“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…
