Who will be the next American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

fair enough— I also admit that given her near universal acclaim, that part of this is certainly a me problem. I tried, too. I have the vinyl of Horses somewhere. But after a while, I stopped trying. Should probably sell that record!

Patti Smith will never get the Novel, don't worry!

I've enjoyed a fair amount of her music down through the ages, but first encounter was before she started doing that, when she was a music writer, into thee halcylon with Leroi Jones and Richard Meltzer, but not bothering to seem competitive, just calmly inspecting her object from every angle, moving in and out of metaphor and so on.
I haven't kept up with all of her books over the years, but do have a sense from those I've read that she has kept up, maybe gotten better or deeper while she keeps digging, writing every day, preferably in a near-deserted backstreet coffee shop (black coffee, bread, olive oil, notebook, pen, that's it) Writing about travelling around her room, her books, her neighborhood, the world, her head ,incl. memories that finally have to be disclosed, as other contents under pressure become brief prose poems, as she keeps moving: that's in the logbook of M Train, my copy of which is marked on the back, New Content Within Of course.
Laurie Anderson also seems to have gotten closer to the emotional core of her life in ways she can tell, for instance on the album Heart of a Dog (haven't seen the movie) and the posted trove her Norton Lectures, where audio and video are masterful as ever, text is key.

But those are speculations, suggestions----mostly, from being seized by a single deep body of work in each artist's canon, I nominate Robinson and Ferrante.