Review: ‘Just Kids’ by Patti Smith
February 19, 2011 Leave a comment
I’ll say this for Patti Smith: Homegirl certainly knows how to write lifestyle porn.
Somewhere between the Chelsea Hotel and the insertion of a millionaire benefactor I closed her love letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, bonked myself in the head and said “Knock it off.” I needed to stop being dazzled and wooed and to start seeing through clear eyes or I’d wake up in a bus stop in Detroit clutching a one-way ticket to 1971.
People do that. Chuck it all, grab a blanket, commit 100 percent to making things. Music. Pictures. Words. More than just teacher-school dropout Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethrope, a skinny kid on the lam from the Catholic church.
Every day, maybe even right this second, a kid is climbing off a bus at some junction in New York City, schlepping a dirty military backpack filled with notebooks filled with poetry filled with nature imagery, A copy of Bob Dylan’s Chronicles in his back pocket. He’s got two weeks worth of dinero in a two-toned teal velcro wallet and a breathlessness about doing “whatever it takes, washing dishes, cleaning toilets as long as I can write.”
He might, like Patti Smith, sleep in a doorway or two. He might, like Patti, find a street angel who will teach him about day-old bread and primo napping places in Central Park. He might get a job at a book store; move into an extended stay hotel full of eccentrics; become a regular at corner bar. He might meet someone who is first his lover, then friend, muse and soulmate.
He’ll observe and jot and wait for a Warhol-ian figure to notice him, all while experimenting with couplets, then, perhaps free verse, then, perhaps starvation. Published in a zine. A promise for publication on a friend of a friend’s website. And after all those PB&Js, after he maybe even finds a word that rhymes with orange, maybe we’ll hear about him. We probably won’t. Maybe he’ll write a book about his soulmate and win a National Book Award.
This is in progress right now and right now and even right now.
This review was originally published at Minnesota Reads on Saturday, February 19, 2011.
