Patti Smith is best known as one of the early progenitors of what would be called punk rock in the United States in the late 1970s, but she is also known for her drawings and poetry. She lived and worked with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who became a one of her biggest influences. Her drawings often combine texts from her poems.
Widow of MC5 guitarist Fred Sonic Smith.
Poet and punk musician.
Was the first performer to sell out a poetry recital at New Yorks CBGBs music club.
Was the inspiration for Gilda Radner s character Candy Slice on "Saturday Night Live" .
Ranked #15 on VH1s 100 Greatest Women of Rock N Roll
Husband Fred Sonic Smith died of heart failure in 1994, at the age of 45 years.
Gave birth to her son Jackson Smith in 1982 and her daughter Jesse Smith in 1987.
Collaborated on a soundtrack song from Wim Wenders film, Bis ans Ende der Welt (US title: "Until the End of the World").
Husband Fred Sonic Smith broke a decade-long hiatus from music to co-produce her comeback album, "Dream of Life".
She and husband, Fred Sonic Smith , lived in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, an eastern suburb of Detroit, during their married years from 1980 to his death in 1994.
She was voted the 47th Greatest Artist in Rock n Roll by Rolling Stone.
Former girlfriend of controversial photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Her song "About a Boy" is a tribute to late Nirvana vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Kurt Cobain , who wrote a song called "About a Girl".
Graduated from Deptford Township High School.
Born to a Jehovahs Witness mother, she grew up in Woodbury, New Jersey.
Was romantically linked to Allen Lanier before marrying Fred Sonic Smith.
Active supporter of the US Green Party.
Won the National Book Award in 2010 for her memoir, "Just Kids", which she plans on adapting into a screenplay. It discusses her whole life, but specially focuses on her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.
(April 2005) She will appear in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on 7 April 2005 as part of a program entitled "The Dark and the Light: An Evening of Spoken Word and Music Dedicated to Diane Arbus." This event is presented in conjunction with the exhibition "Diane Arbus Revelations."
Former girlfriend of Actor, Screenwriter, & ex-drummer, Sam Shepard in 1971 when they co-wrote & acted in a play "Cowboy Mouth" at the American Place Theatre, New York City.
Since the death of her husband, Patti chronicles much of her life with her vintage Polaroid Land 250 camera.
Resides in Rockaway, Queens, New York.
[on friendship] Those who have suffered understand suffering and,therefore extend their hand.
Freedom is. . . the right to write the wrong words.
Make your interactions with people transformational, not just transactional.
. . . the law of empathy, by which he could, by his will, transfer himself into an object or a work of art, and thus inflence the outer world. He did not feel redeemed by the work he did. He did not seek redemption. He sought to see what others did not, the projection of his imagination.
In the war of magic and religion, is magic ultimately the victor? Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.
Everything comes down so pasteurizedeverything comes down 16 degreesthey say your amplifier is too loudturn your amplifier downare we high all alone on our kneesmemory is just hips that swinglike a clockthe past projects fantastic scenestic/toc tic/toc tic/tocfuck the clock!,We were as Hansel and Gretel and we ventured out into the black forest of the world.
I refuse to believe that Hendrix had the last possessed hand,that Joplin had the last drunken throat,that Morrison had the last enlightened mind.
We didn’t have to talk then, and that is real friendship. Never uncomfortable with silence, which, in its welcome form, is yet an extension of conversation.
He picks the lock of her dreams with her own hairpin.
He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.
I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.
I had no concept of what life at the Chelsea Hotel would be like when we checked in, but I soon realized it was a tremendous stroke of luck to end up there. We could have had a fair-seized railroad flat in the East Village for what we were paying, but to dwell in this eccentric and damned hotel provided a sense of security as well as a stellar education. The goodwill that surrounded us was proof that the Fates were conspiring to help their enthusiastic children.
I read and feel that same compulsion; the desire to possess what he has written, which can only be subdued by writing something myself.
It was like being at an Arabian hoedown with a band of psychedelic hillbillies (p. 171).
I had one of those headaches. It kept pounding and got into that crazy realm where the guillotine seems like a good idea.
