Tomorrow Will Be Wonderful

Rock poet Patti Smith and her daughter, Jesse, chat with Samantha Trenoweth about love, family, and riding the storms of life.

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Patti Smith stands on a tiny stage in a cavernous marble art gallery in Sydney. She wears her signature jeans, T-shirt, scruffy old boots. She’s here to read a little poetry, sing a couple of songs, chat informally with fans (who run the gamut from 20-something fourth-wave feminists to gnarly old artists). They’re expecting maybe a little shouting, a little swearing from this pioneer of the New York punk movement. Instead, Patti quotes her mother on the importance of counting one’s blessings:

“‘I wept because I had no shoes, then I saw a man who had no feet.’ That was what my mother always told us,” she says, in her soft New Jersey drawl. Then she goes on matter-of-factly to impress upon the audience the importance of sensible, woollen socks.

At 72, Patti sees her mother’s aphorisms (of which there were many) as solid preparation for the travails that life has flung her way. She has weathered more than her share of storms since her 1975 album, Horses, took music by the collar and shook it hard. Patti has outlived many of those she’s loved best and her most recent book, The Year of the Monkey, reads almost as a meditation on letting go.

“This is what I know,” she writes. “…My brother is dead. My mother is dead. My father is dead. My husband is dead. My cat is dead. And my dog who was dead in 1957 is still dead. Yet still I keep thinking that something wonderful is about to happen. Maybe tomorrow.”

Patti attributes this tenacious sense of hope to her mother, Beverly, a bighearted Jehovah’s Witness who was a jazz singer in her youth, then raised four children while working as a waitress. Many years later, she took on the task of answering Patti’s fan mail, and would often include a fragment of her downhome wisdom and occasionally a copy of the Witness’ newsletter, The Watchtower, for good measure.