Patti Smith and Jonathan Lethem in Conversation

so how do I want to start by making you talk about being a book Scout one of my favorite things in in in just kids was your incredible attentiveness to not just the fact that you were scuffling for rare books to make money but you'd say you know the pages were lightly foxed or all the plates were in place and and it just gave me such a thrill it made me remember my own days you know as a book hound imagining what I could turn some item over for well I grew up in the 50s where most people in America after World War two were getting rid of their old stuff they didn't want their grandfather or their parents stuff they they didn't want the nice porcelain they wanted melmac they didn't want these old leather-bound books they wanted the Reader's Digest collection so even as a child I would go to like rummage sales or Church bazaars and pick out books that you know for like pennies a quarter I got a first edition Dickens with a green velvet cover with a tissue guard with a reviewer of Dickens it's just you could get things like that and they always even I mean it's never gone away my love of the book the paper the font the cloth covers which all of these things are slowly dying out but and did you work at rare rare book shops at one point I only worked at one I worked at Argosy books in 1967 though I falsified my credentials as a book restorer and the old fella who ran Argus II was very touched by me and he tried to train me but I spilt rabbit glue all over a nineteenth-century Bible that he said was not really rare it was he was it was a trainer Bible so he had to let me go so that was my brief time in a in a rare book door and you still collect not maybe not systematically but you have precious oh you showed me a few amazing amazing things patty let me hold Arthur Rambo's calling card this morning I have I have such nice things I have a couple of letters of HP Lovecraft a watercolor of Hermann Hesse's I have a page from Jim Morrison's last notebook and and which all of these things I mean we don't really own worth we have a guardianship of for a while and I there might they're my things you know I look at them and play with them well you've just you've handed me my next question which is I always feel that this relationship the collectors relationship also connects very strongly to an attitude of well you cure something curatorial in it but also you know you've been a collage artist your whole life you've cut things up to make other things out of them and you've been an appropriator you know I mean in in gestures as simple as you know recording hey Joe and Gloria as among your first songs you know as a cover artist you you you're a remixer and I always think that these relationships are closer than people realize that to collect things is also to want to repurpose them well sometimes I mean sometimes it's really just to you know resonate like within them I know a lot of great collectors all of their things are involved I know people that own Arthur Rimbaud manuscripts and they're involved and all my stuff is in my room I mean I'd look at it loved it let it sit outside you know I mean sit outside of you know a metal box or something I look them and sometimes I photograph them that's my way of appropriating things like that but I did nota ly appropriate a 19th century mathematics book of Ryman's hypothesis for a collage but it was falling apart anyway so I've you know I've just read the book about your incredibly gorgeous account of your the origins of your collaborative work and collaborative life really with with robert mapplethorpe and the you know the grounding and the visual arts is so fundamental to your work and yet you're not-- you know you're known now as a musician and a writer but you still take photographs you still draw as well oh yes i mean i it's it's funny because i don't consider myself a musician at all i can play a few chords on the guitar i have no natural gifts as a musician obviously i sing but i think of myself more as a performer when I think of myself in terms of my grill skills I would think of myself as a writer and a visual artist before I would a musician but I I don't even remember what the question is sorry I can pick it up and say you mean you and I have a funny thing in common that in a couple of weeks we're both graduating with a doctorate and the arts from Pratt which is kind of a weird a weird fate for such unruly students as you and I were you ever an art student in any official capacity art history at Glassboro State Teachers College and then I came I left and I came to New York in 67 and really I studied through Robert I was drawing at the time we sat for hours and hours night after night drawing and you know drawing from each other as well as drawing and I studied in my own way I loved art one of my ideas when I came to New York in 1967 was to get a job at the Museum of Modern Art as a guide so I knew the story and history of every painting in the Museum of Modern Art and you know tried to pitch that as a job but they scooted but I yet like you an unruly student but I always dreamed of going to Pratt I couldn't afford to I wasn't like you said I wasn't the best of students but I wondered about this you know should I accept this honor and then I thought Robert would really like that so he really wanted when Robert went to Pratt and we lived together in Brooklyn if a professor came to look at his work he always asked the professor to look at my work and critique it anything that he knew or understood or contemplated he shared with me I don't know what he would think he had a bachelor and I'll have a doctorate let me ask you a little more about the book specifically and and your your present role as a memoirist I mean it's a very generic and maybe kind of pedantic question to ask but I think I'd be very interested in knowing what your writing process is like how you put this book together you know and whether you are working on another book like it or want to write another book in the same mode well this book was very difficult because Robert asked me to write it he asked