{"id":3728,"date":"2017-09-29T11:11:28","date_gmt":"2017-09-29T18:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/?p=3728"},"modified":"2017-09-29T11:12:25","modified_gmt":"2017-09-29T18:12:25","slug":"patti-smith-in-all-the-poets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/2017\/09\/patti-smith-in-all-the-poets.html","title":{"rendered":"Patti Smith in All the Poets"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>[contextly_auto_sidebar]<\/p>\n

FOR the last few months I’ve been doing a series on musicians and their interest in literature and writers for the Los Angeles Review of Books. So far, all of these have been strong interviews with artists I love about figures I share an ardor for. In some cases, the conversations have taken me down intellectual alleyways I did not expect to go, which is even better. Each interview has been quite different from the last.<\/p>\n

Patti Smith is by all measures a major, deeply influential musician going back to the mid-’70s: She was a kind of godmother to the New York punk movement. She’s drawn acclaim for her memoir Just Kids<\/em> and other writing, as well as her advocacy of French poetry.<\/p>\n

Smith now has a slim, strange new book called Devotion<\/em> on Yale University Press, which blends a meditation on creativity with a fable-like piece of fiction. (This blog is inspired, of course, by my own book on YUP, Culture Crash, <\/em>so I probably don’t have to underline how proud it makes me to be labelmates not just with Greil Marcus and Terry Eagleton but the great Ms. Smith.)<\/p>\n

The interview with Smith, which took place a few hours after she walked in from a trip to Mexico City (for what I take it was a memorial event for Sam Shepard) was wide-ranging and, at least for me a lot of fun. For reasons of length I had to leave out a few lines, such as her fondness for Powell’s Books in Portland, her love of the early Camus novel, A Happy Death, or the difference between John and Paul. (Beatles, not Bible.) But the review busted out its word length — hat-tip to my editor Boris Dralyuk for the space — because of our shared love of her work.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here<\/a>, then, is my All the Poets interview with the great Patti Smith.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[contextly_auto_sidebar] FOR the last few months I’ve been doing a series on musicians and their interest in literature and writers for the Los Angeles Review of Books. So far, all of these have been strong interviews with artists I love about figures I share an ardor for. In some cases, the conversations have taken me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3729,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35,40,34,30],"tags":[849,819,799,848],"class_list":{"0":"post-3728","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"category-indie","9":"category-literary","10":"category-los-angeles","11":"tag-devotion","12":"tag-french-culture","13":"tag-los-angeles-review-of-books","14":"tag-punk-rock","15":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3728"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3731,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3728\/revisions\/3731"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}