If there is one thing that is incredibly heartwarming for me, it is the flowering successes of Patti Smith. Her passions for Blake (as well as so many other things - from the French Symbolists to the Beats via Robert Mapplethorpe) is well known, enduring and, on a personal level, extremely touching.
One thing that is particularly marvellous about her career is that it seems to have enjoyed a millennial resurgence. Smith, in my opinion, joins those ranks of women such as Louise Bourgeouis and Georgia O'Keefe who just get better as they get older, and it's a damn fine sign that she is not being brushed out of sight in her sixties - if anything, is becoming more prolific and more admired. In 1999, a bitchy and thoroughly mean-spirited biography by Victor Bockris and Roberta Bayley was published which largely wrote her off as another has-been: the next decade proved them both completely wrong.
Very briefly, her list of accomplishments in the new decade has included various collections of her lyrics (such as Patti Smith Complete, which came out a year after the Bockris/Bayley hatchet job, followed up in 2006 by Complete: Lyrics, Reflections and Notes for the Future), some fine editions of her favourite poets, including a selection of Blake's published by Vintage in 2007, a book of her 2008 exhibition of photography, Land 250, a much-awaited autobiography of her time with Mapplethorpe, Just Kids, recently published by Bloomsbury and which I haven't had chance to read yet, and - last but by no means least for this blog - the 2006 collection of original poetry, Auguries of Innocence.
In some ways, though the Bockris/Bayley biography annoyed me immensely, it came at a time when Smith probably was something of a fading shadow. I'm sure I'm not the only young man to have half-fallen in love with the Mapplethorpe portrait of her on Horses - one of the very icons of cool itself, beautiful in all its androgynous perfection - but by the end of the 1990s I must be honest that she had drifted far away from the centres of my perception. In the past ten years, however, something of her true value has been appreciated by writers and film-makers, such as Stephen Sebring, whose 2008 film Dream of Life has attracted critical acclaim recently.
Smith's influences cannot, and should not, be reduced to Blake - but her tousles and invocations of the Romantic should also never be forgotten. Her recent performance at Union Chapel, London, included a rendition of "My Blakean Year", from the 2004 album Trampin':
For a life sublime
A labyrinth of riches
Never shall unwind
The threads that bind the pilgrim's sack
Are stitched into the Blakean back
So throw off your stupid cloak
Embrace all that you fear
For joy will conquer all despair
In my Blakean year
You can read the lyrics in their entirety on her site, pattismith.net, but I shall end here with one of my favourite quotations from her, taken from a 2000 interview for Tate Magazine: