Patti Smith: On imagination, adaptability, and gratitude
Advice from the "punk poet laureate"
Meet our next creator, Patti Smith:
Patti Smith
Location: New York City
Vocation: Writer
Links: Patti Smith Substack, Website, Instagram
I hope you all were able to spend yesterday celebrating, grieving, reflecting in the way you wanted. On Mother’s Day (the day I spend yelling “Not my problem!” at my darling children), I like to take some time to examine myself as a mother, and this year I recognized that I often look at the world of motherhood through a lens of sacrifice: I sacrificed my flat stomach to have children and then my perky breasts to feed them; I sacrificed ambition in my career to be more present at home; I sacrificed evenings of bars and shows and friends; I sacrificed afternoons of reading and nights of sleep; I sacrificed vacations in Europe for trips to Pennsylvania.
But after an hour in the presence of Patti Smith, I’m looking at things differently. After my chat with her, my husband asked how it went, and I sat in humbled silence for a moment and then could muster only: “She’s so fucking good at life.” I often feel like I’m in a wrestling match with myself, for some reason fighting the beautiful life I’ve created, seeing the dirty floor and cluttered surfaces instead of the happy children and art projects, seeing the jam-packed schedule and lack of autonomy instead of the proud home run and unconditional love. But Patti, she seems to live on a higher plane.
If I can be so bold as to interpret Patti’s feelings, she sees her life not as a string of sacrifices but as a string of exchanges, of trade-offs. She swapped the excitement of New York City for the peacefulness of Michigan. She swapped rubbing elbows with all the stars of her day for living with the love of her life. She swapped devoting her life to art for devoting her life to both her family and art. There is no subtraction in these equations. If anything, there is addition. And through nurturing others, through loving others, she was nourished. And when a person is nourished, their art flourishes.
This is how Patti seems to approach everything in life: with an open, full heart, with adaptability and with creativity. The creativity is not reserved for what she produces; it’s also for how she lives. While in Michigan, she managed to re-create the feeling of Marseilles out of a concrete wall; a café, with 7-Eleven coffee. Perhaps it was through experiencing terrible loss and trials or perhaps it was through her incredible imagination, or a combination of both, but she knows how to adapt to the moment and how to appreciate it while it’s happening.
I’ve half-joked that Patti, self-described as a writer, performer, and visual artist, is The Creators Forum’s godmother. Because she’s the success story. She raised two children, who are creative and successful in their own rites, and continued to produce some of the best work out there (If you haven’t read Just Kids or M Train, do so—they will leave you changed). She is someone to look to for guidance on so many occasions. In this interview—a most special hour of my life—she gives us lessons in how to love, how to be flexible with our creativity, how to raise imaginative children, how to create our own oases, and how to have gratitude for the moment.
This is the first in a two-part series.
Now, Patti Smith…
After Patti and Fred “Sonic” Smith fell deeply in love, Patti left New York City to live with him in Michigan.
Patti, in M Train you describe how Fred said he’d take you on a trip of your choosing if you gave him children.
Well, it was more specific. He said if I gave him a son, I could go anywhere in the world, because we knew we didn’t have a lot of money at that time, and we also knew if we had a child, we probably wouldn’t be traveling. So I took him at his word. I had no doubt that I would have a son for him, so I said that I wanted to go to French Guiana, so we went. And that was our most exotic trip we ever made. It was our first and our last exotic trip, really.
If Fred had to kind of bribe you to have kids, does that mean you were reluctant to have them, or that you worried they would inhibit your artistic life?
I had no plans to have children. I just wanted to be an artist. I was such a sickly kid and had been through so many illnesses. I didn’t imagine myself living a long life. I really wasn’t domestically oriented, and he and I had never spoken about it. He was an artist, too, and I just imagined we would go through life from one adventure to another. But he wanted a son, and then, of course, he wanted a daughter. I mean, he was my person. He was the love of my life, so I said yes, I can do that. My biggest decision of leaving New York and leaving my public life behind, I had already made, so it was just a continuation of that. I can’t say that I thought deeply about it. I just said yes.
I was the oldest of four children. I knew how to take care of kids. I babysat since I was, like, eight years old. So I was no stranger to taking care of little ones. And in the end, no matter what we think, once we have a child, we fall in love again. You fall in love with your baby and then you readjust your life. Because, artist or not, you’re no longer the center of your universe. Your child is. It’s like readjusting the solar system.
