Patti Smith
Author of Just Kids
About the Author
Patti Smith was born in Chicago, Illinois on December 30, 1946. She is a singer-songwriter, writer and visual artist. She gained recognition in the 1970s for her revolutionary mergence of poetry and rock. Her album Horses has been hailed as one of the top 100 albums of all time. She has recorded show more twelve albums. In 2007, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She has written several books including Witt, Babel, Woolgathering, The Coral Sea, Auguries of Innocence, M Train, and Just Kids, which won the Nonfiction category of the National Book Award in 2010. Her drawings, photographs, and installations have been shown at numerous venues including the Andy Warhol Museum and the Fondation Cartier Pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris. In 2005, she was awarded the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, which is the highest honor awarded to an artist by the French Republic. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Disambiguation Notice:
Not to be confused with Patty Smyth.
Image credit: Patti Smith à la 81e édition de la Mostra de Venise en 2024.
Series
Works by Patti Smith
Patti Smith Complete 1975-2006: Lyrics, Reflections, and Notes for the Future (1998) 228 copies, 1 review
Work Songs 3 copies
Voz M 3 copies
Patti Smith (sound recording) 3 copies
Set Free 2 copies
A Normal Day 2 copies
Gloria (In Excelsis Deo) 2 copies
A Small Entreaty — Author — 2 copies
Patti Smith. Poesie e canzoni 2 copies
Poesie 1 copy
Gloria in Excelsis Deo 1 copy
Patti Smith - Rote Fabrik 1 copy
Patti Smith dream of life 1 copy
“Time”April 29, 2024 1 copy
Piss Factory 1 copy
Om å skrive 1 copy
ATP Patti Smith 1 copy
A Useless Death 1 copy
Poesie rock 1 copy
Wicked Messenger 1 copy
Patti Smith 35 1 copy
More than Friends Shaped by Flower Power: Women's Stories from Brotherhood of the Spirit 1 copy, 1 review
Smith, Patti Archive 1 copy
Two More (A Perfect Day / Here I Dreamt I Was An Architect) — Artist — 1 copy
The Beavers of Popple's Pond 1 copy
Home For The Holiday 1 copy
Associated Works
The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture (1999) — Contributor — 181 copies, 2 reviews
Dead Man Walking : Music from and inspired by the motion picture {sound recording} (1995) — Contributor; [Walkin Blind] — 27 copies
Until The End Of The World: Music From The Motion Picture Soundtrack (1991) — Contributor — 25 copies, 1 review
Democracy in Print: The best of the Progressive Magazine, 1909-2009 (2009) — Contributor — 14 copies
In'hui, No.9 — Contributor — 1 copy
Smash 4 — Contributor — 1 copy
No Alternative [sound recording] — Contributor — 1 copy
CUZ 3 — Author — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Smith, Patti
- Legal name
- Smith, Patricia Lee
- Birthdate
- 1946-12-30
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Deptford Township High School
- Occupations
- singer-songwriter
poet
artist
writer - Awards and honors
- Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2005)
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (2007)
Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2022) - Relationships
- Smith, Fred Sonic (husband)
- Short biography
- Patti Smith is an American singer-songwriter and poet. She was influential in the birth of punk rock with her 1975 debut album "Horses". Called "Godmother of Punk" she integrated the beat poetry performance style with garage rock. Her allusions introduced American teens to 19th century French poetry, while her "unladylike" language defied the disco era. Smith is most widely known for the song "Because the Night", which was co-written with Bruce Springsteen and reached number 13 on Billboard Hot 100 chart.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
- Places of residence
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
New Jersey, USA
New York, New York, USA
St. Clair Shores, Michigan, USA - Map Location
- Illinois, USA
- Disambiguation notice
- Not to be confused with Patty Smyth.
