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Patti Smith talks about his first performance of poetry – in 1971 at St. Mark’s Church in Bowery in New York – as if it were yesterday. “I remember everything,” she said over the phone from her home in New York. Smith was in his early twenties, working in a bookstore and living at the Chelsea Hotel with her then-lover, playwright Sam Shepard. She had attended poetry readings before, most of which had put her to sleep. “I wanted to do something that wasn’t boring,” she recalls. “Sam said since I was singing to myself all the time, I should try singing a song, or maybe do something with a guitar.” So she called on musician Lenny Kaye to provide “interpretive” sounds on the guitar as she half-read, half-sang his poems.
The show was an instant hit. “It seemed to make a big impression on people – which I really didn’t understand,” she says. Producer Sandy Pearlman approached her afterwards and suggested that she present a rock band. She ended up following his advice, making the flagship album Horses in 1975, and an American punk icon was born.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the St. Mark’s show next month, Smith will take over the light screens of London’s Piccadilly Circus. Curated by digital artist Josef O’Connor and designed for our socially distant reality, the installation will combine art, music, poetry and prose, and will include two recorded performances – one scheduled for midnight on New Years Eve and the another on the day of the US Presidential Inauguration on January 20. “Some of the work I did in my bedroom, some in a recording studio, and some in my office,” said Smith, 74 this week. “I had to teach myself to use Photo Booth on my computer and to film myself reading a poem. I’m sure there are 14 year olds who can do it in five minutes, but it took a long time. But I got there and I’m so proud of myself.
His favorite piece is a reworked version of Peaceable Kingdom. Written in the aftermath of September 11, it is a song of comfort and hope in the face of disaster and, by performing it, Smith will commemorate 100 NHS workers who died from Covid. “It’s so sad to lose people who are working so hard to rebuild our world,” she told herself. She will also read a new poem dedicated to environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who turns 18 in January and who, Smith says, “Practically sacrificed his childhood for all of us.”
Smith is a great speaker: generous, self-deprecating, but deeply serious in her work. She apologizes for not using Zoom but, she explains, “I can sense someone’s presence when I talk to them on the phone. You and I could be sitting in the cafe across the street.
She says the last 10 months have been tough. Smith has lifelong bronchial disease – “I was a sick child, sometimes they feared I wouldn’t make it” – and so has stayed at home throughout the pandemic. Used to traveling, with her group or on a book tour, she barely remembers spending more than two weeks at home before. It was time, in 1979, that Smith put his career on hiatus for a decade to raise two children with her late husband, MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith. But then, she says, “I had so much responsibility and a real purpose. Being in limbo for almost 10 months, for a person like me who doesn’t like to sit in one place, it was very difficult. I feel like I’m half a wolf, wandering from room to room.
Four years under Trump have also taken their toll. “It was a terrible atmosphere to live,” she says. “You try to do your job and don’t let [politics] permeates your consciousness daily but it does. It’s very insidious. She notes that she and the outgoing president are roughly the same age. “I met him in New York over the years and found him a horrible, narcissistic person and just a bad businessman. I saw the wreckage of his things. I think the damage he caused is going to be felt for a long time. It will not be so easy to heal because in the world he has empowered like-minded people.
Nonetheless, she will take “enormous psychological relief in the new administration.” I am a natural optimist, so I am not without hope or inspiration. What matters is trying to clean up some of your mess and tidy up. I do this at home. I’m a messy person and I know that before I can do anything creative or exciting, I have to erase everything first.
Although Smith is famous for her music – Rolling Stone ranked Horses as the 26th best album of all time and in 2007 she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – she considers herself a writer rather than a musician .
“My daily practice since I was young has always been to write,” she says. “I was married to a musician and my kids are musicians, so I know how a musician thinks. It’s out of respect for [them] that I don’t like to be called one.
Over the past 20 years, she has traded poetry widely for memoirs, first with her award-winning book Just Kids, about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Her next two books, M Train and Year of the Monkey, focused on her recent life, revealing her as a lonely soul bent on creativity and for whom the ghosts of those she lost – her parents, her brother, her husband – stay close.
“The funny thing is, I never wanted to write non-fiction,” she says. “For years, I wrote novels, all unpublished. Then Robert asked me on the day he died to write our story and of course I promised him that I would.
Mapplethorpe died of HIV in 1989, although it took 10 years for Smith to start writing Just Kids and 10 more to finish. When he arrived in New York, his plan wasn’t just to make a lot of money. “I had more pride than that,” she explains. “I wanted to do something good. I wanted to write a classic. My dreams were much more noble than fame and fortune. But Robert really wanted me to be successful… And in my entire life, including any record, [Just Kids] has been my most successful business. So Robert made his wish come true.
Now Smith is working on a new book which she calls “auto-fiction,” which will be full of dreams and imagination, and further reflection on where her life is now. Smith “keenly feels the urgency of our global problems.” But, she adds: “I still love life. I am so grateful that I can write – my notebook has been my companion in the most difficult times. As a writer, I’ll be as dark as I need to be – you can be a pacifist or a murderer in your work. But as a mother, grandmother, aunt, I try to stay optimistic, practical and responsible. I try to live by my parents’ work ethic and I do my own thing, and I do what I need to do to make things as good as possible.
She still loves to act – “My goal is to stay in touch with people, and when I go on stage, it’s all for them” – but it hasn’t always been easy. Smith mentions her performance of A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall by Bob Dylan at the 2016 Nobel Prize ceremony in Sweden, when she forgot the lyrics and had to stop and start over. “I bleached, I just froze,” she says. “I felt like a child. I just wanted to run away and hide under the bed. But I had to continue because I had a responsibility. If this performance didn’t do anything else, I hope it set an example of not giving up in the face of humiliation, and just to breathe and keep going.
Take a breath and continue is what Smith does now under lock and key, working on her book and counting the days until she can get back on the road. Lately, she dreamed of revisiting the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci in Milan and the Adoration of the Magi by Rubens in Cambridge. “But art endures, and these works are not going anywhere,” she says. “When the time is right, I’ll be back.”
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