Did you have a vision of what it would be like to have kids and be an artist? Were you concerned about your art?
I didn’t think of it that way. I mean, I thought of my mother. My mother had to raise a family and she was a waitress. She worked her whole life. She found a way to raise her children, despite the fact that they always struggled financially, and she was a waitress till she could no longer be a waitress. Our whole life, my whole life at home, my mother worked, and she still was our mother. So I just used her as a template, really. I would find a way to do my work. What made it not easier but more possible was because I have various vocations. I had left my public life and performing vocation behind, which would take me away. I was also a visual artist, but I didn’t have the space or the time to devote to visual art. So I really focused on my first love and my first vocation, which was writing. All I had to do was to develop a writer’s life around motherhood. So I found my way to do that.
In M Train, you describe this one scene where you told your son that you wanted to do some writing and you asked him what he was going to do. And he was like, “I’m going to do some thinking.” How is that possible? My children will not let me have two seconds to myself if they’re around me. Did you cultivate that with him?
Well, my son had that temperament to begin with, and also he didn’t have a sibling until he was five. But he understood that’s what I did. Mommy’s work was writing. I wrote. I did all the domestic tasks myself. I did everything I was supposed to do. But when I was writing, that was my time. And that was a time when I needed time to myself. And he could be with me and sit with me if his father was doing something. But he had to also respect that it was quiet. He knew how to play quietly. He could sit there and play with his soldiers or draw pictures. Or as he told me that day, he was going to think. But he absolutely just integrated. I often played with him, read to him. So I spent a lot of time with him, and his father did more physical things like playing ball or teaching him to ride a bicycle. He liked looking at books. But I made that a rule of existence, that there were times where he could have his space to be in his world, but I also needed space to be in mine. And we could always have that space in the same room or on the same beach. But I required that space. I was also lucky because he had a dreamy temperament as a kid.
And then when you had two kids…
Well, my daughter required more of my time, but also she had a brother to be with, and they were very close. That was six years later, so I had developed a lot of my habits pretty well. At that point, I could adjust to anything. But it was a challenge. When she was a baby, I would have her in a little papoose on my back because she wanted to be around me. But both of my kids knew how to entertain themselves. I thought it was very important to cultivate their imagination.
I’d never push them in any direction, but cultivating the imagination and cultivating their ability to entertain themselves was really important because we had to do that. That’s how I grew up. My parents both worked. We were often by ourselves. And so we had to construct our own games and be a little more independent. So I tried to instill that.
Were you in Michigan for their whole childhood?
Till their father died when they were six and twelve. So then I came to New York like a year and a half later. So it wasn’t their entire childhood. A lot of my son’s childhood. Not my daughter’s.
While you were in Michigan, did you feel content and satisfied with your quieter family, writing life? Or did you crave the energy of a city?
I missed certain things. I missed my friends. I missed working with my brother sometimes because he was the head of my crew. The thing I missed most was cafés, being able to go and sit in a café and have coffee. So I sort of made my own. You know, I have a good imagination. There was this little fish and tackle shop that had a little whitewashed stone alcove. It was just like a little corner. It wasn’t big enough to put a car. It looked very Moroccan to me. So I would get coffee to go from 7-Eleven or something and go sit there with my notebook and pretend I was in Morocco. And I would do things like that. At the end of our street, there was a little old cement dock that reminded me of Marseille. So I would sit there and look at Lake St. Clair and imagine I was in Marseille. I have a really good imagination.
But I was very involved in my present life. I didn’t regret any of the decisions I made at all. I mean, I missed sometimes the mobility of travel, but we found our own way to travel. And I missed the sea because Michigan is surrounded by lakes. But if I missed anything, it was just cafés, the old cafés, not like cafés now, because cafés are so loud. They’re so noisy. They play music so loud with the bass pumped up and people are screaming and carrying on and they have computers. But, you know, in the ’60s and ’70s, they were often really quiet and you could sit for hours and have a cup of coffee for less than a dollar.
I miss small things, the things that I get attached to. And that seems to be consistent with me. A lot of it is connected with writing and coffee, so I found a way at home to make my own little café-like existence and sit with my notebooks when everyone was sleeping or everyone was out on a little excursion and create my own café existence.
