When Patti Smith steps onto the stage at Prudential Hall in Newark on the evening of Friday, October 16, she will be doing something she has done for more than half a century and yet, by her own account, has never done quite this way before. The occasion is "Patti Smith: Songs and Stories," a headline performance at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.
"We haven't done this before with all these people anywhere," Smith told New Jersey Monthly ahead of the festival, "so it'll be very special to Newark and for the Dodge Poetry Festival."
The performance is part of the 2026 edition of Dodge Poetry, which runs October 15–17 and is, by the foundation's own reckoning, North America's largest poetry festival. It is a biennial gathering that has drawn more than 150,000 people over more than four decades, and it has been described in terms borrowed from rock rather than letters: "poetry heaven," in the words of former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass; "a new Woodstock," per the Christian Science Monitor; and simply "Wordstock," as the New York Times once put it.
That a punk icon should headline such an event is less incongruous than it first appears. Smith has insisted for years that poetry came first and everything else followed. "Everything I've ever done has been an extension of poetry," she told the magazine. "I started performing as a poet, and it evolved with some music and improvisation and then into song. An album like Horses completely evolved from poetry."
Her love of the form began in childhood, and it began in New Jersey. Smith's family lived for a time in Pitman before settling in Deptford, where she graduated from Deptford Township High School in 1964. She briefly attended Glassboro State College — now Rowan University — before leaving for New York City, where she fell in with the artist Robert Mapplethorpe and the downtown scene that would produce Horses in 1975.
But the poetry came earlier still, during a sickly childhood in South Jersey. "I was a sickly child, and I spent a lot of time convalescing, so my mother gave me poetry books — A Child's Garden of Verses and Silver Pennies, all poems for children," she recalled. "I was probably seven years old, and I was reading poems by Yeats and Carl Sandburg." By twelve she had read widely. Her father, she said, read poems aloud to the children — Robert Burns, Kipling — and taught her the cadence of verse. "They were like early rap poems," she said. "That's when I started reading poetry aloud."
That oral tradition is the thread running straight to the Newark stage. The Dodge performance, Smith said, will emphasize "poetry and songs that had their roots in poetry," with shifting configurations of players rather than a full band — some pieces with just her and Kaye, others with a few joining in, and at least one with only her son.
The New Jersey connections run deeper than Smith's own biography. Kaye, her longtime guitarist and the compiler of the landmark garage-rock anthology Nuggets, was born and raised in New Brunswick. "So we'll have three New Jersey people performing," Smith noted. "The New Jersey connection is very strong."
Smith and Kaye first played together around 1970 or 1971, when Smith was living with the playwright Sam Shepard. It was Shepard's idea, she said, that she find a guitarist to accompany a poetry reading she wanted to make "a little more energetic." She asked Kaye. "Because people weren't used to seeing a girl reading poetry with an electric guitar, it caused a bit of a stir," she recalled — "both a positive and negative stir." The pairing endured through the Patti Smith Group, through her years away from public life, and into the present. "We're friends more than anything," she said. "We've known each other for half a century."
The festival itself has a longer history than many of its attendees may realize. It was launched in 1986 at Waterloo Village, the restored nineteenth-century village in Byram Township, and for more than two decades it made its home there, growing into the largest poetry gathering in North America. In 2010 it moved to Newark and took up headquarters at NJPAC, spreading its readings and workshops across the downtown Arts District — the Newark Museum, Trinity & St. Philip's Cathedral, and other venues — in what organizers framed as an effort to bring poetry into the streets of a working city. The festival was reimagined again in 2024, with a new emphasis on poetry as a performing art and as a tool for social justice advocacy, and it now anchors a year-round slate of Dodge Poetry programming at NJPAC.
The 2026 edition reflects that widened frame. Alongside Smith, the festival features 2025–2026 U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze, the best-selling poet and young-adult novelist Elizabeth Acevedo, Pulitzer Prize winner Tyehimba Jess, and alumni of Def Poetry Jam, plus a free outdoor celebration for families, writing workshops, and professional development for working writers. Newark's Source of Knowledge bookstore will open a pop-up shop at NJPAC. Passes went on sale in June.
For Smith, who turns 80 in December, the appearance is a kind of homecoming on several fronts at once — to the state where she first read Yeats, to the collaborators who have stayed with her across fifty years, and to the form she has always claimed as her foundation. She is careful about the labels. "I think of myself as a writer," she said. "I certainly don't think of myself as a musician; I don't play any instruments with any real skill. And I would say I can sing, but I'm not a great singer. I am a performer." Her daily practice now is prose, and her recent memoir, Bread of Angels, returns to the teenage years in which, as her publisher puts it, "the first glimmers of art and romance take hold."
Still, she keeps the old books, and she keeps reading the poems she read at seven. "My love of poetry goes way back," she said. "I'm almost 80 years old, so I've been reading poetry for over 70 years." On a Friday night in Newark, with an electric guitar nearby and an old friend at her side, she will read it aloud again.