Because the light

Interview, June, 1996 by Ingrid Sischy

INGRID SISCHY: There are so many places we could take off from. There's your new record, Gone Again [Arista]. There's your new book, The Coral Sea. There's the fact that audiences have been responding with Immense feeling to the occasional performances that you and your floating band have been doing over the last year. Each time you've played, the response from both the crowds and the critics has made it clear that the hunger to see and hear you is huge. And then, of course, there's the space of years where you weren't a public figure and instead chose to be private. There are the reasons why you made that choice, which I want to talk about later. Then there's what happened in your life during the time that you were out of the limelight, and what you learned from that. Whenever I've thought of you, Patti, I've always known that for you, being a human being and being a real artist are much more important that being a famous star. I think everyone thinks of you that way, whether they know you or not. It's not a matter of some spin that's been put on you, it's everything that you've done and been. So let's begin with how that started.

What was it that got you on the road to becoming a writer?

PATTI SMITH: Well, there were a couple of things. One was a little book my mother gave me when I was about three called Silver Pennies, which was filled with poems about elves and fairies. That sort of seduced me. And then there was Robert Louis Stevensoh's A Child's Garden of Verses. That book deeply seduced me, especially the poem called "The Land of Nod." I hungered for it. Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit. I started to want to become a writer. But what would I write? My fast daydreams or aspirations were that I would write the kinds of things that Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling wrote. And as a teenager, I also imagined myself a jazz poet - not a very good one. I'd just listen to Coltrane and then write poetry. When I discovered the poetry of Rimbaud, I actually stopped writing for a while because I felt like I'd found the ultimate language.

IS: How did you discover Rimbaud?

PS: I found him in a Philadelphia bus depot when I was sixteen. I remember seeing a copy of Illuminations for sale on a table of used books. Of course, illuminations is a great word, but what I was really taken by was the cover. It was a beautiful picture of Rimbaud. That's why I got the book. When I opened it up, I didn't really understand it. It didn't compute. But still, somehow, I knew this was the perfect language. It looked like it glittered. I knew someday I would decipher it. So I carried the book around with me.

IS: It's amazing how we know something is profound sometimes before we even understand why. Isn't it?

PS: Yes. And there were other things, too, that made me know writing was a beautiful thing. Bob Dylan was developing his thing - his exploration of language also made me want to write. But I didn't think I was very good at it. In fact, I thought my calling was to be a painter.

IS: Did you go to college for that?

PS: I went to Glassboro State Teacher's College in New Jersey, which was about all I could afford because I put myself through school. I left there, after three years, in 1967. New Jersey was no place for me and I wanted to go to New York. The only people I knew in the New York area went to college at Pratt in Brooklyn, so I went to find them. When I got to the one address I had, it turned out my friend had moved. Someone told me to ask the person who was staying in the room now if he knew where my friend had gone. That's how I met Robert Mapplethorpe. The door was open and I went in and he was sleeping. I stood over him, looking down at him, and he looked up at me and smiled. That was our first encounter - and he led me to my friends. I moved to Brooklyn and lived with Robert while he went to Pratt. We worked all the time. I just drew and drew, and Robert would ask his professors to look at my work even though I wasn't a student there.

IS: Whenever I've seen the things you guys made back then, I've been struck by the aura that they have. But tell me, did you feel pulled in two directions during those days, in terms of the literary versus the visual? Often the prevailing wisdom is that we're supposed to choose between one thing and another. Can you believe how stupid that is? It seems to me that these labels and slots that people get packaged into are so artificial, so limiting. Your triumph over all that is another reason I wanted to talk to you. For instance, your new record cannot be slotted. But your work's always been about the way things connect. Let's keep talking about how this stream of connections began.

PS: I think I'm constantly in a state of adjustment. When I was younger, I also dreamed of being an opera singer, simply because of Maria Callas. I used to daydream about being like her, but I didn't do anything about it. The way all these things commingled and I wound up doing what I do seems to me like a piece of calligraphy. It's all intertwined. Somehow I started introducing writing into my drawings, and after a time, the language took over and I started getting very involved with the handwriting and then the look of the handwriting. The language literally just spilled onto the wall and got physical. Finally, it reached the point where I was no longer content just to write the language.