Poetry at full voltage on late-night television
Tom Snyder’s 1978 conversation with Patti Smith catches the poet after Horses had already redrawn the map and in the year of Easter, when Because the Night carried her voice onto the radio. She treats the late-night chair as another stage, not a trap. Mischief and doctrine share the same breath: fame as apprenticeship, instinct as method, and a flat refusal to sand the poetry down into polite chat. Watch the hands as much as the sentences. The voltage is the point, and she does not turn it down for the camera.
