The Brilliant Mind of Patti Smith
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"You walk like a poet.” In 1969, at New York’s landmark Chelsea Hotel, this remark directed at a notebook-toting Patti Smith changed the course of her life; Bob Neuwirth, a songwriter and aide-de-camp to Janis Joplin, urged the 22-year-old to perform the words she’d been writing for years. In 1971, she would debut her half-spoken, half-sung hallucinatory verse at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, kicking off her career as a seminal recording artist, resulting in such game-changing albums as Horses (1975), Easter (1978), and Wave (1979). Performing, she says, became her “vehicle to improvise poetry.”
All along, literary mentors—Sam Shepard, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Gregory Corso—encouraged her to continue writing, resulting in multiple books of poetry and prose. In 1989, her soulmate, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, would plead on his deathbed that she write “our story”—which became the 2010 National Book Award winner, Just Kids.
Twelve years and three books later, Smith’s constant photo taking, vast travels, Instagram habit, and daily writing regimen have merged in the exquisite A Book of Days. Documenting each day of the year, Smith illustrates her unique musings on the world, her literary and visual-art heroes, and people and objects dear to her via her own and archival photos. The beautifully designed volume is both uplifting and bittersweet.
Much of Smith’s development as a writer, she told me in 1996, evolved during her disappearance from public life between 1979 and 1994. During those years, she lived near Detroit with her husband, the pioneering rock guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith, with whom she’d have two children, Jackson and Jesse. “I really loved having the time off from performing,” Smith said, “because I was able to write in a way I hadn’t been able to write before. When you’re singing or playing guitar, you’re abstracting your sensations or your emotions, instead of using language to articulate how you feel.”
The Smiths and their kids rambled the country, often stopping in small coastal towns. “I like to write by the sea, so we’d find little motels at different seacoasts,” she recalled. Elements of those years and her literary pursuits emerged in Smith’s elegiac M Train and The Year of the Monkey.
Her 46-year-old husband’s death from heart failure in 1994 led the grief-stricken Smith to return to her beloved New York with Jackson and Jesse. There, she resumed her onstage life, touring with Bob Dylan and then releasing Gone Again, her first new album in eight years.
Often accompanied by Jesse, a pianist, and Jackson, a guitarist, she kept up a fast pace, touring, recording, writing, and photographing around the world, a product of what she calls her “jumping-bean personality.” In 2018, a couple of years after Smith got her first smartphone, Jesse introduced her to Instagram, and on the spring equinox, she posted on her freshly minted account, thisispattismith—which has attracted a million followers. As she writes in her introduction to A Book of Days, “Jesse felt the platform would suit me, as I write and take pictures every day.”
A Book of Days
amazon.com
amazon.comSmith, who turns 76 on December 30, is undaunted by the passage of time, or the pandemic. While grounded, she launched “The Melting” on Substack and communicates with subscribers through short videos. In the December 29 entry of A Book of Days, she sums up her devotion to using whatever life brings to express herself artistically. Offering
both solace and spark to fans, she writes: “Now to place energy into the task at hand… Ceaselessly creating.”
Holly George-Warren is the award-winning author of 16 books, including the bestseller Janis: Her Life and Music, and a longtime contributor to such publications as Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and Entertainment Weekly. She has received two Grammy nominations: for coproducing the box set Respect: A Century of Women in Music, and for her liner notes to Joplin’s The Pearl Sessions. She is currently writing a biography of Jack Kerouac (Viking) and collaborating on a book with Dolly Parton (Penguin).
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