me to write it on his deathbed I wanted to write it I have lots of sources I have Diaries daily Diaries I know the date when I cut his hair when I first chopped up my hair I when I first met Janis Joplin when Robert went to a taxi dance for the I have everything David I have lengthy journals I have his letters but after the Robert died I had to face the death of my husband my brother and my parents and I found it very difficult to write and it's only been in the last few years where all of these notes and pages and and baskets of writing I was able to sit and then put it all together and I made a rule for myself two rules one that no matter what I remembered or what I had if I couldn't see what I was writing about as a little movie then I took it away because I wanted the reader to just enter like they were reading a movie and the other Robert was not much of a reader he didn't read hardly at all so it couldn't be boring or too digression 'el or he would just be agitated so I'd like for instance I had a two page meditation on Nathaniel Hawthorne's desk in there and Tony asked me why but I knew that this had to go I mean I can put it somewhere else but I knew that it was going in an area that might just you know sort of stunt the reader but also agitate Roberts I'm struck by of course I was talking about your your your art of collage but in a sense this was a collaboration with your own past self your collaging these journals and and notebooks and and letters but book of course has an extraordinary quality of compression and it just does read as a series of scenes that you enter so you're the rule you've set for yourself which is what I'd love to impart to any writing student I ever encountered well ended Lee and I also tried to the book is filtered through our relationship it's a very intimate book and you were asking me about would I write another well I didn't think I would write another but I I couldn't stop writing once I'd like become friendly with my voice in the book I I'm still writing but what I decided to is to write maybe a little trilogy of books that all are in the same time period but from a different angle like I could write about that whole time period not filtered through Robert and I and it would engage in other things how I write salt road songs or other people or other things that happened and I found it very and it's an interesting idea well there are other relationships that seemed to become pivot relationships yes that it you allude to like I could write a whole Sam Shepard or a whole chapter on William Burroughs you know but but also we were talking you know about Bolanos to 666 such a freeing book for a writer because you the idea of entering andrey entering and exiting worlds and i thought it would be very interesting to you know expand the world that i began if the people wanted it right and it seems like they might so i think they Thanks so I like your sneaker thank you they're they're not vintage but they're this doesn't matter they're like they're classic yeah class that's the word classic so well you know going from my Ramones sneakers one of the things from my own perspective as a as a fan you know I was I was let's see if I can do this I was 10 years old in 1974 I went I went to CBGB's three or four years later for the first time they used to oh yeah well sorry oh it's okay okay but the the way doesn't even a let out of the house when I was 13 well it was only it was only a subway ride but the way that my friends and I received your career which was already legendary to us in you know 76 77 78 I mean you'd graduated you and talking heads would not appear in a small club anymore we'd have to go to you know a winter land or some but simply not true I still went page oh yeah write it right to the end it's just that I was often on the road at all it was about philosophy we were we were more often in those little clubs seeing you know our own peers high school students who started bands we're now taking over CBGB's and and we would we would see you guys in these little mini arenas and so on but the concept of punk was so formative for us it was so powerful it made an entire they created a possibility for us as as listeners and as a subculture that you know we could clamp we could claim our own rock and roll and that also had it to had a kind of a analyst n't quarantine aspect to it certain things were decide decisively uncool or unacceptable you know we we didn't we didn't let ourselves hear how great the music that had preceded Punk was because we needed Punk to be our own kind of anthemic thing of course reading your story it's amazing to see I shouldn't be shocking but it was because of the prejudices I find I still have from that punk identity how completely continuous with the earlier rock-and-roll 50s and 60s and even early 70s you know Janis Joplin being a great example the development of your role as a as a performer as the singer in a rock and roll band didn't have to do with sweeping the plate clean well the thing that's really that's great I love hearing about this because people like Lenny K and myself we were born in 1946 we saw from childhood on the entire evolution of rock and roll and so we came when when we started performing and 73 and 74 our goal was not we were not punk rock we were Guardians we felt of our own history we felt that rock and roll was becoming more corporate more glamorous less a cultural voice and we wanted to remind people that it was a grassroots art that it was ours that it was revolutionary that have belonged to the people it didn't belong to rich rock stars it didn't belong to record companies that belonged to the people but we were the messengers of this we were not you know please don't get me wrong I'm not comparing us to Moses but Lenny and I often thought we were like we saw the Promised Land we saw the future of for generations we saw rock'n'roll as being you know belonging to the streets the just people playing in their garages anyone could play rock and roll it was it you know to take some of the the star system out of rock and roll and so we were more the bridge and the