Jared Smith is a poet I have admired for many years. I met him once by chance, on a day in July so humid that even the trees looked resentful, and we had a long conversation about art, the place of poetry in contemporary society, and what it means, or should mean, to be a writer. I found him to be a unique mix of the visionary, talking about poetry in unabashedly mystical terms, and the modern scientist (he started working in the high tech industry before it was an industry). His poetry embodies the same seeming contradiction, and that is one of the things that makes it so impressive.
Also impressive is how prolific and consistently topnotch a writer Smith is. This spring alone, he put out two books, a new collection titled Grassroots [Wind Publications], and a compilation, Looking into the Machinery, Selected Longer Poems, [Tamarack Editions]. Both books are exciting forays into the mind of this important poet of the modern experience.
Song catch
me
as
snow
falling into air……
Song of the blood of this land,
fill these veins
Song burning in earthen fragments,
filling the granite bonds of city,
building the bones of time,
Sing in the arteries of my mind.
So begins “Song of the Blood,” a book-length poem published in 1983, which serves as the launching point of the Selected Longer Poems. The incantatory call for attention, the invocation of the Muse, which is both apart from and part of the body itself—it is this sense of the orphic made concrete in granite and bones that makes Smith’s work so powerful. One can see a young man’s passion in this poem, the pulse and avidity of a seeker just starting out.
This sense of discovery and curiosity, of the desire to fill oneself with the world irrespective of the cost both psychic and practical, is a theme throughout Smith’s oeuvre. Take the beginning of Section III from “A Trout in the Pick-up on Papago,” a recent poem composed for the collection:
When I am hungry, I rise to the surface
and the universe settles a dusty miller
which I take into my bloodless lips;
the universe then settles around me.
The bones dry out over time, crumble
away but they always hold what built them.
They hold the sun and they hold the darkness
and every shade of color from in between.
These are the same concerns, the same hunger for inspiration, the same seeking, and the same bones. Yet the position has shifted: the voice here is slower, calmer, more philosophical than incantatory despite the repetitions. There is a wonderful sense of circularity, the sense of a highly-attuned poetic mind returning to the same place, and, as Eliot wrote, knowing it for the first time.
A sense of intellectual and spiritual restlessness is a vital characteristic for any poet, but a poet also needs musicality, linguistic creativity, and an eye for keen observation. And a feel for love, which is what fills the short lyric “Know in your absence,” quoted in toto below:
I had forgotten almost how to
touch your mind down here where
a freight train hangs my words
on cold tracks that sing with something
not my own nor yours but cars containing
factory floors and somehow songs that
touch you again here and here and
my fingers are tuned as memories.
To begin with “forgotten” and end with “memories”—this is a process Smith plays out on the page for us over and over. Let us remember what we have forgotten in this age of everything digital, in the suspicious isolation that plagues our suburbs, in our increasingly automated and impersonal public life. Freight trains are fading, but for Smith—at heart a poet of the 1960s and the long-lined expansiveness of the Beat Movement—they still represent freedom, the open road, the opportunity to change one’s life. And these poems will change you. Their scope and sensitivity and occasional displays of anger and frustration are expressions of a wisdom and engagement seen too rarely in today’s literature. I urge you to discover Jared Smith’s voice for yourself. Let his poetry sing to you of the America that once was, and the America that is.
And tomorrow: the America that is.