Living with Legends

From an interview with Patti Smith published last week in Slate.

"When we (Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe) moved to the Chelsea Hotel in 1969, I met a lot of poets and writers and developed my poetry more. In Brooklyn, I had worked on drawing, but in the Chelsea Hotel I saw Allen Ginsberg or William Burroughs every day. Gregory [Corso] was there, Jim Carroll—so poetry was a very strong force then," she said. One day, she asked the guitarist Lenny Kaye to plug in and add some musical accompaniment during a reading she gave in St. Mark’s Church. Her performative gifts were self-evident, and she became a rock star almost instantly. In the oral history Please Kill Me, an early publisher of her poetry, Victor Bockris, recalls thinking, "She’s an asshole, but she’s really good."