people that came after even like the Sex Pistols I knew all those people all those kids they came to our shows I knew the clash but a lot of them it was necessary for them to as you said turn their back on the past because of their method that they had to break through they had to break through without us and even despise us and I understood that I understood that but I'm not like that I I would feel to me being part of the chain of being that includes you know anyone from Raphael to Coltrane to Alan Ginsberg to Jimi Hendrix to be part of this is something that I embraced I wouldn't want to turn all of that over okay but really I have no quarrel with people that need to do that it's really up to you know it's up to the individual and how one declares their existence I did a similar thing with religion that you know certain young people did with to us or to you know the dinosaurs of rock and roll you know but it's it's all okay as long as we keep the blood infused into the medium right well you know for a for a teenage listener you were on the side of revolution at that time we would have placed your relationship to the dinosaurs that rock and roll as a very aggressive one and the irony is that you have always been so engaged with your sources whether it's William Blake or or you know Van Morrison's you know song you've always worn them on your sleeve and celebrated them in this sort of ecstatic way but by that act by combining them with an image of renewal a revolution you could also become a guide back to those sources for someone what is your you know what is your relationship to present-day music making do you listen to a lot of contemporary music when you're thinking about what kind of recording you might make no I mean I listen to opera really that's what I listen to but I love I mean I listen to my son and daughter my daughter is 22 years old she's composing all of the time I listened to her playing I listened to her friends my son is a guitar player I listen you know they they stick stuff on my computer like one day I'm looking at my you know eivol my opera and then there's like the yeah yes you know so like okay I'll listen to that the other thing I do is some to either MySpace and I'm not so active in it but what I do is I got all these friends on it I go in to their you know I go to their space and a lot of them create their own music and I listen to them and see what they're doing and I tour listen to you know a lot of young kids give me their CDs and it to me I'm just happy to see it prevail I don't really when people ask me who's the new people well to me the new people are the unknown people the new people that I embrace are the people that and we don't even know who they are I just the people of the future the kids that are you know in their basements or the the group that is struggling out there in Brooklyn or you know I it's not Streck thing but there are there the people that I invest my love into yeah you just mentioned your kids and you know one of the things that I think is it so stirring to have grown up with your your career and as your fan the the fact that you that there's a kind of mysterious you know period in the middle where you became primarily a member of a family and you know there's one album in the way a housewife a suburban housewife was in place of birth but I thought I'd try so there's there's dream of life as this weird signal coming out of that period in the middle it's an incredible album and and then you know as we now know you you've suffered a period of losses and transformations but you also came back to a time of very fertile productivity and you have this relationship to your grown children even play music on stage with you at times this is something that you know for people who have a romance of you know a alienated romance with you know to be creative is to be outside of a family it's it's you know to not have children it's something all the young people do and and you have to make a choice well that the story of your choices is a very stirring one but it's also it's incomplete we don't know how you felt always about moving out of out of out of New York and out of out of your role as you know the the role you'd carved for yourself in the in the career you had here well the role that I carved for myself we had accomplished I mean in in terms of rock and roll our mission was to wake people up and create new space for the new guard well the new guard came and hopefully we created space for them so I felt that I had accomplished that mission and I you know being on the road and starting to become quite successful and the demands and and pressures of that and the media I felt that I wasn't growing as an artist at all I wasn't growing politically I wasn't growing spiritually and I met a really great person I met Fred sonic Smith he had been in the mc5 he had gone through all of the things that I had gone through and I had a decision if I wanted to carve a more difficult life with this man or continue the way I was going and I most happily went with him I mean I missed New York City I Love New York City I missed you know the coffee shops I missed the camaraderie of my band but it's it's really a misconception that these were not productive years I this book just kids came from years and years and years in those 16 years of developing writers discipline of becoming hopefully a better human being having children finding I wasn't in the center of the universe being more empathetic to my fellow man so I became more knowledgeable politically and you know just seeing how human beings toil and I had to do all the cooking and the cleaning and the washing of the diapers we didn't have nannies or anything like that we did everything ourselves and we didn't make a big income because we both withdrew from public life but for me it was the the skills and disciplines that I obtained in those years are still they've magnified all my efforts so it certainly they sir we weren't lost years that's a beautiful way to put it I want to talk a little bit about your reading life your you're so engaged with Roberto bolaño right