Punk pioneer, poet and photographer Patti Smith is in Sligo this weekend for her photographic exhibition - and to visit the grave of her hero, WB Yeats, she tells Belinda McKeon in New York
Faces stare from the walls of Patti Smith's Soho brownstone, all of them in stark, unblemished black and white. Most of the faces are so rawly iconic that to see them here like this, hanging as informally as family snapshots, is to feel a shock of recognition. There is Bob Dylan, standing between Allen Ginsberg and Michael McClure in a San Francisco alleyway. There is Jackson Pollock, crouching in his studio, dwarfed by a mammoth canvas of pours and drips and spatters, and there he is again, standing beside his wife, Lee Krasner, in an evocation of American Gothic. There is Smith herself, striking and scruffy at 26, her eyes downcast, the low waves of a beach behind her.
Propped on the mantelpiece are some of Smith's own Polaroids, including several of her teenage daughter, Jesse, smiling wryly on a piano stool. Other faces, other moments crowd the living area like presences in a dream.
A chaotic dream, that is, with the stuff of Smith's life - books, papers, musical instruments, cat dishes, pieces of sculpture - piled and scattered on every surface. But in her 60th year, Smith seems energised by chaos. This house is her haven, her studio and her library; it's here she steps from one artistic process to another without pausing to worry much about what outside voices expect or demand.
Though she is primarily known as a musician - her debut album, Horses, broke new ground for punk and rock when it appeared in 1975 - Smith has, since her early years, also been a prolific artist in other mediums. For her, the New York City in which she arrived as a 23-year-old was a place in which to create spoken-word poetry, to paint and draw, to perform (she collaborated with the playwright Sam Shepard on the play Cowboy Mouth). Photography was central to her life too - unsurprising, given her home at the time was in the Hotel Chelsea with Robert Mapplethorpe. Song existed at first only as an element of her performance poetry; rock music, the Patti Smith group, and a tension-filled recording studio shared with John Cale, who produced Horses, came later. And it came as a surprise to Smith.
"I actually thought when I recorded Horses that that would be it," she says today. "I didn't think that I would be doing another record . . . I felt that my job was done." Three albums followed between 1975 and 1979, when Smith retreated from a very public life to marry and raise children with the man to whom she refers, still with a slight catch in her voice, as her "sweetheart", Fred "Sonic" Smith. With his sudden death in 1994, Smith felt obliged to begin recording music once again so that, she says, she might make a living for her son and daughter. She has lived in New York since, releasing four albums and touring regularly. And writing. And painting. And taking photographs. And this is the only work she wants to talk about today.
The music, she says, she's discussed a thousand times before. She wants to talk about poetry - and the poetic process, solitary and possessed, is utterly different to the process of writing songs, she insists - about the paintbrush, about the Polaroid camera sitting on her mantel. These are the art forms that will this weekend bring Smith to Sligo, where an exhibition of her drawings and photographs (at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery) will accompany an evening of her poetry (also at the Model) and a public interview in collaboration with the biennial arts programme Critical Voices.
These are the art forms about which she's now thinking most seriously. They're the ones she's had to "table", she says, when immersed in rock music. And they're the ones she foresees herself spending most of her time at as she grows older.
BUT THE YOUNG Patti Smith's priorities were no less clear in her mind. Growing up in relative poverty in postwar New Jersey, she remembers telling her mother, when she was six years old, to buy her nothing but books from that point on. "Except for the time I wanted a bicycle," she grimaces. "I didn't want clothing, I didn't want any girl stuff. I just wanted books."
Her parents, a factory worker and a housewife, were both avid readers - though the tastes of her mother, who raised her children as Jehovah's Witnesses, were somewhat different to those of her father, a lifelong agnostic; facing down his copies of Plato and Bertrand Russell were her Hollywood biographies. It was a house of constant religious debate, not primarily between Smith's parents, but between the priests and rabbis her father would invite in for theological discussions. This atmosphere made a deep impact on his daughter, who for a time considered becoming a missionary or a theologian. Apart from a fleeting desire to be an opera singer - "but I was so skinny and of course I didn't have the ability" - a career as a musician never entered her mind. "I wanted to write or paint," she says. And as a teenager, she began committing herself to both those things. "I started writing very bad jazz poetry, poems about Charlie Parker, poems about the civil rights movement, teenage poems," she explains. Quickly, however, she became aware of the work of the poets who remain her greatest inspirations; Yeats and Dylan Thomas, Blake and Rimbaud.
