According to the Chinese zodiac, it’s the Year of the Horse — the Fire Horse, to be exact — which only comes around every 60 years. It is said to promise a year of bold courage, independence, intense energy, intelligence and action.
It’s fitting that Patti Smith’s new memoir, Bread of Angels, lands here this year — she of the skirling, spitting rebel yell, independent, intense, intelligent. And, of course, one of her biggest hits was the propulsive anthem Horses. It may be 50 years old but it still packs an urgent, galvanising punch.
Smith, candle-thin and androgynous, with the faintest cast in her grey eyes and a shock of self-cut black hair, was known as the High Priestess of Punk because she emerged during the punk scene of 1970s New York. But it’s a lazy appellation. She was more a high priestess of rock poetry. And she herself rejects the title — she was never a punk, she says. Her performances at the storied club CBGB in the 1970s may have set up a template for punk in their raw authenticity, experimentation, and the immediacy of their message; against the rise of glam rock she was speaking to the mavericks, the disenfranchised, she says. “But I was never negative, never a nihilist.”
The crucible of artistry is endlessly interesting. The forces that create and shape an artist are fascinating in retrospect. Smith’s life story is positively Steinbeckian. She is born at the end of 1946, the first child of Beverly, a diner waitress, and Grant, a returning soldier weakened by malaria and migraines. He takes factory jobs to support his young family and Beverly waitresses through an eventual four pregnancies until she can no longer stand on her feet.
Smith is a sickly child, born with bronchial distress and prone to any illness going around. The family moves nine times before settling on a bleak housing estate outside Philadelphia, nicknamed “The Patch”. It overlooks a field sprinkled with daisies but behind it is a yard filled with trash cans and discarded junk, teeming with rats.
“Often, with no adults on patrol, we would assemble there searching for treasure,” she writes. “The massive crawl space beneath the buildings was called the Rat House. These were our playgrounds, one humming with nature, the other with debris, equally esteemed by the neighborhood children.”
They are a scrappy pack, with dirty faces and skinned knees, filthy clothes and “homemade bowl cuts”. Smith is curious and constantly strays. She once misses school because she is communing with a giant snapping turtle in a swamp nearby. She thinks he is a king. She loves fairy tales and Bible stories and drives her parents mad with her questions. “What is the soul? What color is it?”
One day — and this is one of the seminal events of her life — she finds two stacks of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar while going through the trash. She is enthralled by the magazines, having only ever seen Sears catalogues. “Subconsciously, I absorbed the work of some of the great contemporary photographers: Penn, Horst, Beaton.”
Another seminal event is a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Her father takes the children there just once. They’ve never been to a museum or a gallery, have never even gone to a movie or a restaurant together. There is no money for anything other than family picnics in the summer. The museum has a profound effect on the adolescent girl. “My father found me staring at a large Cubist painting … I was smitten with Picasso. I now felt I had superlative allies, who would one day lead me to a whole new world. I had fallen for art.”
From art it isn’t far to poetry and photography, and from these it isn’t far to leaving home. At 19 she finds herself pregnant. She gives up the baby and heads to New York, flinging herself on the mercy of the city.
Here the story begins to move in a blur. She meets the achingly beautiful photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and they have a long and profound relationship (the chronicle of which became her bestselling book Just Kids.) She befriends the playwright Sam Shepard, she writes poetry and forms a band with her brother Todd where she melds her words with their music. Bob Dylan is drawn into her orbit, and they become lifelong friends. Bruce Springsteen gifts her a song that becomes one of her great hits, Because The Night. The writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs join her circle. Her performances heave and swarm, the fans coming for what they see as a benediction, a sacrament.
And then she ghosts the New York scene, vanishing to Michigan with her great love, the guitarist Fred Smith. They live quietly, raising two children, and she writes every day. “The desire for illumination eclipsed that of ambition,” she explains. “Our life was obscure, perhaps not so interesting to some, but for us it was a whole life.” The marriage lasts 14 years, until Fred Smith’s death from heart failure.
She carries what she calls “sacred wounds of grief”. Not only does her husband die but so do Mapplethorpe, her brother Todd, Shepard, others. It is a cascade of loss during years of obscurity. Around 1995, Dylan draws her back in to open his stage show, and her rebirth begins: tours, books, awards, activism.
She is still performing at nearly 80. Slender as ever, long grey hair flying, still writing her own story. A Fire Horse. She has stayed faithful to herself and her belief in artistic freedom, turning the mundane into the beautiful, pain into hope.
From the March issue of Wanted, 2026
