February 15, 2021 - Micro book reviews: Arthur Russell on Patti Smith’s "Just Kids" - Chapter Three, Pages 166-167.
I may not have mentioned that I’m reading Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, which is a chronicle of her life in NYC 1965 till not sure when because I haven’t finished. I think she’s a gifted narrator, and that her poetic sensibilities emerge constantly. Here’s a passage about her time with Jim Carroll, author of Basketball Diaries:
Jim and I spent a lot of time in Chinatown. Every outing with him was a floating adventure, riding the high summer clouds. I liked to watch him interact with strangers. We would go to Hong Fat because it was cheap and the dumplings were good, and he would talk to the old guys. You ate what they brought to the table or you pointed to someone’s meal because the menu was in Chinese. They cleaned the tables by pouring hot tea on them and wiping it up with a rag. The whole place had the fragrance of oolong. Sometimes Jim just picked up an abstract thread of conversation with one of these venerable-looking men, who would then lead us through the labyrinth of their lives, through the Opium Wars and the opium dens of San Francisco. And then we would tramp from Mott to Mulberry to Twenty-third Street, back in our time, as if nothing had ever happened.
Of course, the ending is such a wonderful surprise. The tramp through the physical grid of the city becomes a journey through time, which is wonderful enough, but the last phrase, “as if nothing had ever happened” illuminates the experience, casts a kind of backward, confirmatory wonderfulness on the interesting, but seemingly ordinary, details she’s just shared. And note how she builds to that poetic turn starting with the tea to clean the tables, the smell of oolong, and then the assonance of ells in “lead us through the labyrinth of their lives” followed by the double “opium” of “Opium Wars and the opium dens.” And, too, in the geography bit, the evocative ems of “Mott” and “Mulberry” yielding to the colder, numerical “Twenty-third Street,” which mirrors the march from magical past to bland present. And yet none of these devices is obtrusive, none calls attention to the wit or cleverness of the poet. There is humility in her craft.
______________________________________________
Arthur Russell lives in Nutley, New Jersey, where he works as a lawyer. He is the winner of both Providence Fine Arts Work Center and Syracuse University fellowships as well as Brooklyn Poets’ YAWP Poem of the Year for 2015 and YAWPER of the Year for 2016.
His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Paterson Literary Review, Prelude, Yellow Chair Journal, Muse-Pie Press, Shot Glass Journal, Brooklyn Poetry Anthology (2017), the Red Wheelbarrow #9, and Wilderness House Literary Review.
