Patti Smith's Lifetime of Reinvention

Nearing 80, the punk poet reflects on the twists in her story that have surprised even her.

- By Amy Weiss-Meyer

Even from the back, Patti Smith was unmistakably Patti Smith. Standing on a downtown-Manhattan sidewalk on a late-summer afternoon, she wore loose jeans rolled at the cuff, white high-tops, a black blazer, and—on a cool day for August, but still an August day—a wool cap over her long gray hair. We had arranged to meet at a gallery owned by friends of hers and, for the time being, we were locked out. A life-size horse statue was the only thing visible through the glass windows, like one of Smith's lyrics come to life. Someone came a few minutes later to open the door, and we stepped into the cool interior to discuss Smith's new memoir, Bread of Angels.

Smith, who turns 79 in December, was preparing for a busy fall ahead: the release of her memoir, an international concert tour to mark the 50th anniversary of her seminal album, Horses. In addition to reading the book, I'd spent the preceding weeks listening to her songs on repeat, and one lyric in particular seemed like it might be a kind of key to her career, which over the course of six decades has comprised poetry and performance, memoir and drawing, photography and painting, an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and a National Book Award. “People say, 'Beware,' but I don't care,” she sings defiantly in the first track on Horses. “The words are just rules and regulations to me.” After a pause she repeats the last word, elongating the vowel for emphasis: “Meeeeee.”

I already knew that she started chafing early on against authorities and edicts. Smith writes in the memoir about a question that came to her as she sat in Bible study in South Jersey at the dawn of the 1960s: