Celebrate Rimbaud's Birthday with Patti Smith's "Camera Solo"

Happy birthday to Arthur Rimbaud! He would have been...let's see...born on October 20, 1854; he would be 157 today. Um, that's of course not taking into consideration various biological/ecological/actual factors. Also in today's poetry news is Patti Smith's newest art and photography installation--just up at Electric Lady Studios in New York. The exhibition, "Patti Smith: Camera Solo," includes reproductions of "the litter on which Rimbaud was carried," as well as photographs of his utensils (taken in a museum). Smith talked to Isaac Kaplan at ARTINFO about it:

One of your installations contains a reproduction of the litter on which Arthur Rimbaud was carried.

There are two, a black one and a natural-wood one. They're reproductions to scale of the one that Rimbaud was carried on up and down the Ethiopian mountains for about two hundred miles when he had gangrene of the leg and was in mortal agony. He actually drew a sketch of a litter for the Ethiopian bearers to build, and that sketch has survived. I had a litter fashioned after the sketch. I imagined Rimbaud lying on this litter in the pelting rain, in the sweltering heat, in terrible pain, his mind feverish; imagined him returning to a more poetic consciousness, so I wanted to cover the litters with his language, his letters, his poems. The light one represents his youth and is covered with his poetry in French and English. The dark one represents the end of his life, and on that I used gold and bronze and copper pencils to copy his last missives before he died. One was a telegram [sent from his sickbed in France] asking when the next ship would be leaving to go back to Abyssinia, because he wanted to return to Africa. He died the next day. He was semidelirious when he dictated it.

Smith also has photographs of some poetry beds:

Many of the subjects of the photos in the show are literary: Virginia Woolf's bed, the poet John Keats's bed.

At the end of Woolf's life, her husband built her a separate room, almost like a shed, attached to the house — very humble, with a single bed in it — because I think she had a lot of terrible migraines and probably just wanted to be alone. We spend half our life in bed, it seems: giving birth, making love, sleeping, sick. So beds are always interesting to me. Some are very anonymous, and some have a lot of personality. I took a photograph of my friend, the poet Jim Carroll's bed days after he died, and the sadness of the end of his life seemed totally incorporated into his bed linens and his pillow. I’ve always loved books, loved them so much that I loved the people who wrote them for me. I loved J.M. Barrie for giving me Peter Pan, Louisa May Alcott or giving me Little Women, Herman Melville for giving me Moby Dick, Roberto Bolaño for 2666. And I've lost so many people in my life: my husband, my brother, my pianist. Robert Mapplethorpe, who was my best friend. I've lost my parents. Remembering the dead is part of my life.

To read more about Patti Smith's thoughts on photography, and to view a photo gallery (other photos include Walt Whitman's tomb and Robert Mapplethorpe's slippers), mosey on over to ARTINFO.