THE poet laureate of punk is a creature of habit. Every morning after getting up in her downtown New York apartment she feeds her cats, Cairo and Lua, and checks her e-mails before walking to an old Italian café down the road.

“It was the first café I ever went to,” recalls Patti Smith. “It must sound strange now, but when I was a teenager what I wanted to do more than anything was go to a New York café and read poetry. So one day in 1963 I took the bus from New Jersey and ended up in this same café in SoHo.”

Today, aged 58, and sipping her coffee in front of the same smoke-stained etchings of Florence and Dante’s visions of Hell, she’s already been writing poetry, posting a poem on her website in tribute to Joan of Arc. “It’s her anniversary today and it’s something I do every time it comes around,” she explains. She’s also been getting a lot more e-mails to read since being asked to curate this year’s Meltdown festival at the South Bank Centre in London, a job she has inherited from such luminaries as David Bowie, John Peel, Nick Cave, Scott Walker and, last year’s incumbent, Morrissey.

“I contacted Morrissey for some advice and he was really helpful,” she says. “At first I was not quite sure if I was qualified to do this because I worry that I am not very social and I don’t know many musicians. I don’t know a whole lot about new bands because at home I mainly listen to classical music and opera and old albums from my collection. I didn’t know if I could pull together an interesting evening, not to mention two weeks of events. But Morrissey was very encouraging. He told me to just barrel on through because the Meltdown people shepherd you along. And it’s been true.”

Smith has taken the task to heart, choosing the most varied programme of events in the festival’s 13-year history, encompassing film, poetry, politics and literature as well as music. “I have a lot of ideas but I was not certain how I would go about getting people to execute them. So I used Hermann Hesse as a model and tried to construct it as if I was constructing a glass-bead game, where you have one concept and it radiates in various ways and touches upon various aspects of our culture. I used William Blake as my template.”

The visionary Londoner was the very definition of a Renaissance man and Smith is something of a female counterpart, albeit two centuries later, with her diverse interests in music, poetry, drama, cinema, literature and political activism, most notably for the environment and against the Iraq war. “Blake was involved in all of the arts and he was highly political,” she says. “He opposed war, slavery and child labour. He had little or no fame, he had no materialism and no fortune in his life. So I tried to think of how to bring all these aspects together — the revolutionary, the political and the poetic. And of course music, which he also loved.”

The result is a series of collaborative events in tribute not only to Blake, but to a diverse range of people who have influenced and inspired Smith:William Burroughs, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jimi Hendrix and, bringing the programme right up to date, the young American humanitarian activist Marla Ruzicka, who died in a car bombing in Baghdad in April.

If there is a unifying theme, it is Smith’s lifelong determination to challenge convention. “Ever since I was a child I have been looked upon as if I was different — weird or strange,” she says. “I never really fitted in: my physical appearance or the things that I cared about, the church I was in. ”

There must surely have been few other young girls growing up in suburban New Jersey in the 1940s and 1950s who so avidly devoured the poetry of 19th-century French writers such as Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire. Enchanted not only by their work but by their wild passions and unconventional lifestyles, Smith sought and found contemporary parallels in American musical icons such as Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison and Hendrix. Abandoning teacher training because of an unwanted pregnancy (she gave the baby up for adoption), she worked on a factory assembly line to finance her escape to New York.

Through poetry, literature and music, Smith saw a world outside the “P*** Factory” (as her caustic debut single described it) with which she could identify. “I felt I understood. I wanted to be an artist myself and that was part of being an artist: being unaccepted, perhaps starving; to be poor, struggling. I wore these things with pride. I could see that other people had a more difficult time wearing this type of mantle.

“I just thought I could maybe make them feel better, inspire them or at least offer some kind of abstract kinship.”

Moving in with Robert Mapplethorpe, who also became her lover, Smith became a familiar figure on the downtown New York arts scene, writing and performing poetry and appearing onstage with Sam Shepard in an early underground play. Her lifestyle was simple: “When I was in my twenties I had no TV, no cellphone, no fax machine, no computer. I had pencils and paper to write and I had art supplies. If I didn’t have electricity I wouldn’t have fallen apart — I would have got a flashlight.”

It was after meeting the guitarist Lenny Kaye that she decided to combine her poetry with rock’n’roll and the experimental spirit of jazz and soon found herself at the centre of the nascent New York punk scene, performing at CBGBs alongside Richard Hell and Television (both also performing at Meltdown), Blondie and the Ramones.