Patti Smith on Substack
Few artists are as suited to Substack as creative multi-tasker Patti Smith, who recently performed a live set at NY’s Electric Lady Studio exclusively for her subscribers on the digital newsletter platform. Since March 2021, Smith’s readers have received weekly instalments of her latest journal, The Melting. As the pandemic played out, her writings on “the sting of global claustrophobia” gave way to something more digressive, picking up strands from her 2015 memoir, M Train. Her profoundly lyrical prose ranges across travel, science, books, art, music, and good coffee. The third part is shaping up like a detective story (inspired – let’s hope – by her love of a good ITV3 mystery drama). There’s audio too, as Patti reads each episode aloud. Without the lightning rod of a live audience, the sonorous on-stage poet becomes a fond, friendly narrator. Smith revels in the intimate possibilities of the medium, promising that, “As you are reading, I will still be writing, until we collide in real time.” Meanwhile, burgeoning video experiments have seen her puzzling over the camera’s mirror image before reading aloud with
Cairo, her Abyssinian cat, sat patiently on her lap. See them both at pattismith.substack.com