In the midst of a certain number of publications which this year highlight the 150 years ofA season in Hellthe only collection published during the lifetime of the poet Arthur Rimbaud, some catch our eye.
Like this superb large format edition ofA season in Hell. 1873 and other poemsenriched with photographs, personal texts and drawings by Patti Smith.
Since his discovery at the age of 16 of Illuminations, in her native Chicago, the American singer and writer’s passion for the poet has never really wavered. It must be said that between the interpreter of Because the Night and the author of Letters from the seerdazzling master of freedom, inexhaustible source of inspiration for generations of artists and writers, the atoms hooked are without number.
A season in Hellshe describes it as the “pamphlet” of an “adolescent who recognized and rejected all mirrors, fought all demons, unmasked the archangels and prophesied the modern era”.
A sort of godmother of the punk movement, since Horsesher iconic album from 1975, this peace activist, often opposed to the American government, has several times defended political causes through the texts of her songs: the invasion of Tibet by China or the destruction of a Lebanese village by the Israeli army.
But for a long time, Patti Smith, 76 years old, has loved France as much as she is passionate about French culture – she showed us this in Devotion (Gallimard, 2018).
Better yet: in Roche, a small village of 90 inhabitants in the Ardennes where Rimbaud spent a large part of his childhood, Patti Smith purchased a house rebuilt on the ruins of the family farm where the poet came to take refuge after the two shots fired by Verlaine in their hotel room in Brussels on July 10, 1873.
The Germans made it their headquarters during the First World War and razed it when they left in 1918. From this house which grew up on the very spot where the poet wrote at age 19 The Illuminationsshe intends, she says, to make a place of residence for writers.
Patti Smith, obviously attached to the “pebbles of the old floods” – as Rimbaud writes in Hunger —, says that she even has the bullet that remained in the Lefaucheux revolver with six shots of 7 millimeters after Verlaine’s madness of love and despair. A tiny object that she cherishes like a talisman and a relic.
It is the same flame that animates A book of days, beautiful collection of captioned photographs. A project which took root at the time of the pandemic, while the American was stuck in New York and which is a bit like the book version of her Instagram account, which she supplied with photos, drawing from her box of Polaroids or in its more recent archives. There are tributes to a number of artists and writers from his travels or birthdays: Dante, Rimbaud, Genet, Bolaño, Robert Walker and Hermann Broch. Inspiring.