well as other "ghosts of writers" who have walked the path she now treads. "I knew Genet," the head of the French publisher Gallimard tells her, "softly, looking away so as not to appear immodest." For Smith, this is all part of the atmosphere -- of Paris, yes, but also of her inner life. The writing, when it comes, grows out of both impulses, or maybe it begins at the moment they coalesce. Either way, it is at the seaside town of SËte that she begins what will become the second part of the book, a long fable named Devotion, which traces the relationship of a teenage ice skater, the daughter of an Estonian couple lost in the deportations, and an older man who becomes her fateful love. "Her mind was a muscle of discontent," Smith writes, describing her protagonist, a line so stunning it stops me short. This is how the particular bleeds into the universal, how the experience of this young woman speaks to a condition that is shared, I believe, by nearly all of us. "Languages are like chess," she tells the man, to which he replies, "And words are like moves?" The porousness, the extent to which we are aware of, although undistracted by, the presence of the author in the background, is a key intention of the book.\n\nOn the one hand, this has everything to do with Smith herself; she always sits at the center of her work. For her, writing (or music or photography) is an interior exploration, although it also is, it must be, something more. At times, this has led her to indulgence: Radio Ethiopia, for instance, an album I adored when I was younger, if much less so now. Still, this is what is so astonishing about her career and what motivates Devotion -- the way that, as she has gotten older, Smith's vision has expanded, framing her self-awareness not as self-absorption but rather a deep dive into everything, the exhilaration and the terror and the transcendence that we all share. "What is the task?" she wonders in the closing lines here. "To compose a work that communicates on several levels, as in a parable, devoid of the stain of cleverness . . . What is the dream? To write something fine, that would be better than I am, and that would justify my trials and indiscretions. To offer proof, through a scramble of words, that God exists."\n\nI'm not entirely sure about the God part, although really that's a matter of semantics, since what Smith is asking for has less to do with any deity than with the intention to write beyond oneself. That is the point of Devotion, and its message also: art making as inspirational act. Such inspiration is less a search for a starting point than a mechanism for connection, a desire to communicate. "Why do we write?" Smith asks, and the answer comes encoded in the question, as of course it must. "A chorus erupts . . . Because we cannot simply live."\n\nDavid L. Ulin is the author of Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he spent ten years as book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times. \n\nReviewer: David L. Ulin\n- The Barnes & Noble Review\n\nPatti Smith makes a story of her process of creation. The result is a contemplation of the art of writing, sources of inspiration, and movement towards discipline, which may be a little dry for those who are not interested in Smith's work or her frequent French backdrops. For fans of Smith's work, however, her narration creates the illusion of being in the same room with her. We are treated to the best kind of lecture, one given by a generous intellectual mind. She is warm, precise, and measured as she describes struggling with the mundane details of everyday life in order to give rein to the impulse to create. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine\n- JUNE 2018 - AudioFile\n\n2017-07-04\nMuch-honored rock goddess and writer Smith (M Train, 2015, etc.) returns with a hurried meditation on miscellaneous deep things, including the title topic.Where Just Kids (2010) was alive with bohemian exuberance and M Train was one long product-placement vehicle, the latest seems like a knocked-off magazine piece for some vaguely spiritual enterprise. At the core of this slender volume, part of the publisher's Why I Write series, is a love story, of sorts, concerning an Estonian skater who bears more than a passing resemblance to the young Horses-era Smith: "She was small with porcelain skin and thick dark hair with severely cut fringe." Every idea she has of herself is in complete relation and devotion to skating; "I excelled in school," she intones, "yet nothing before skating gave me the tools to express the inexpressible." Naturally, the unflinching Eugenia had to make a tough choice, and guess what she stopped doing? In memoir-ish vignettes bracketing this story, Smith writes of the French martyr Simone Weil, to whom she directs a poem with a rather awful couplet about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (surely Weil deserves better); of visiting Albert Camus' home and being given time alone with the manuscript of The First Man, with its "unflinching unity with his subject"; of surrealists and anarchists and travels here and there. Sometimes Smith catches a poetic wave and rides it capably, as when she writes, "it occurs to me that the young look beautiful as they sleep and the old, such as myself, look dead." It's not the profoundest thought she's ever expressed, but it's nicely rendered all the same. Not so many other passages, though--e.g., can a monotone be lilting? Not Smith's best work--fine for devotees but pretty thin gruel for the uninitiated.\n- Kirkus Reviews