The long road (2005)
The long road is a 2005 fiction book written by Patti Smith.
Patti Smith returns to the page with her first poetry collection in more than a decade. The poems read like anthems set down in ink, searing and intimate, the work of a writer who has spent her life turning the world into song. Smith writes in the line of troubadours and wandering wordsmiths, answering what she sees with fresh, unguarded language. Her touchstones are wide and unruly: Blake and Rimbaud, Picasso and Diane Arbus, even Johnny Appleseed. Grief, wonder, and a stubborn faith in art move through the pages. An American original speaks in her own plain, oracular voice.
Quick answers
What is The long road about?
Patti Smith returns to the page with her first poetry collection in more than a decade. The poems read like anthems set down in ink, searing and intimate, the work of a writer who has spent her life turning the world into song. Smith writes in the line of troubadours and wandering wordsmiths, answering what she sees with fresh, unguarded language. Her touchstones are wide and unruly: Blake and Rimbaud, Picasso and Diane Arbus, even Johnny Appleseed. Grief, wonder, and a stubborn faith in art move through the pages. An American original speaks in her own plain, oracular voice.
When was The long road published?
The long road was published in 2005.
Who made The long road?
The long road was written by Patti Smith.
Similar books
A few thoughts on The long road
Anyone moved by these poems should hear Horses, Patti Smith's 1975 debut, where the same visionary language first became rock and roll. Jim Jarmusch's Paterson honors the quiet poet at work, a bus driver writing verse between routes. For the Rimbaud thread she keeps returning to, Todd Haynes' I'm Not There channels that same restless, shape-shifting artistry.
More of Patti Smith's own music, memoir, and art
The Long Road is Patti Smith returning to poetry after years away, and the rest of her catalog answers that same restless creative pull. Horses turned verse into punk anthems, Just Kids and M Train turn memory into prose-poems, and Woolgathering and Early Work, 1970-79 catch her voice both before and after fame found her, one continuous act of noticing.
The Romantic and Symbolist poets Smith keeps talking back to
Smith names Blake and Rimbaud as touchstones for The Long Road, so Songs of Innocence and of Experience and Paul Verlaine's poems, written alongside Rimbaud himself, sit right at that source. Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes and Apollinaire's Alcools carry the same Romantic-into-modernist thread forward, and David Axelrod's Song of Innocence turns Blake's own words into music the way Smith turns hers into song.
Searing, oracular poetry from other unruly women writers
The Long Road answers the world in searing, oracular language, the same fierce directness that runs through Audre Lorde's Coal and Alice Walker's Hard Times Require Furious Dancing. Fatimah Asghar's If They Come for Us carries that urgency into a newer generation, and Diane di Prima's Beat-era verse and Kate Tempest's Brand New Ancients push the same unguarded, spoken-word energy into different decades and countries.
Art about a poet's quiet, unguarded way of watching the world
Patti Smith turns ordinary sights, and touchstones from Blake to Rimbaud to Johnny Appleseed, into fresh, unguarded verse, and Paterson follows a bus-driving poet doing exactly that with his own daily route. Elizabeth Bishop's exacting eye, Charles D'Ambrosio's wandering essays in Loitering, and Maya Angelou's reflective Even the Stars Look Lonesome all trust that same quiet act of noticing to carry a book.