Roland Allen

I’ve come to like the hard-driving staccato of Punk over the past couple of years but I didn't listen to it as a university student and l don't know early or "classic" Punk. So I know little to nothing about Patti Smith and The Sex Pistols apart from recognizing her name.

However, Slate's article on Patti Smith's new book of poetry caught my eye. According to Slate and to the couple of reviews on Amazon.com, Smith is a good writer.

Auguries of Innocence is a testament to her ongoing devotion to poetry—and not the poetry of her contemporaries. She adheres to poetic inversion and archaic language, and the poems are studded by her trademark French symbolist abstractions: "I saw the book upon the shelf,/ I saw you who was myself" (a la Rimbaud) and "I will sit here till dawn tripping/ the spine of the stars." The influence of poets like Baudelaire and Blake (whose "The Chimney Sweeper" she reprises here) is obvious, and her wide reading has resulted in a sense of how structure and sentiment intertwine in poetry.
...
Reading Blake, she told me, "reminded me of how elegantly he lived through personal strife and poverty, how he kept his personal vision"—a vision she strives to adhere to herself: namely, that music, poems, and paintings can make us better people.

Flannery O'Connor said that people who have the ability to read and choose not to do so lack imagination and a sense for mystery. It's awesome that Smith reads good literature and takes off from there as a poet. This makes me believe her when she says that "music, poems, and paintings can make us better people." She presents a rich idea and, clearly, art has encouraged creativity in her life. These are grand and hopeful and very cool thoughts.

One final point: I enjoy words. I love the sound of the title word "auguries" because, to me, it carries a mysterious tone that seems particularly archaic and literary.