I came to poetry early, thanks mainly to my parents’ throwing a few good anthologies my way as soon as I could read. I loved it all, the rhyming stuff especially, and the more fanciful the better—Coleridge and Blake being particular favorites—and also the stuff you’d expect a kid to like: John Ciardi, Edward Lear, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

I was aware, even then, that the title was mawkish and vaguely condescending, but still A Child’s Garden of Verses rocked my little world. The first poem I remember thinking: This!—really young, maybe four or five—was Stevenson’s “Happy Thought.” It was also the first poem I ever memorized, which became a vaguely geeky lifelong habit, and if I were inclined to get lines of poetry tattooed somewhere on my person, that would be my choice. In its entirety:

The world is so full of a number of things,
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Some solid, unironic words to live by, if you ask me; a gentle antidote to the inclination to buckle under information overload. So I was particularly pleased to hear the poet’s name come up in a report from the Edinburgh International Festival. On August 13, Patti Smith and Philip Glass teamed up for The Poet Speaks, a music, word, and visual homage to poet Allen Ginsberg. Among other things, Smith—another deep-rooted influence of mine, though maybe not going back quite that far—spoke of her lifelong love of Stevenson:

“I can’t imagine my childhood without him. His poems were my companions, my friends,” she said. The singer, songwriter, poet and artist recalled her early days as a “very sickly child”.

“I had pneumonia, I contracted TB, scarlet fever, every childhood disease. And my two favorite books were [William Blake's] Songs of Innocence and Experience, and Stevenson’s poems.”

She went on to perform two of her favorites, Looking Glass River and The Land of Nod, “just for my own pleasure—to read him in the place of his birth.”

I’m always interested to know who and what influenced artists I admire, and the thought of Smith in her bed with a copy of A Child’s Garden is an amiable one. I hope she keeps the odd poem of his in her lineup. And the next time you see her play, when the inevitable annoying “Freebird”-request-shouter in the audience calls out, “HAPPY THOUGHT!”—that’ll be me.

(Photo of Patti Smith at the Edinburgh International Festival ©Eoin Carey.)