People say that it’s impossible to be an artist and to be a mother. Well, it’s very challenging. But it depends what you’re after. I mean, at that time in my life, my ambition wasn’t for breaking through the art world or getting published. I had been through certain things, and I had seen a certain kind of life. What I really wanted was just to be a better writer and to get myself to a point where I could write something great. So, yes, if your ambition is to be part of a world or a scene or, you know, to build your reputation, it is going to be difficult. But what I was looking for at that time in my life was not that. I had had shows in major galleries. The Robert Miller Gallery was a beautiful gallery. I had a couple of books published. I had four albums. And so I had experienced that. And I had experienced, at least in Europe, being a fairly big rock and roll star. But I was looking for something higher. I mean, for me, higher. I was looking to evolve as a human being and as a writer. So what I needed as an artist, it was quite possible. In fact, I think being in that situation, being in my situation, my being a wife and mother and living somewhat isolated really nourished the needs and desires and ambition I had for myself as a writer. It wouldn’t work for everybody, but it worked for me.
Did your experience of having children and raising them have any impact on the work you were doing or were they separate spheres for you?
I mean, it permeates. I’ve written poems and songs for both of them. But in general, my work is really my own. Even being a mother and wife and trying to do that as well as possible—I’m an artist, and there’s still a certain amount of self-orientation. I’m still self-centered, and that never goes away, really. You can’t help but be a survivalist, or a survivalist in lieu of your work, or letting your work survive. And I would say the greatest chunk of my work had nothing to do with my family or children or husband. I carved an area for myself where my imagination went wherever it went. It could go to Egypt and the 12th century or it could go anywhere. The atmosphere that my family produced or allowed me to live in had a great impact on my work. But I would say, really, my influences tended to be just as they were always, which have to do with the books I was reading. It might be biblical studies. It might be imagined travel. But it doesn’t focus on my family situation.
The women I usually interview for TCF have young children, and they’re in the midst of the struggle of trying to figure out how to make every part of their life work together. But you’re the success story. You did it. You raised these children who are doing wonderful, creative things, and you kept your own creative life and are producing some of the best stuff out there.
Well, there’s also all the things that are private things, the struggles. You know, we all have our struggles. My son and my daughter, they have their struggles. They lost their father young. We had to all rethink life, not only without him, but then my brother died a month later, who was their second father. If anyone thinks it was difficult for me to leave New York and leave a public life and leave a certain amount of, you know, burgeoning fame, they could never imagine how really difficult it was to suddenly be a widow with two young children and have to sort of start over again.
I always look to my parents and grandparents or generations before and think of all their struggles, my parents going through World War Two and then having three kids in rapid succession and no money and all the strife they went through. I look at my mother losing her son, her only son, and her parents, her mother at 11. They’re examples, both of them, of people who have not had the easiest time, but they maintained always a sense of humor, curiosity, enthusiasm. We had a lively household, and there was always books and laughter interspersed with very difficult times. My mother was a survivor and I am her daughter, and my kids, they’re also survivors.
Another thing I’ve always tried to instill in them is when things seem really rough, you have to project and think about what other people are experiencing at this very moment. And sometimes people think it’s almost cliché to think like that, but I think about it. Like, I’ll be cleaning, and I’ll feel so tired and dusty and agitated. So I get a shower, and it feels so great. And I think about people suffering through the earthquake or people in certain parts of the world who don’t have this luxury, they don’t even have clean water, and I’m having this nice hot shower. And I think about it. I can’t change that. But I think to keep them in my consciousness is important so that if we can’t always help others, we can at least have gratitude for what we have.
Gratitude is one of the most important aspects to develop in oneself, gratitude for what we have or gratitude for what we’ve done. Like, I wrote a few good lines today, and I feel really good about that. I didn’t write the three pages I was hoping to write, but I wrote this one thing that I didn’t even know I could write. So I feel gratitude for the fact that I was able to do that.
I feel gratitude that I have my kids and I see them. I’m grateful for things in their life. And for their father. We didn’t get to know him very long, relatively short, but I’m grateful that he was their father and that they know this of him and they have this. So I always try to tell them if I see little things, even annoying things. You know, “That’s so annoying, it’s just like something your father would say,” or, “You know, you have that mole. It’s exactly like your father’s.” Just to keep him in our conversation, even lightly, even jokingly or complainingly, in every way, lovingly.
Part 2 of my talk with Patti Smith will be published next Monday, May 22.
*Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Gratitude. Puts the worst of days in perspective.