now and you've talked about how you tend to have this consuming relationship with very very large books in succession you know that you you've spent you see you described it as a year reading over and over again hermann hesse's the glass bead game and and that now it's you know Bologna oh is the you know you can't get away from two six six six but I also have heard that you reread certain children's books oh yeah over and over again I I walk with all my books I mean I reread I'd love child's garden of verses and love of course Songs of Innocence which is in a children's book but my mother gave it to me when I was a child so I perceived it as a children's book Pinocchio Alice in Wonderland Peter Pan I read these books in fact my goal in life still which I haven't achieved I want to and I've wanted this ever since I was like 10 to write one of those books I really hope I live long enough to give to the children of the future one wonderful book that fell love as much as I loved Pinocchio so that's a but I I love my books I I've always loved books and I you know Moby Dick I guess was the first big you know that I'm assuming that I plow was rereading the whiteness of the whale skipping the whaling chapter the blubber and and so there's nothing more wonderful to me than the book well you the time that William Blake will you place the William Blake song okay I mostly write my songs with musicians Lenny Kaye being probably the person I've written the most songs with but occasionally I write a song by myself and I read this little song when I was having a lot of strife when I felt unappreciated which I know might seem ridiculous because obviously I'm well appreciated but it's all relative you know sometimes you feel unappreciated and and I was thinking about this sort of feeling sorry for myself and I fell asleep and then when I woke up this song was in my head and it was just like the answer and the answer was that remember William Blake who gave us such beautiful songs poems was an activist a humanist a philosopher an artist a printer and also a casual day of the Industrial Revolution and was barely had any success in his own lifetime not only that was ridiculed died penniless and was nearly forgotten so and yet William Blake was always grateful for his visionary powers never let them go and did his work even on his bethe deathbed he was working on illustrations to Dante on his deathbed so and still speaking to his angels so I just try to remember William Blake when I feel sorry for myself which isn't too up in my plug-in here I was so disposed toward a mission yet unclear and facing poll by poll by Jim breathe into my ear obey the simple code when road is paved in gold when road is just a road in my blacken year such a woe for schism the pain in our existence was not as I envisioned foods that tram from track to track worn down to the soul when road is paved in gold when road is just a road in my black eight-year temptation yeah there is just a shallow sphere root and cowardice brace yourself for bitter black for life divine a labyrinth of riches never shell unwind the tears that finds the pilgrim sack a stitched into the Blakey and back so throw up used to be cloak embrace all that you fear his joy will conquered all despair in my Blakey in here so throw up used to be cloak him right he's all that you fear this joy will can turn on despair in my Blakey here in my Blakey year in my Blakey in here okay I've been hogging you so I'm gonna fight no I've been talking to you because you've been very generous and spending all this time asking me questions when I know we could very easily turn it around because it's good you're a fine writer and wrote such beautiful essays and it's very generous of you to spend this time letting me do all the talk of great propor a lot of the talk great sir thank you I there are two microphones here and if people have questions they should come up and and and pick one of them and I don't know quite how much longer we've got but we'll do this until we're done and and I'm just going to be a tiny bit of a hard-ass and say because it's a the time is tight not anecdotes but questions thank you question anybody how about the connection to Allen Ginsberg William Blake more wooden actually the connection the lineage now and you're part of that Gordon well I mean if you want to talk about connection Allen Ginsberg who is my great friend and teacher spoke to me about this actually Alan I used to talk about this that we have like two family we have two trees we have the genetic family tree and we have our Mort us the spiritual artists golden chain tree and Alan really felt his connection so much like you can choose your ancestors and we used to play a game like who are your your ancestors and his were of course Walt Whitman and and and William Blake and each William Blake Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg all three of these men reached out to people that reached out to the poets and writers and human beings of their time in the future to animate their creative impulse to to understand that they had it first and then Walt Whitman saying poet young poet 250 years from now young poet who does not exist I am thinking of you now I am with you now Allen Ginsberg embraced that Walt Whitman is with me and he walked with Walt Whitman he walked truly walk with Blake and I think of them all I did a lot of walking with William Burroughs because we both loved detectives well thank you and Allen's in the house thanks Perry I'm from former Soviet Union so first of all I want to tell you how much bigger will you and Robert Mapplethorpe and hold this generation plate for us when we were starting our revolution against 80s and 90s and I want to thank you for that I also want to thank you for your wonderful life and you're describing and I'm really looking forward to buying this book about how you went back to with your family and raised kids and then came back and didn't lose a track and that really means a lot to us to see that you know the oldest world of 60 is a wonderful freedom world of 60s was not just saying no to the family and