We imagined ourselves as the Sons of Liberty with a mission to preserve, protect, and project the revolutionary spirit of rock and roll. We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity.
It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was.
All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations. All I needed for the heart was to visit a place of greater storms.
I may not know what is in your mind, but I know how your mind works.
I had no proof that I had the stuff to be an artist, though I hungered to be one,Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.
Is it time uninterrupted? Only the present comprehended? Are our thoughts nothing but passing trains, no stops, devoid of dimension, whizzing by massive posters with repeating images? Catching a fragment from a window seat, yet another fragment from the next identical frame? If I write in the present yet digress, is that still real time? Real time, I reasoned, cannot be divided into sections like numbers on the face of a clock. If I write about the past as I simultaneously dwell in the present, am I still in real time? Perhaps there is no past or future, only the perpetual present that contains this trinity of memory.
Perhaps priest and magician were once one, but the priest, learning humility in the face of God, discarded the spell for prayer.
I wanted to cry so bad, but my tears are inside. A blindfold keeps them there. I can’t see today. Patti, I don’t know anything.
Christ was a man worthy to rebel against, for he was rebellion itself.
I believe in movement. I believe in that lighthearted balloon, the world. I believe in midnight and the hour of noon. But what else do I believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond. I believe in life, which one day each of us shall lose. When we are young we think we won’t, that we are different. As a child I thought I would never grow up, that I could will it so. And then I realized, quite recently, that I had crossed some line, unconsciously cloaked in the truth of my chronology. How did we get so damn old? I say to my joints, my iron-colored hair. Now I am older than my love, my departed friends. Perhaps I will live so long that the New York Public Library will be obliged to hand over the walking stick of Virginia Woolf. I would cherish it for her, and the stones in her pocket. But I would also keep on living, refusing to surrender my pen.
William Burroughs was simultaneously old and young. Part sheriff, part gumshoe. All writer. He had a medicine chest he kept locked, but if you were in pain he would open it. He did not like to see his loved ones suffer. If you were infirm he would feed you. He’d appear at your door with a fish wrapped in newsprint and fry it up. He was inaccessible to a girl but I loved him anyway.
And the eye became a body, the murky heart of a rose. The sinister shadow of an orchid. Or the indolent poppy balanced behind the ear of Baudelaire.
How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human angel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water.
How wonderful it would be to meet an angel, I mused, but then I immediately realised that I already had. Not an archangel like Saint Michael, but my human engel from Detroit, wearing an overcoat and no hat, with lank brown hair and eyes the coler of water.
A real prison breakfast" I said. "Yeah, but we are free. "And that summed it up.
He took twelve pictures that day. Within a few days he showed me the contact sheet. "This one has the magic," he said. When I look at it now, I never see me. I see us.
I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth,In my way of thinking, anything is possible. Life is at the bottom of things and belief at the top, while the creative impulse, dwelling in the center, informs all.
-What is nothing? I impetuously asked. -It is what you can see of your eyes without a mirror, was the answer.
Those who have suffered understand suffering and therefore extend their hand.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
Never let go of that fiery sadness called desire.
The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood, not so engaged in communication.
For Christmas every year, my mother used to give me those cheap little diaries that would tell your horoscope and provide a little blank slot for each day.
Polaroid by its nature makes you frugal. You walk around with maybe two packs of film in your pocket. You have 20 shots, so each shot is a world.
I work to Glenn Gould in the morning and go to sleep listening to Parsifal.
My parents had three kids right after the Second World War, and we were all sort of sickly. Then I had a fourth sibling, with very serious asthma. The medical bills. . . So my parents always struggled.
In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.
My dad got a job in a factory in Philadelphia, so I was raised in Germantown in a sort of a barracks for soldiers. They had housing for temporary housing. And then my parents saved money and bought a little house in South Jersey, built on a swamp.
The Bible is very resonant. It has everything: creation, betrayal, lust, poetry, prophecy, sacrifice. All great things are in the Bible, and all great writers have drawn from it and more than people realise, whether Shakespeare, Herman Melville or Bob Dylan.
