Patti Smith on the One Desire That Lasts Forever

What It Covers

Patti Smith reflects on her artistic evolution from childhood communion with nature through New York's 1960s-70s art scene to leaving fame for Michigan, discussing creativity, the rebel hump concept, and maintaining artistic integrity.

Key Questions Answered

• •Childhood consciousness: Smith experienced wordless communion with animals and siblings from age five, a shamanistic quality that evolved into her improvisational performance style. This empathetic channeling ability, possibly enhanced by childhood scarlet fever, became fundamental to connecting with audiences and creating characters within songs during fourteen-minute improvisational solos.
• •New York affordability enabled art: In 1967, Smith found East Village apartments for $150 monthly by walking streets and talking to building supers. Artists could work waitressing or bookstore jobs, pay rent, and have time to create. This economic accessibility allowed misfits rejected elsewhere to converge, experiment, and produce the era's groundbreaking work without financial desperation.
• •Daily writing discipline: Smith writes by hand every single day, rewriting the same paragraph ten times if necessary. She learned in the 1980s that writing is a muscle requiring constant exercise. The turning point came when she could not imagine life without writing—that inability to stop defines a true writer, not talent or inspiration alone.
• •Measuring worth internally: Smith never measures her work's quality by audience size, critical reception, or adulation. She remains her harshest critic, focusing on whether work deserves the trees sacrificed for it. This internal compass allowed her to walk away from stadium performances in Europe at her peak to evolve as a human being and artist in obscurity.
• •Receptivity over control: Creative breakthroughs cannot be summoned or demanded through petition. Smith received the opening words for Bread of Angels while sitting quietly at the Bay of Angels, demoralized and receptive. The alchemical process between what enters and what emerges requires nourishment through years of discipline, but the magical transformation itself remains beyond conscious control.