Few artists have done more to reconstruct the course of contemporary culture than Patti Smith (b. December 30 1946). Celebrated as the “Godmother of Punk,” her musical influence reverberates across acclaimed artists from Garbage to Morrissey to Madonna, and Michael Stipe famously cited her as the core inspiration for founding R.E.M. As a poet and visual artist, she has explored with lyrical poignancy issues of irrepressible urgency, ranging from foreign policy to mortality.
Among Smith’s greatest feats it the systematic demolition of the the perilous and artificial divide between “high” and “low” culture. In 1978, her song “Because the Night” from the groundbreaking album Horses reached #13 on the Billboard 100 chart; in 2010, her remarkable memoir Just Kids earned her the National Book Award. William Blake and Arthur Rimbaud have inspired much of her music, which has moved generations of hearts and bodies across dance floors and mosh pits. In 2005, she was named a Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture; in 2006, she brought down the house at CBGB’s with an extraordinary 3½-hour masterpiece of a performance. The following year, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Allen Ginsberg once bought her a sandwich in the East Village after mistaking her for “a very pretty boy.”
In the decades between Horses (1975) and Banga (2012), Smith recorded nine other studio albums, delivered countless poetry readings, and authored a number of books, including the breathtaking The Coral Sea, which chronicles her grief over the loss of her onetime lover, lifelong friend, and comrade-in-artistic-arms Robert Mapplethorpe.
In Just Kids, which documents how Smith found her creative voice during her early life with Mapplethorpe when both were aspiring artists in New York City, she articulates the singular duality of her muse:
It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.
For more than half a century, poet and essayist Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 — March 27, 2012) explored with equal parts courage and conviction such complex cultural phenomena as identity and ideology, gender and politics, oppression and freedom. The recipient of numerous honors, including the National Book Award for Poetry, two Guggenheim fellowships, and a MacArthur “genius” grant — Rich is celebrated as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.
For Rich, art was as much a tool of creative expression as it was a vehicle for empathy, for expanding one’s understanding of the world beyond the limits of the individual. In a 2005 conversation at the Kelly Writers House, she articulates her ethos with a beautiful definition of art:
One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
Rich’s own life was anything but ordinary. In 1953, she married Harvard professor Alfred Haskell Conrad, who fathered her three children. Over the decade that followed, her career exploded, in the process catapulting her into a spurt of personal growth, self-discovery, and political awakening. In 1970, stifled by the institution of marriage, Rich divorced Conrad. In 1976, she met and fell in love with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, who became her lifelong partner and inspired Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), her first literary exploration of lesbian desire and sexuality, later included in one of her most celebrated works, The Dream of a Common Language (1978). The two remained together for thirty-six years, until Rich’s death in 2012. In a lamentable manifestation of the current failings of marriage equality, as of this writing, her Wikipedia entry still lists Conrad as her only spouse.
In 1997, in protest against the growing monopoly of power and the government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, Rich famously became the first and only person to date to decline the prestigious National Medal of Arts, the highest honor bestowed upon an individual artist on behalf of the people of the United States, previously awarded to such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Updike, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and fellow reconstructionist Maya Angelou.
But despite the strong undercurrents of political and sociocultural commentary, Rich’s work was driven first and foremost by the irrepressible stirrings of her inner life. She reflected in an interview:
A poem can come out of something seen, something overheard, listening to music, an article in a newspaper, a book, a combination of all these… There’s a kind of emotional release that I then find in the act of writing the poem. It’s not, ‘I’m now going to sit down and write a poem about this.’
Learn more: Brain Pickings | Wikipedia
One of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century, Susan Sontag (January 16, 1933 – December 28, 2004) has left indelible marks on contemporary culture spanning film criticism, literary theory, political activism, theater, and education. From her prolific and penetrative essays to her novels to her production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in a candlelit theatre during the Siege of Sarajevo, Sontag’s extraordinary work ethic and uncompromising cultural stance earned her numerous literary prizes and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship.
In On Photography (1977), Sontag constructed a seminal critique of the role of visual culture in capitalist society; in Illness as Metaphor (1978), she confronted the “blame-the-victim” sensibility and its long history of shaming those suffering from disease by projecting onto them psychological failings in addition to their already debilitating physical pain; Against Interpretation (1966) endures as one of the most critically acclaimed essay anthologies in history.
Despite her daunting powers of reason, Sontag was also a woman of immense emotional capacity. Per her self-professed account, she had been in love nine times in her life — four with men, one of whom, the writer Philip Rieff, fathered her only child, David, and five with women, including legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz, with whom Sontag spent the last decade of her life.
From her poignant meditations on art, love, and writing to her formidable media diet of literature and film to her intense love affairs and infatuations to her meditations on society’s values and vices, Sontag’s recently published journals reveal an intimate glimpse of a woman celebrated as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable minds, yet one who felt as deeply and intensely as she thought, oscillating between conviction and insecurity in the most beautifully imperfect and human way possible as she settles into her own skin not only as a dimensional writer but also as a dimensional human being.
Learn more: Wikipedia | Brain Pickings
More than a century and a half before Kickstarter and the golden age of modern self-publishing, young Charlotte Brontë (April 21, 1816 — March 31, 1855) and her two sisters, Emily and Elizabeth, self-financed and -released a joint poetry anthology under the pen names Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. Charlotte later wrote of the decision:
We did not like to declare ourselves women, because — without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called ‘feminine’ — we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice; we had noticed how critics sometimes use for their chastisement the weapon of personality, and for their reward, a flattery, which is not true praise.
Less than a century later, Brontë’s work reached the status of literary gold standard and has since been looked on with the wide admiration of “true praise.”
But Charlotte’s life was as trying as her legacy is lasting. The third of six children, she outlived all of her siblings, even though she herself died a few weeks short of her 39th birthday. When she was only nine, she lost both of her older sisters to tuberculosis. Shortly after the success of Jane Eyre, her brother Branwell, with whom she had been extremely close, died of chronic bronchitis and complications of heavy drinking. Her sister Emily fell gravely ill after Branwell’s funeral and died of pulmonary tuberculosis within weeks. Five months later, in May of 1849, the relentless disease claimed Charlotte’s last remaining sibling, Anne.
Charlotte herself was only 38 when she died, with her unborn child in her womb and a world of posthumous recognition ahead of her.
Learn more: Wikipedia | The Life of Charlotte Bronte (biography)
