Patti Smith is where literary transcendence, nineteenth century French poetry, and experimental three-chord rock intercept.
In 1975, Patti Smith took her spoken word poetry and combined it with ear-shattering guitar licks and visceral performances, bringing the high arts to the lowest of venues and destroying amplifiers—screaming about Arthur Rimbaud, making allusions to William Blake, and kicking in monitors as crowds went wild. She began a movement—the reverberations of which are still being felt.
Patti Smith is the quintessential predecessor of modern rock and grudge. While some might know her from her hit “Because the Night,” this December marks the 40th anniversary of the release of her debut album “Horses,” which was released in the 1970s and has been named one of the top most influential albums of all time. Her influence can be sensed in all fringes of the arts from photography, to film, to fashion.
While Smith is an iconic musician, she sees herself primarily as a writer, and she has been prolific throughout the course of her career, writing 13 books of poetry, two fiction pieces, and two memoirs.
Smith is not a literary lightweight. She doesn’t dabble in intellectualism to seem interesting. Literature and “cultivating the landscape of the mind,” according to Smith, is her way of achieving spiritual transcendence and happiness. Smith, despite her fame, intentionally spent most of her life bordering on homelessness, happily being an artistic vagabond.
In October, I had the rare opportunity to speak to Patti Smith at a book signing marking the release of her newest memoir, “M Train.”
Her previous memoir, “Just Kids,” won her the National Book award in 2010. It gave a heartrending portrayal of life within the artistic community of New York City during the 1960s while chronicling Smith’s relationship with the polemic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
Following the success of “Just Kids,” Smith crafted another masterpiece, this time focusing on her later years spent with her husband Fred Sonic Smith of the punk MC5s.
Smith suffered the loss of her beloved friend Robert Mapplethorpe to AIDS in 1989, then her husband Fred Smith, in 1994. The death of her brother Tod followed a month after the death of her husband.
The story chronicles Smith’s literal pilgrimage to different locations throughout the course of her life as well as a metaphysical pilgrimage throughout her imagination as she comes to terms with the passing of time.
Smith took solace in her beloved books and the authors who inspired her, traveling to the graves of great writers and spending time in their homes. She snapped polaroids of the items that survived them—Virginia Woolf’s cane, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter, Samuel Beckett’s glasses. The book is sprinkled with Smith’s photos and interesting anecdotes of her life on the run.
At the same time, “M Train” is a love letter to her late husband as she recounts her happy times spent with him in St. Clair, Michigan, as a young mother.
“M Train” is part memoir, part free association, part requiem for those she lost, all beautifully tied together by Smith’s delicate prose. It’s melancholia in its most optimistic form. “M Train”—the “M” standing for mind—is a journey through Patti Smith’s consciousness and throughout the world as Smith comes to terms with death and what it means to be alive. With every loss, there is a transformation, Smith suggests.