That her parents had little money made no difference to their ability to provide the young Smith with books. "For us, weekend entertainment was to get to go to the library and pick out the books you wanted," she remembers. "Back then, the TV was starting to come. It was the early '50s and people were getting television sets and discarding their books, and you could go to, like, a church bazaar and for something like a quarter. And I had a lot of, and still have a lot of, very beautiful children's books."
One of the books which had a great impact on her as a child was the 1920s poetry collection Silver Pennies, which included Yeats's He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven. For Smith, it was like a clarion call. "I wanted to see who this Yeats person was, and I said to my mother, 'I want a book by this person'. And she bought it for me, and a lot of it was over my head, but I had it."
Later, in her early 20s, Yeats became fiercely important to Smith. She buried herself in his poems and plays, living as much in his world for a time as in the seamy rooms of the Chelsea. All through her life, she has become immersed in this way in the subjects that have caught her attention; she refers to it as her "studying", her habit of fixating on an individual, a period or a phenomenon, from New Wave cinema to 16th-century Japanese literature, from Beethoven to Jean Genet, and reading everything she can about it.. In this, her mother, who died in 2002, was, touchingly, a constant support; she would scour flea markets for books that she thought might be of interest and send them in box-loads to her daughter.
Smith has published several volumes of poetry since her first collection, Seventh Heaven, appeared in 1972, but most have appeared only in limited editions (a volume about Houdini came complete with padlock and keys). However, a selection of her early work was published in 1994, and The Coral Sea, a prose poem inspired by Mapplethorpe, appeared two years later. Last year she published a new collection, Auguries of Innocence, which confirmed that the French Symbolists are still very much her guiding spirits. Along, that is, with the spirits of her husband and her brother (both died suddenly within the same month); her poetry's very pigments are formed from a lonely intimacy with loss.
Loss informs her visual art also; on September 11th, 2001, Smith was working on a series of drawings inspired by the Crucifixion when, suddenly, the light in her part of Manhattan changed forever. The towers fell, and Smith grieved for them deeply. "It seemed wonderful because there were two," she writes in the text which accompanies the exhibition. Her response was a series of drawings and silk-screen prints centring on the twisted remains of the South Tower - in what was left, Smith immediately saw a reflection of Bruegel's Tower of Babel - and incorporating text from the Essene Gospel of Peace. Several of the works are truly beautiful, somehow rendering blisteringly raw an image long gone beyond simulacrum. It's clear from them that Smith is no Sunday painter.
PHOTOGRAPHY - AN ART she learned, essentially, from Mapplethorpe - she approaches with a different intensity. Unlike painting and drawing, it is her constant companion on the road, and something which makes the experience of being on the road seem a little more real.
"Sometimes, with the band, I don't get a lot of time in cities," she says. "You wind up being in 20 cities in 25 days. And I've learned to discipline myself and make sure that in each city I go somewhere on my own, taking photographs, so I'll feel some relationship with the city other than sort of crawling out of the tour bus, into a venue, doing our show and then crawling back into the bus. And so I started developing other relationships with these cities other than performing - which is a great thing to do, a great way to connect with the people - but I like to have a sense of the city itself, its history, its soil."
Smith will bring her camera to Sligo, taking shots she hopes will become part of a planned exhibition in New York later this year.
She reveals that there is also a chance that she will curate a show of Jack B Yeats's paintings in Sligo in the future, and that part of her time at the Model will be spent examining the work, looking for her binding theme. Part of her time in Sligo may also, she hints, be spent scouting for a potential home.
"I'm trying to figure out what to do as I get older," she says. "I'm looking for a place to live part of the time, and I now want to live by the sea."
And naturally, she will visit the grave of her first poet, under Ben Bulben, and read for the first time in its smooth stone an epitaph she has known about, and longed to see, since the age of 17. "It took me a long time, but now I'm going to see it," she says quietly. "And I love things like that. Because I still can remember, I'm very much in connection with my younger self. So this is going to be a very important visit for me."
• Patti Smith is in Sligo this weekend for the opening of her exhibition, Patti Smith, Drawings and Photographs, which runs at the Model Arts and Niland Gallery until Jul 20. She will be taking part in various events, including a public discussion with Peter Crawley, on Sun May 21 as part of the Arts Council's Critical Voices programme. See www.criticalvoices.ie and www.modelarts.ie