Patti Smith, the poet and shaman of punk rock, kindly met me for a late lunch at six P.M. Omen Azen, a favored hangout of hers, is close to her home on Macdougal Street, in SoHo, New York, and this American icon, whose first album, in 1975, Horses, revolutionized the music scene, had just returned from an extensive tour of Europe with her band.

She told me in her unassuming way that the biggest audience she played to on tour was about 110,000 at the Glastonbury Festival, in England, the smallest, about 40 kids she read poetry to “in a field someplace in Poland.”

Yet it’s as if she became a rock star by accident. “It’s a mystery I’ve never solved,” she said. “What is it that drives me to perform when I can hardly hold my own at a dinner party?”

She’s a vagabond child of rock ‘n’ roll who fused it with her own, fiercely honest poetry. “I’m not a musician,” she added disarmingly. “I can’t really play anything. I don’t need to perform to know who I am. I’m not Judy Garland. It’s just something I do and know how to do.”

In the 1980s, when she was living in Detroit with her husband (Fred “Sonic” Smith, the musician and love of her life, who died at age 45, in 1994), she didn’t perform for 16 years. “I didn’t miss it at all,” she said. She wrote stories feverishly instead—working in escapist solitude each day from five A.M. until eight A.M., before her husband and two children awoke. And if she had to choose between rock and writing? “I wouldn’t hesitate,” she said. “I couldn’t live without writing.”

When Just Kids, her rapturous labor of love about her formative days with Robert Mapplethorpe, was received with acclaim (and a National Book Award), some were surprised. The Mother Courage of Punk can write! Her new memoir, M Train (published this month by Alfred A. Knopf), will leave no one in doubt that she has long since been a fully paid-up member of what she calls that secret society of writerly bums and obsessed alchemists panning in vain for a drop of gold. *M Train—*the title signifies a “mind train” that goes to any station it wants—is a sublime collection of true stories concerning irredeemable loss, memory, travel, crime, coffee, books, and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is.

“I know what I want,” she said. “A green salad and the green-tea-soba-noodles special.” Along with a cold, dry sake for us both. “I have poor table manners, but I’ll do my best,” she announced incongruously. “I like chopsticks. But I don’t really like utensils. Unless I’m having soup.”

She was raised in southern New Jersey (and retains her Jersey accent). She’s the daughter of a factory worker who was curious about everything and read Plato, and a waitress who was also a voracious reader and loved opera. “In our house, we had very little except for books. We had no money. But in 50s America people would dump books. Whole libraries. Or someone died. So we had beautiful books because my family would go to a church bazaar and buy them for pennies. Really, no one wanted them.”

She learned to read when she was still a toddler. Her mother taught her. Patricia wanted to copy her parents, who were forever staring into these objects. She vividly remembers the first book she read: Silver Pennies, a collection of poems mostly about elves and fairies that included Yeats’s “Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” (“Tread softly because you tread on my dreams”).

When she was about seven, she read Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. “I discovered that a girl could write a book. I loved the character of Jo. She was a writer. So at a very early age I decided I wanted to be like Jo.”

She’s still open to wonder. “Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book,” she exclaims in M Train, as one of her heroes, Lorca, declared, “I want to be a poet from head to toe, living and dying by poetry!” She has just reread Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game again, as well as her childhood edition of Pinocchio “for about the hundredth time. I can completely meld with myself at that age. I can read Peter Pan again and be 11.”

Time past lives in time present for her, depending on where she wants to go. Her silvery hair signals time passing too quickly, though. It’s hard to believe that Patti Smith is now 68 and a grandmother. It’s hard enough for her. “ ‘How did we get so damn old?’ I say to my joints,” she says with startling candor.

“As long as your knees are all right,” I said.

“Yeah, my knees are fine. They’re the same bony old knees. I’m not unhappy with my age. I just noticed it one day three years ago, and for the first time in my whole life I was like, ‘Whoa. I’m 65. How much time do I have left, selfishly, to write more books? To see my children? How much time do I have?’ ”

“Live forever!” I thought. Besides, she’s already writing her next book, a thriller—the kind she loves to read, or catch on TV, like the adventures of that mess of a detective and opera-lover, Wallander. And she’s edging back in time toward reopening the notebooks she filled compulsively in Detroit when she was writing a novel about a traveler who never left his room, but went everywhere.