Members
Reviews
Recommend reading this one like it's meant to be read, a day at a time over the course of the year. The surprise each day of the next photograph and missive from Smith is worth savoring one per day. Smith's not voluble with the prose attached to each of the photographs, but each is poetic in its own way. And her calling back to friends and inspirations with these unique little monuments is just wonderful. Some, like the ones featuring her friend [[Sam Shepard]], quickened tears in this old show more cynic. show less
The audio book of this National Book Award winner, as read by Patti herself. is entertaining, joyous, and sorrowful. That New Jersey accent! I am the same age and grew up in a suburb of NYC, but I never ended up sleeping on stoops or in Central Park, which Patti does when she leaves her South Jersey working class family and throws herself into creating art in NYC. On her first night in the city, she meets Robert Mapplethorpe in a crash pad, and they immediately become determined to find show more success in art and poetry. They're mostly starving and scrounging until they scare up enough funds to rent the smallest room at the notorious Chelsea Hotel, and by hanging out in the lobby and at the El Quijote restaurant next door, they meet musicians, elder beat poets, artists, junkies, and denizens of Andy Warhol's Factory. They stay romantically attached until Robert gives in to his attraction to men, but they remain the most loyal and loving friends. Robert insists that only fame will validate his talent. Patti is shy and only a new Keith Richards haircut brings her out and gains the attention of major and minor celebrities, which is as negligible to her as it is important to Robert. Her narrative, with that unique accent, is simultaneously thrilling and heartbreaking. Despite the tragic ending of Patti's mysterious move to Detroit and Robert's death, listening is a true pleasure and I wanted it to never end. show less
Written by a Lake
New Year’s Day. Rain. Two candles light the room where they sleep. She confesses. This is where she weeps. She is the cause of the rain. She could not stop weeping and the sky obliged to follow.
(How is it mapped? What is the refrain? Why must the sky follow?) The heart drops in the center of an inexhaustible lake. How light the heart appears, yet how weighty a thing. A powerful stone carved in the shape of an organ with chambers pumping. How slick a shadow it leaks as its show more signature. Sticky, oxblood, the colour of new shoes. High toppped, gold laced and worn with expectations poised to ride out life on horseback. Racing from hill to hill with humour, horror, bit of Spanish stitched on leaves.
The work wrung with this cry. Look you radiant wash yard. The sheets billow. Their wet folds tell a tale. Once there was a girl who walked straight, yet she was truly lame. She walked upright in new boots, yet I tell you her feet were bare. She lives forever, yet she lies buried in a vault of fertile air.
New Year’s Day. The wicks twist. The insistent mirror winks. An eye with time as her lashes. And if he-slipping at last, face pressed against the glass, releasing beads of spittle from parting lips-should suddenly speak, what would he say? And if she, shaken from her torpor, should rise to write, what would she write? Their table is laid with the promise of the lake. Water sighs for want of blood. These remains, malleable ash, are nothing. Signs for want of substance. A sack of sticks spilling order upon the surface. Words traced on a slab hewn from another forested mind.
a postscript prefiguring
Your finger press the door triggering a spring exposing the hard corner where you have walked. You shall not stumble. Offering a first encasing rivets extracted from the wet pout of this time or that. Prick the hour’s hand with nothing but eyes. Think nothing of it. For what remains to flush is nothing but salt jamming the mechanism of formal delights of, former misery. Nothing but salt to bundle and fling over a shoulder. Nothing but clumps of salt to toss, years later, like dice across a board of glass where you’ll sit on a ledge circling a glowing body, unfastening the dressings of a burden gone. The cremation of all my sorrow-may you spread the singed grains with your fingers, and without thought brush them aside.
Thus free to drown in sorrow of your own, may you sit in the shadows of our lost life, immersed in stillness, flanked by translucent hills, one a mountain coated immaculate and ringed at the throat with beads of cloud.
These words were written by a lake.
String them around a wrist. Do not grip a sword or draw what might be drawn, for wisdom is a dying bird, engraved on a palm. Next to nothing. And these words were written by a lake, before being as being was scripted and dealt. A pack of lives, each with a winning face, each with this blushing command.
Prick this. This moment the hand is free. show less
New Year’s Day. Rain. Two candles light the room where they sleep. She confesses. This is where she weeps. She is the cause of the rain. She could not stop weeping and the sky obliged to follow.
(How is it mapped? What is the refrain? Why must the sky follow?) The heart drops in the center of an inexhaustible lake. How light the heart appears, yet how weighty a thing. A powerful stone carved in the shape of an organ with chambers pumping. How slick a shadow it leaks as its show more signature. Sticky, oxblood, the colour of new shoes. High toppped, gold laced and worn with expectations poised to ride out life on horseback. Racing from hill to hill with humour, horror, bit of Spanish stitched on leaves.
