Quite a life it has been: This androgynous Jersey girl obsessed with Rimbaud and Shelley and Whitman came to the big city 40 years ago and became the muse and friend and partner of Robert Mapplethorpe (no adequate English word exists to describe their relationship), became a poet and then a performance poet and then an underground rock musician and then a rock star, left the stage and the city for life in Michigan as a wife and mother, and then, after the 1994 death of her husband Fred “Sonic” Smith, returned to New York, to music, to poetry and to political activism.