Patti Smith shares personal essay paying tribute to Tom Verlaine

Image from Patti Smith's Instagram

The musician has shared a new essay dedicated to the late Television frontman.

Patti Smith has written an essay, published in the New Yorker, paying tribute to Tom Verlaine – who died on 28 January aged 73.

Following the news of his death, Smith shared a series of Instagram posts dedicated to Verlaine. The pair previously dated and collaborated, with Verlaine playing guitar on Smith’s Glitter in Their Eyes from her 2000 album Gung Ho. “This is a time when all seemed possible”, Smith wrote alongside a photo of her and the Television co-founder, “Farewell Tom, aloft the Omega.” The following day, Smith also shared a photo of daffodils with the caption: “This morning thinking about Tom. Grief is not an affliction but a privilege.”

In a new essay, Smith remembers Verlaine with a personal tribute to him. The piece sees her reflect on his creative process, describing it as “exquisite torment” and poetically detailing how he crafted Television’s debut album Marquee Moon. “He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence. He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen”, Smith wrote. “He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of Marquee Moon were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment.”

Smith also detailed that Verlaine – born Thomas Joseph Miller – lived 28 minutes from where she grew up. She also wrote that “in high school, he played the saxophone, embracing John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. He played hockey, too, and when a flying puck knocked out his front teeth he was obliged to put away his saxophone and dedicate himself to the electric guitar.”

Elsewhere in the essay, Smith goes on to recall when the pair first met in “1973, on East Tenth Street, across from St. Mark’s Church, where he stopped me and said, “You’re Smith.”” Following this, she went to see Television on Easter night, 14 April, 1974. Remembering that moment Smith wrote, “as I watched Tom play, I thought, Had I been a boy, I would’ve been him.”

She goes on to detail how the pair grew closer, sharing personal memories and anecdotes of her time spent with Verlaine. Concluding the letter, Smith wrote: “There was no one like Tom. He possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music. In his last days, he had the selfless support of devoted friends. Having no children, he welcomed the love he received from my daughter, Jesse, and my son, Jackson.” Read the full essay here.