Between 1954 and 1965, in the thick of his foray into Buddhism, Jack Kerouac turned his beliefs and techniques for writing prose to poetry and wrote several dozen poems, both playful and profound, spanning everything from irreverent comments on his friends to meditations on spirituality. They were published in the posthumous volume Pomes All Sizes (public library) and capture, as Allen Ginsberg notes in the introduction, Kerouac’s experience of life as “both real and dream.”

In this enchanting recording, punk-rock godmother Patti Smith — herself a poet, with a penchant for setting literature to song — reads Kerouac’s poem “The Last Hotel” to music by Thurston Moore and Lenny Kaye:

The last hotel
I can see the black wall
I can see the silhouette on the window
He’s talking, at a rhythm
He’s talking, at a rhythm
But, I don’t care
I’m not interested in what he’s saying
I’m only interested in the last hotel
I’m only interested in the fact that it’s the last hotel
Deep, discordant, dark, sweet
The last hotel
The last hotel
Ghosts in my bed
The goats I bled
The last hotel

Complement with Smith’s poetic homage to her soulmate, her advice on life, and Kerouac on kindness, the self illusion, and the “golden eternity.”