saying no to children but it was saying no to the very bourgeois desires of the small kind of world so since we had the period unfortunately the world right now we also and everyone is looking since the destroying of the so-called cold air Cold War area and we actually fought the Soviets always because we knew about you guys in 60s and 70s and was the same spirit of liberation from this slavery and you guys Janis Joplin all these guys were for us it was not Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher that's who says that it was you guys who really generated this revolution in the Soviet Union so my question is very simple in 2010 2010 are we condemned to live in a boudoir slavery or that could be some freedom coming from your experience thank you are we condemned to live in Gujrat slavery I don't think that were condemned to what do anything where as long as we're alive we can we we have choices and actually I don't even know what bushwa slavery is since I never experienced it so I'm not quite sure exactly what that means but I think you know each each generation has to translate for themselves I myself never felt condemned to anything I always felt like you know no matter what the situation one could either imagine or create their own portal out of there so you know we have either our physical ability to change or we have our imagination in times of imprisonment so that's the only thing I can say about that Thanks yes I would like to ask you about how do you experience limitations to freedom of expression obviously we are a wonderful free spirit with wonderful words but there are so many visible institutionalized or invisible informal restrictions to or freedom of speech in there I don't know I mean I'm lucky I mean being in an American I have obviously enjoyed you know freedom of speech is part of our heritage of course it's one still has to continually fight for this but I don't know how to answer questions like that because you know we just each human being it's like what he just asked we have to decide you know what we want and if we're in a situation where we have to die for that then we have to choose whether we want to die people have they did die in the revolution you know in in in my country in this country they died for their freedom you know people died for your freedom we we you just have to decide sometimes people ask me that and all they're talking about is a record company doesn't want them to you know put a certain song on their seat well you know them you know put it on or leave you know I mean I've never been suppressed by I mean radios I've had like records band I've had people not play my records or something because I spoke out about it against rocks because I wrote a song called rock and roll but I still did the work you know you just keep doing your work you know if you know a corporation or a big company won't put out your work you go out on the streets you know before I had a record label we made our own records and went to parks and sold them for a dollar or you know read poems out in you know in the streets and I still do that I still go to all over the world and still we'll go in a square with my guitar and just sing a song we're a lot less confined and people think obviously there are some cultures in some places where I can't even project what that's like but we are a lot less confined than we when people complain especially in this country that they're confined there's always a way out there's always a way out you just have to keep pushing as Jim Morrison said break one through to the other side as you see I'm not very politically astute I'm just like I'm just like a big Saint Bernard I just go bounding in any situation and you know do it I'm there to do and if people don't like it they can you know throw me out thank you yeah I'm not sure how accurate this is but it seems like when you first came to New York you were really able to engage with this entire community of young artists and I guess my question is from the way the city has changed and the whole nature of the way we communicate with people has changed do you think it's still possible for a young artist to kind of come to the city and find that community well when I first came to New York City I didn't I didn't have any money I didn't know anybody I did know a few people at Pratt Institute which is a ready-made situation I mean obviously a school a college a place of higher learning is a ready-made situation for a community but I didn't go to school I met people and we did develop communities it's much harder in New York City almost impossible to do what we did back then because of how it's changed economically in the 60s New York City was down and out it was a bankrupt city you know the resulting garbage strikes you could get an apartment for $60 a month in the East Village you could you know build a you know a whole community of transvestites or a whole community of actors and poets and singers or a political community it was much easier because we could get shitty jobs and and get a shitty little apartment without a bathroom but we were alive when we were together and New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling but there's always other cities you know I don't know Detroit Poughkeepsie Newark you know you have to find the new place because New York City has been taken away from you but it's still a great city but it has closed itself off from this the poor and creative burgeoning society so my advice is find a new city I just wanted to thank you for how intimate you and just kids you shared your experience when you were 19 I went through a similar experience I'm 19 as well and also lots of childs when I over the past year and I just appreciate how your strength prevails you and your creative expression didn't die down or you didn't let depression get in way of that after a traumatic experience such as that as losing well in New York is giving up a child's after for adoption I just admire your strength than your ability to share that with well it was a hard choice to talk about it but you know it's nothing I made of course not