Tonight I have the great pleasure of attending the tribute concert honoring Patti Smith at Carnegie Hall with an incredible roster of artists and actors playing her songs and reading her work. When I was fifteen years old, in 1975, I discovered two works that would change the course of my life. Ariel by Sylvia Plath, that slim volume of poems that spoke to all the pain I couldn’t name. And Horses, the album, that spoke to all the rage. I found it in Cutler’s, the New Haven record store, where I spent many hours perusing albums. I hadn’t heard of Patti Smith, but the jacket art called out. An androgynous looking woman in a black and white portrait photograph, white shirt, suspenders, an unapologetic gaze. Reader, I bought it. From the very first lines, I was galvanized, besotted. When I wrote to Patti Smith as a young editor wondering if she’d consider writing her memoir, I never could have possibly imagined that 28 years later we would have become compatriots, friends, editor and writer connected through language and poetry, life and art. Tonight is a night of nights.

Photo: Steven Sebring

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People always ask me what I’m looking for as an agent. Besides a house in Santa Barbara and a lifelong supply of Ambien, I usually say something like “prize winners or page turners.” Or, “I’ll know it when I see it.” Or something else equally evasive. I’m not trying to be cute, it’s just really hard to describe. Today, I read an interview with theater producer Sonia Friedman and she said, “I don’t want the writer to write what I want; I want the writer to write something that I didn’t know I needed. And that’s been the rule for me throughout my working life, to do with the thing that’s almost impossible to articulate, which is a about a feeling, about a chill, about a goose bump, holding your breath and realizing that time has stopped and I’m lost in another world, and if that happens, I’m all in.”

I’ll have what she’s having. What makes time stop for you?

photo: Sip and Feast

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