Early Work: 1970-1979

by Patti Smith

Overview

Selections from Patti Smith's writings over the decade in which she made a lasting impact on America's underground literary and rock scene.

Collected here are selections from Patti Smith's writings over the decade in which she made a lasting impact on America's underground literary and rock scene. Smith's work evokes the experimentation and the desire to break boundaries of those pre-punk days. Over one-quarter of the works selected are unpublished pieces from journals, performances, and Smith's personal papers. Heavily illustrated with photographs by Judy Linn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edward Maxey, and others, Early Work brings together all sides of Patti Smith, from the thoughtful intellectual to the explosive performer.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393313017
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	06/17/1995
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	1,045,499
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Patti Smith is a poet, performer, visual artist, and author of M Train and the National Book Award-winning memoir Just Kids. She has twelve albums, has had numerous gallery shows, and continues to give concerts of her music and poetry. Her books include Early Work, The Coral Sea, Witt, Babel, Auguries of Innocence, Woolgathering, Land 250, Trois, and many others. In 2022, Smith was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation in recognition of her outstanding lifetime achievement. She lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

"A poet of distinction."

John Rockwell

"[Early Work] burns . . . with the galvanizing sense of faith and transcendence that made [Smith] the last of the great rock poets."

Entertainment Weekly

"[Early Work] establishes Smith as a visionary belletrist who believed in rock as a spiritual outlet and haven for black sheep—an outpost on a continuum connecting such heroes as poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, Amelia Earhart, Harry Houdini and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini to a sexy, androgynous future."

Evelyn McDonnell

This collection of Smith's poetry, focusing on her work during the decade in which she made her greatest impact on the punk and literary scenes, includes photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe and others. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``An artist wears his work in place of wounds. Here then is a glimpse of the sores of my generation,'' Smith says in a brief introduction. It is in the context of its decade that readers might best appreciate this volume. The writing from the four books gathered here, which seemed so daring in the 1970s, has lost some of its fury, especially when held up against recent performance artists. But this also works to the book's advantage: readers are not shocked as easily, and those who were caught up in their own turmoils during the 1970s can look more objectively at what Smith has to offer. Her stream-of-consciousness style permits superficial stabs at mystical vision, but beneath the sex, drugs, and four-letter words, she reveals a romantic sensibility. Sometimes, as in a magnificent three-page prose meditation on God and her father, everything calmly falls into place. With photos by Robert Mapplethorpe and Judy Linn. Recommended for larger, metropolitan collections.-- Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, ``Soho Weekly News,'' New York

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