I discovered Patti Smith the way many people do. Through that photograph. The one Robert Mapplethorpe took in 1975 for the cover of Horses. She’s leaning against a white wall, jacket slung over her shoulder, looking directly at the camera with a gaze that seemed to say: I don’t need your permission.
I saw the original print at the Mapplethorpe retrospective at the MCA in Sydney in 1995. I was in my late teens, not yet sure what kind of life I was building. I remember standing in front of that image for a long time. Not because of Mapplethorpe’s technique, though the composition is flawless. Because of her. The way she held herself. The certainty in her gaze that had nothing to do with polish and everything to do with presence.
But that’s not what drew me deeper into her work. What drew me in was learning that before she was Patti Smith, before punk rock, before the poetry readings at St. Mark’s Church, before she became the godmother of everything raw and unpolished, she worked in a bookstore. She cleaned toilets. She wandered through museums alone for hours, teaching herself how to see.
She arrived in New York in 1967 with nothing but a few dollars and a certainty that she was meant to make something. Not fame. Not money. Something. She didn’t know what form it would take. She just knew she had to stay close to the making of things.
This is what I keep returning to about Patti Smith. Not the icon she became, but the long apprenticeship before the becoming. The years of watching, reading, absorbing.
The patience to remain unfinished.
In Just Kids, her memoir about her relationship with Mapplethorpe, she writes about those early years at the Chelsea Hotel. They had almost nothing. They shared a single hot plate. They took turns being the one who ate. And yet she describes that time not as struggle but as devotion: “We gathered our singular intensity and forged it into the future.”
Standing in that Sydney gallery, surrounded by Mapplethorpe’s flowers and figures and famous faces, I didn’t know any of this backstory yet. I didn’t know they’d been lovers, collaborators, each other’s first believers. I didn’t know about the poverty or the patience. I just knew I couldn’t look away.
What strikes me now, reading Just Kids, is how little anxiety there is about arrival. She wasn’t asking when she’d be successful, when people would recognize her, whether she was wasting her time. She was simply doing the work of becoming. Reading Rimbaud, studying Modigliani, writing poems no one would see for years, supporting Mapplethorpe while he found his way to photography.
“I hadn’t yet become what I was to become,” she writes. “I had not yet read Illuminations.”
That sentence stops me every time. As if she understood, even then, that she was waiting for certain encounters. With books, with people, with ideas. That becoming is not a project you complete but a door you keep open.
When Horses finally arrived in 1975, it sounded like nothing else. The opening line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” announced that something had shifted. Here was a woman who had spent years absorbing poetry, visual art, rock and roll, and was now refusing to separate any of them.
But what made Horses radical wasn’t just its sound or its defiance. It was the fact that Patti Smith was thirty years old when it came out. In an industry obsessed with youth, with the prodigy narrative, with early arrival, she had taken her time. She had let herself be unfinished until she was ready.
Listen to “Birdland” from that album. Nine minutes of incantation, of speaking in tongues, of a woman who trusted that the audience would follow her into the strange. That trust didn’t come from confidence. It came from all those years of reading, wandering, watching. A long apprenticeship in not-knowing.
“I wasn’t trying to be commercial,” she said later. “I was trying to be immortal.”
Patti Smith teaches that the long becoming is not a detour. It’s the work itself.
We live in a culture that treats creative development like a race. Ship faster. Post more. Build your platform now. Find your voice immediately. We’re taught that hesitation is failure, that taking time is falling behind.
She offers a different model. The radical practice of remaining unfinished. Of continuing to read, to look, to learn, long after you’ve “arrived.” At eighty, she still reads poetry every morning. Visits the graves of writers she loves. Photographs with a Polaroid camera because she likes the waiting.
In M Train, she writes: “I was not ready to talk, having not yet learned the language with which to dream.”
That phrase. The language with which to dream. This is what the apprenticeship builds. Not skill exactly, though skill comes. Not style, though style emerges. A vocabulary of images, references, obsessions that become uniquely yours. A language no one else speaks because no one else has lived your particular sequence of encounters.
I think about Agnes Martin walking away from New York for seven years. Paul Thomas Anderson spending three years on a single film. The long silences and the slow accumulations. Patti Smith belongs in their company. Not because she chose silence (her work is anything but silent) but because she chose patience. She chose to trust the long becoming over the quick arrival.
“To be an artist,” she has said, “is to be willing to fail.”
I think she means something specific by failure. Not rejection or obscurity, though she experienced both. The failure of incompleteness. The willingness to remain in-process. To show up at the page or the stage not as a finished thing but as someone still arriving.
The question isn’t when will I be ready? The question is what am I still becoming?
Unfinished is not a problem to solve. It’s the condition of making anything worthwhile.
She’s in her late seventies now. Still performing, still writing, still wandering through cities with her Polaroid camera. Visiting Rimbaud’s grave. Reading poetry before breakfast.
I think about that photograph at the MCA. Thirty years ago now. I was eighteen, maybe nineteen. I didn’t know then that I was having one of those encounters Patti Smith writes about. The kind that changes how you see. I just knew I couldn’t look away.
That’s the teaching. Not that we’ll eventually arrive if we’re patient enough. Arrival was never the point. The point is the reading, the looking, the wandering. The devotion to encounters you haven’t had yet. The openness to the book that will change everything, the conversation that will crack you open, the work that will show you who you’re still becoming.
“I had not yet read Illuminations,” she wrote.
What haven’t you read yet? What encounter is still waiting?
Stay unfinished long enough to find out.