With casual androgyny now as common as rehab and pop-star poetry a recurring joke, it's hard to imagine how strange Patti Smith must've seemed when she exploded out of New York with Horses 33 years ago. Defiant, literary, and rocking, Smith's debut, and the albums that followed, weren't only great pieces of art, they were life-changers. Just ask Michael Stipe or Courtney Love. They were life-changers for Smith, too: Feeling burned out, she recorded only one album between 1980 and 1996, choosing instead to spend time with her husband, former MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith, and their two children. "I'd given all I had to give," says Smith, 61, speaking from the hills of Spain, where she's staying with relatives of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. "I had to go away if I wanted to learn to be a human being."

Personal loss brought Smith back to music in the mid-'90s, and since then she has released a steady stream of urgent, explicitly political, and often joyous albums. Empty-nest syndrome has not been a problem.

Following the release of both Patti Smith: Dream of Life, director Steven Sebring's gorgeous new documentary film, and The Coral Sea, a musical collaboration with Kevin Shields, Smith spoke, sometimes haltingly, about a life spent outside the expected margins.

You were raised in New Jersey as a Jehovah's Witness. Was there a lot of rock music in your house growing up?

My mom loved rock'n'roll. My father hated it. We couldn't play it when he was around. He liked classical music and Duke Ellington. I still heard it on the radio -- I grew up in the 1950s, when rock'n'roll was king. I had a handful of records, but when I was 11 years old, I liked Puccini as much as Little Richard. They both made sense to me.

I guess one ended up making more sense than the other.

I don't know about that. I'm not a very analytical person. I have various impulses. I've often quoted Walt Whitman's phrase "I contain multitudes." I understand that. The same person who wrote "Rock N Roll Nigger" has also written lullabies.

So you never intended to be a rock musician?

I knew I needed to leave New Jersey to develop as an artist. But my goal in life was never to become a musician. I'm not a musician. I drew and wrote poetry for ten years before I wrote Horses. I published books. Why do people want to know exactly who I am? Am I a poet? Am I this or that? I've always made people wary. First they called me a rock poet. Then I was a poet that dabbled in rock. Then I was a rock person who dabbled in art. But for me, working in different forms seemed like a very organic process. From an early age, I studied people like Da Vinci and William Blake and Jean Cocteau. They all did a lot of different things. But if you want to call me anything, call me a worker. I do work.

How did Horses come about?