Smith, often referred to as the "Godmother of Punk," is not only a musical icon but a literary powerhouse. She's a unicorn artist who blends music, poetry, and visual art seamlessly, with her works spanning decades of cultural relevance. Best known for her 1975 debut album Horses, lauded as one of the greatest rock albums, Smith's rebellious spirit and intellectual lyricism have made her a key figure in the punk movement.The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee is set to return to the Miami Book Fair this year to discuss her 2022 book, A Book of Days. It's an event she has been participating in as an author for more than a decade. Her most recent book is an intimate window into her daily life, featuring 366 photographs — one for each day of the year, including a bonus for leap year. [...] Each image is paired with a short reflection, combining the mundane with the profound, offering readers a glimpse into the mind of an artist who, in her own words, has "a permanent ticket down the rabbit hole," triggering the reader's curiosity and imagination.

Patti Smith continues to make waves in myriad pop culture and musical landscapes. Known for her iconic contributions as a singer, lyricist, artist and poet, Smith has collaborated with many creatives. Long after her explosion into the rock industry, she has continued to inspire forthcoming generations, leading her to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Her memoir, Just Kids, documents the triumphs and difficulties of moving to New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s on her own. She carved out a substantial path for herself but that is not without suffering in its many relentless forms. It was there that she met Robert Mapplethorpe. The two of them together, experienced a connection that could be described as nothing less than a soul-tie. From difficult beginnings, the creative destined her own path – one that began with paper and pen.

At the Baryshnikov Arts Center, an adaptation of Smith’s poem-memoir “Woolgathering” features Smith reciting, others dancing and a surprise guest. “Woolgathering” is a slim collection of prose poems that Patti Smith, the singer-songwriter and punk pioneer, published in 1992. It’s mostly a memoir of childhood — of a poet’s childhood, or of the way that all children have a poet’s imagination. “The mind of a child,” she writes, “is like a kiss on the forehead — open and disinterested.” It is “mystified by the commonplace” and “moves effortlessly into the strange,” glimpsing and gleaning, “piecing together a crazy quilt of truths.”

Gentle dub reggae plays through speakers by the North Transept inside St Paul’s Cathedral, while ushers show people to their seats. Hosted by nightclub Fabric, this is an unusual collaboration for a 350-year-old place of worship better known for grand royal weddings, funerals and classical concerts. The seating area is packed to its 2000 capacity, as club kids mingle with a rock crowd, and there’s a palpable sense of anticipation. [...] Starting with spoken word lines from the poem Cry Humanity: “Blessed are the children who will rebuild our world”, Patti Smith moves into the tribal, hypnotic chant of Easter’s Ghost Dance. [...] Subtle, careful arrangements – like Shanahan’s plangent notes on the grand piano – become huge and resonant as they float to the cathedral walls.

On 4 October 2021, a sprightly Patti Smith—dressed in her customary attire: a white t-shirt with a black blazer, black trousers, and black boots—ambles onto the stage of the Royal Albert Hall as if having stepped out into a Parisian street after having been holed up in a garret for months on end writing. [...] Anyone slightly conversant with Patti Smith knows that she speaks out on environmental and governmental issues and personal strife. This, along with her seer-like qualities, screams a prophetic bard. Oh, and that she can write—well. Thus perhaps Smith was always destined to recite “Piss Factory” at the Royal Albert Hall, complete with the tincture of her blue-collar, South Jersey accent emphasising how far she has come. And, even if not, it still worked and lost none of its vatic meaning. Yet this is in recent history, not half a century ago when a twenty-eight-year-old sinewy Smith entered Electric Lady Studios to record “Hey Joe” and ended up with a take of “Piss Factory.”

There are certain long-established rules for describing Patti Smith. Google her name and the words ‘shaman’ and ‘priestess’ and you’ll see what I mean. For the best part of 50 years she’s been treated as though she’s a mystical object, a human convergence of ley lines, as much as a rock singer. [...] Her status as one of the progenitors of punk – and as a feminist hero – meant the crowd was startlingly varied in age, from teens to people as old as Smith herself (she’s 77), who were rapt and devoted. She remains charismatic – still in black jacket and jeans, as she has been for ever. Her voice was always idiosyncratic so age hasn’t affected it; she sang powerfully throughout. And she has not done the thing some older singers do, of surrounding herself with lots of musicians to bolster the sound.

There was a full moon out there somewhere, watching over us at Somerset House as the Patti Smith Quartet concluded this year’s Summer Series. The moon has been an enduring symbol in Patti’s world, with her career and personal life shifting like its powerful phases, so the July Buck Moon (and all the spiritual symbolism it holds) solidified an idyllic Patti Smith Quartet set. Opening with a rapturous rendition of ‘Summer Cannibals’, Patti’s charisma was immediate and magnetic, raspy drawls flitting in the space. It felt as though little time had passed since she and Fred “Sonic” Smith first conceived the song.

At Brighton Dome, 25st June, four songs into her set, Patti Smith starts to cry: “First tears of the tour!” she sighs, wiping her eyes. [...] At 77, however, Smith remains a genuinely compelling performer. Music seems to have a transformative effect on her. Between songs she’s far goofier than her reputation as the epitome of New York punk cool suggests, but once her band kick into the Velvet Underground-ish chug of Nine or a surging version of Pissing in a River, she appears to be genuinely transported. She dances with an enviable insouciance, and as her eulogy for Kurt Cobain, About a Boy, collapses into abstraction, she appears to be close to speaking in tongues.

Patti Smith headlines the upcoming Higher Ground Festival in London soon – details in ad at top of this page! To celebrate here is her in depth interview with John Robb in 2010 where she details her creative life in New York and with Robert Mapplethorpe in an emotional account that has tears, laughs, poetry.

When Patti Smith described her 1975 debut album "Horses" as “three-chord rock merged with the power of the word,” she was connecting herself to two artistic streams. First, there was the relatively simple “garage” sound of groups like Count Five, ? and the Mysterians, the Seeds, Chocolate Watch Band, etc., which she—and her longtime guitarist Lenny Kaye—felt epitomized the primal power of American rock. Second, she was asserting that the poetry of masters such as William Blake, Walt Whitman and Arthur Rimbaud, and their 20th century acolytes Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Olson, could be spiritually integrated into music that would aspire to literary heights. As Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Jim Morrison, Robert Hunter and other Smith-approved poet-composers had already proven, lyrics could be literature.