New York, NY · punk poetry · rock

Patti Smith

1 upcoming festival

Punk's poet laureate — 'Horses' remains a sacrament, and every performance still reads as testimony, rock's great living poet at work.

Patti Smith was born in Chicago in 1946 and raised in southern New Jersey before moving to New York in the late 1960s, where she worked as a poet and writer before forming a band with guitarist Lenny Kaye. Her debut album Horses, released in 1975 and produced by John Cale, fused spoken-word poetry with garage rock and is widely treated as a founding document of New York punk.

Her later work includes "Because the Night," co-written with Bruce Springsteen, and albums recorded both before and after a long period away from performing in the 1980s and early 1990s. She is also an author; her memoir Just Kids, about her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, won the National Book Award in 2010. Her performances continue to combine music with reading and improvised speech.

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