The work wrung with this cry. Look you radiant wash yard. The sheets billow. Their wet folds tell a tale. Once there was a girl who walked straight, yet she was truly lame. She walked upright in new boots, yet I tell you her feet were bare. She lives forever, yet she lies buried in a vault of fertile air.
New Year’s Day. The wicks twist. The insistent mirror winks. An eye with time as her lashes. And if he-slipping at last, face pressed against the glass, releasing beads of spittle from parting lips-should suddenly speak, what would he say? And if she, shaken from her torpor, should rise to write, what would she write? Their table is laid with the promise of the lake. Water sighs for want of blood. These remains, malleable ash, are nothing. Signs for want of substance. A sack of sticks spilling order upon the surface. Words traced on a slab hewn from another forested mind.
a postscript prefiguring
Your finger press the door triggering a spring exposing the hard corner where you have walked. You shall not stumble. Offering a first encasing rivets extracted from the wet pout of this time or that. Prick the hour’s hand with nothing but eyes. Think nothing of it. For what remains to flush is nothing but salt jamming the mechanism of formal delights of, former misery. Nothing but salt to bundle and fling over a shoulder. Nothing but clumps of salt to toss, years later, like dice across a board of glass where you’ll sit on a ledge circling a glowing body, unfastening the dressings of a burden gone. The cremation of all my sorrow-may you spread the singed grains with your fingers, and without thought brush them aside.
Thus free to drown in sorrow of your own, may you sit in the shadows of our lost life, immersed in stillness, flanked by translucent hills, one a mountain coated immaculate and ringed at the throat with beads of cloud.
These words were written by a lake.
String them around a wrist. Do not grip a sword or draw what might be drawn, for wisdom is a dying bird, engraved on a palm. Next to nothing. And these words were written by a lake, before being as being was scripted and dealt. A pack of lives, each with a winning face, each with this blushing command.
Prick this. This moment the hand is free. show less
I loved this audiobook even more than her National Book Award winning Just Kids, from 2010. This one is from 2015 and the Mapplethorpe life is gone - in fact, there is not one mention of him, which I thought was strange. Patti married musician Fred "Sonic" Smith and gave up her New York City life and music career to move to Detroit with him. He made a deal with her to take her to the prison wherein Jean Genet had not been held, in French Guyana, in exchange for having a child with him. This show more is one of the journeys Patti undertakes, all over the world, in search of paying tribute to writers and poets she loved, including Paul Bowles, Sylvia Plath, Rambeau, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and several Japanese writers. She also becomes entangled with an exclusive club of geologists, the CDC (Continental Drift Club) and their idol, Alfred Wegener, who was buried in an ice mausoleum while on an expedition.
Smith's curiosity leads her in so many directions and each rivulet, described in her radiantly laconic monotone, takes the reader to another obscure location and adds to the books (72 in all!) that she recommends. So many sentences starting with "It occurred to me...", so many beloved cafes, so many cups of black coffee, slices of brown bread with olive oil, so much poetry throughout, the recounting of many wacky dreams, including appearances by "The Cowpoke" (former lover Sam Shepard), and the tragedies of losing her husband and brother within a month of each other. The two memoirs are unforgettable and I will painfully miss her voice in my ear, in my car. show less
Smith's curiosity leads her in so many directions and each rivulet, described in her radiantly laconic monotone, takes the reader to another obscure location and adds to the books (72 in all!) that she recommends. So many sentences starting with "It occurred to me...", so many beloved cafes, so many cups of black coffee, slices of brown bread with olive oil, so much poetry throughout, the recounting of many wacky dreams, including appearances by "The Cowpoke" (former lover Sam Shepard), and the tragedies of losing her husband and brother within a month of each other. The two memoirs are unforgettable and I will painfully miss her voice in my ear, in my car. show less
Lists
Female Author (1)
Favorite Memoirs (1)
Sense of place (1)
Phoebe Bridgers (1)
sad girl books (1)
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Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 127
- Also by
- 39
- Members
- 12,881
- Popularity
- #1,817
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 448
- ISBNs
- 329
- Languages
- 25
- Favorited
- 33
