Patti Smith presents Book of Days

PAtti Smith always took photos. She was doing it before her former boyfriend, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who died of AIDS in 1989, started doing it. There are already photos in her book “Babel”, which was published by Zweitausendeins in 1980 with texts in English and German; some are her own. Patti Smith used her Polaroid 250 Land Camera for years, which she is also pictured with on the cover of her new book, which has ‘Book of Days’ and her name embossed in gold on a black background – right inside Format and presentation similar to that of “Babel”, more than four decades ago.

Patti Smith now uses her mobile phone for photographic memory work. On March 20, 2018, she also opened her Instagram account, since then she has posted more than 1700 posts there, more than a million people follow her. She has remained true to herself and her unmistakable style. As in her previous books, the “Dream Collector” from 2013 or the “Year of the Monkey” from 2020, in the “Book of Days” – which could be called a “Book of Pictures” – she mixes her own recordings with photographic documents that she are dear and valuable. A kind of calendar was created with 366 days (for everyone born on February 29) and a poem dedicated to April 22, “Earth Day”.

Twinned with the losers of romanticism

Each of her images is linked to a message in words, because Patti Smith is a writer, a poet at heart. Everyone who has ever seen her, the one-time leader of punk, on stage with her screaming electric guitar and her wild lyrics knows that Seekers of meaning like Hermann Hesse or Samuel Beckett, with border crossers like Jean Genet or William Burroughs. And she lives her kind of animism, believing in the soul of nature and creatures and of things as a presence of the invisible. Patti Smith associates this form of humility with her political involvement as a staunch Democrat, as a American artistas she called herself.

With her in the “Book of Days” are the living and the dead – her own dead, like her husband, the musician Fred “Sonic” Smith, who died in 1994, and those she adored from earlier times, who accompany her on all her paths. Cemeteries and graves are places she visits, museums and memorials as memory stores and sources of her inspiration, but also cafés in cosmopolitan cities like Paris. It’s the people close to her to whom she always dedicates a day, her son Jackson and daughter Jesse, her musician and artist friends. She artistically arranges random still lifes with memorabilia and books, like landmarks in her biography. So she takes us, as companions, on her real and imaginary journeys.

Goethe is also honored

It is not a contradiction that the “Book of Days” is a celebration of life, day by day, remembering as that paradise from which we cannot be expelled – and which only opens up meaning and future. Patti Smith’s congregation already knows some of the photos, but now they appear in a new context, each page a calendar page. For example, under the picture of her and her younger sister Linda from 1952, which was already seen in “Babel”, it says: “Sisters. True Love” (February 16). For a photo of an old phone booth, she writes: “With a godsend I would call bygone times.” (September 18). Hermann Hesse’s birthday becomes a funny little homage to himself – “the Smith Premier No. 4 typewriter on which he wrote his masterpiece The Glass Bead Game wrote” (July 2).

Her reading love affair with Arthur Rimbaud began in the 1970s. Now she has bought his house in the Ardennes, which was bombed during the First World War and rebuilt from the rubble, where he wrote “A Time in Hell” in 1873. Rimbaud’s mother’s family offered it to her, she told The Guardian, and now she’s fixing it (October 22). But Goethe is also honored on the “birthday of the multidisciplinary poet” (28 August). She introduces her 21-year-old Abyssinian cat Cairo (November 15) and she thinks of her Zodiac species: Capricorns like Joan Baez, Martin Luther King, Haruki Murakami or the Belgian fashion designer Ann Demeulemeester, electively related to her favorite attitude as a female dandy in Black. On December 30, Patti Smith will be 76 years old herself.

At the end of the book there are “reading recommendations” – from Anna Achmatowa to Marguerite Duras, Yukio Mishima, Albertine Sarrazin or Robert Walser to Virginia Woolf. They are readings for a new year, which can begin with this wonderful book as a companion, with the almost always a little hazy pictures, some enraptured, as if floating, which nevertheless radiate so much energy – and with Patti Smith, as soul guide.

Patti Smith: “Book of Days”. Translated from the English by Brigitte Jakobeit. Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2022. 399. p., ill., hardcover, €32.