Singer, songwriter and poet Patti Smith opened an evening of music and poetry in The Greene Space by reading these lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Wasteland”:
April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring.
“We are going to speak of, this evening, the things that stir us,” Smith said. The April 23 event, Mixing Memory and Desire: An Evening of Music, Poetry, Sound and Remembrance, was presented by WNYC’s Spinning on Air and hosted by David Garland.
Smith was joined on stage by composer-musicians Jesse Paris Smith and Eric Hoegemeyer (of Brooklyn’s Tree Laboratory). Their mission that evening: to honor the chaos and transformation of spring through performances of both original pieces and interpretations of works by Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, W.G. Sebald and more.
Watch excerpts and on-demand video of the entire show below: