Patti Smith isn't writing. "It won't last that long," she tells me. "But it's been a while. It's been a few weeks. And I'm in a state of that nothingness."
We're drinking tea at a table in her hotel room in Paris. She pauses as church bells ring out from across the Seine, reaching us through the open window. "See?" she says with a laugh, gesturing to the sound that has arrived seemingly to underscore her words with divine authority. "He knows."
We're talking about one page in her latest book, A Book of Days, a volume of photographs and captions that has one entry for each day of the year. The images capture the texture of Smith's daily life-her bookshelf, her coffee cup, her eyeglasses, her own hand at work, hovering over a page of her prose.
The book also shares objects of significance to Smith, things once belonging to the many important people in her life who've died before her: her mother's key chain, her father's golf ball, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's hat, a necklace given to her wrapped in black tissue by the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, her late husband's Mosrite guitar. These objects still hold for her a charge, the energy of the lost owner. The caption below an image of Sam Shepard's pocketknife reads, "Keep going, no matter what, my talismans seem to whisper."
This story is from the December 2022 - January 2023 edition of Harper's BAZAAR - US.
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This story is from the December 2022 - January 2023 edition of Harper's BAZAAR - US.
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