ashamed of it was very painful and and I also want to protect all of the people involved in that but but really you know the things that happen to us when we're young do seem more almost it seems exquisitely painful and sometimes we feel we won't get over it I cried really for like two years didn't even know why I was crying but we prevail the human the you know the human beings are so strong the things that we have gone through in the evolution of being a human being and believe me in your life you will suffer again but you also have million wonderful things that happen so we have to just try to think in our life I have a lot of rough things that happen in my life but I don't look at them as stepping-stones of being a human being you try to pick the the beautiful things you're given life your first you know sense of your own imagination your first sense of God your first feeling of love even you know the beauty of feeling when you lose somebody you feel them in your heart so you know pain is a really important part of being a human being you wouldn't want to live without it it just it's like having if you had summer I mean this is why the seasons are beautiful so anyway you'll be mine I I just wanted to say that reading your book was almost the pushing of helping me just find my way again in terms of like speci myself by not holding and so I appreciate your honesty and your strength well appreciate your honesty to it now you can just for John so we'll be able to do just three more thank you everyone who's been greater didn't have to step up I'm sorry if we won't get to every last question cool can you talk about your experience of finding a discipline as a artist and a writer because I I don't I think it's kind of a generally everybody kind of experiences if there are a writer particularly it can be a pretty gruesome and painful and also work yeah like finding a kind of routine well you know I I worked steady jobs since I was 14 so from like 62 to 72 so or 73 so I I've experienced the 9 to 5 job so that was the real painful experience of discipline but in terms of exercising your imagination or exercising your skills the mind and the heart and the imagination are all muscles and they must be exercised and I think it's very important for us as human beings to set goals for ourselves I just made a vow with myself I'm it's very young that I had to write something every day even if it was a piece of conversation I heard from others if I didn't have anything to say myself to be attentive to what people were saying or to record a dream when I woke up in the morning and I can honestly say I would say about 90% of my life I've written at least one line sometimes it's like several pages but sometimes it's like literally four words but if you apply give yourself certain you know you said you know it's almost like the happy prison of existence sometimes I pretend I'm I'm a prisoner and you know if I don't write my word I'm going get solitary confinement but in any event whatever game you played with yourself discipline is a beautiful thing it's like people that do a lot of yoga or they do a lot of exercising after a while your body craves that and if you sit and make yourself look at a blank page or write or look at your canvas or your violin of work with it just a little and after a time you'll crave it and so anyway that's my tool my drinking and buy yourself a nice pen and hey paddy my name is Claudia and I just wanted to thank you so much for being here and sharing your how you've been inspired by books and I was especially excited to hear that of your love for children's books and how you want to write one at some point because I happen to be an editor at Harper College children's books so my question is would you like my visitors come sure I'll take it wait forever for your call last one hi star before we have our last person thank you so much Jonathan I only met Jonathan today so I already I have a new friend and so it was really great to talk to you and I love talking in this historic hall and being part of the pen festival so I thank you all for coming hi my name is Jeff and I live in New Jersey actually I'm gonna say one thing that I'm very proud of which is that my son is going to be a student here next year and that's pretty remarkable and that makes me feel special to hear you hear you've created a lot of art in your lifetime and I guess I have my own opinion having read your book and having the point of view that it should be the National Book Award winner but where do you put it where do you rank this book if you can in all of the art you've created well then I don't you know I don't think like that obviously but one thing I will say is that the thing that makes me the most proud of the book is that the people have embraced it I have no problem and that a lot of my work might live in obscurity might not even greet the public eye but I didn't write this book to be obscure I wanted people to read it I wanted people to know Robert as I had known him I was hoping that it might inspire especially well give some kind of feeling to people of my generation but inspire new generations and the fact that the people seem really to like it they come up to me on the street and tell me I that that makes me really happy it has nothing to do with art so much as it has to do with communication sometimes an artist creates without thought of communicating with anyone because we're just impelled to create and might create a poem that is so obscure that no one really can penetrate it but sometimes we do things solely or most importantly to communicate and I feel if nothing else because one should not critique their own work that the people have let me know that I have somehow successfully communicated this nice very nice little story to them if I might say it's it is great communication but it is truly a work of art

Channel: PEN America

Views: 31,303

Rating: 4.9439254 out of 5

Keywords: Jonathan Lethem, Patti Smith, PEN, PEN American Center, World Voices Festival

Id: 0cHL-VXYSgI

Length: 54min 42sec (3282 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2010