Patti Smith Keeps Working

As the artist, writer, and musician gears up for a new show, Smith looks back on an astonishing 50-year career and what drives her forward

- By Chloé Cooper Jones. Photograph by Pieter Hugo

Patti Smith isn't writing. "It won't last that long," she tells me. "But it's been a while. It's been a few weeks. And I'm in a state of that nothingness."

We're drinking tea at a table in her hotel room in Paris. She pauses as church bells ring out from across the Seine, reaching us through the open window. "See?" she says with a laugh, gesturing to the sound that has arrived seemingly to underscore her words with divine authority. "He knows."

We're talking about one page in her latest book, A Book of Days, a volume of photographs and captions that has one entry for each day of the year. The images capture the texture of Smith's daily life-her bookshelf, her coffee cup, her eyeglasses, her own hand at work, hovering over a page of her prose.

The book also shares objects of significance to Smith, things once belonging to the many important people in her life who've died before her: her mother's key chain, her father's golf ball, the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's hat, a necklace given to her wrapped in black tissue by the artist Robert Mapplethorpe, her late husband's Mosrite guitar. These objects still hold for her a charge, the energy of the lost owner. The caption below an image of Sam Shepard's pocketknife reads, "Keep going, no matter what, my talismans seem to whisper."