An Interview with Dave Smith
                                        -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum


Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: Typically, selecting poems to feature is pretty easy: I simple dog-ear the poems I find particularly good in whatever random book of poems I happen to be reading and go from there.  But you were different— you were one of the first poets I was told to read, and, thus, I had countless poems to choose from rather than a more limited selection. 

So I decided to think about the qualities I cherish most in your poems and to find a small selection of poems that would, hopefully display them.  This, of course, was an equally difficult task, but I quickly found that in all your poems you display three main properties that draw me to your work: a love of the world, of the word, and of the transformational power of story telling.

Before we go into these poems as individuals, would you mind sharing your thoughts/impressions regarding these properties.  Are they as important to you as they are to me?  Are your ideals for a poem the same as they wee when you were a younger poet or have they changed over time?  That sort of thing…

Dave Smith: I don’t think I love the world any more than anyone else. I am not politically very conscious, not acutely given to a social consciousness; I don’t lobby for environmental progress or against shards of broken satellites falling from the sky. The malice and poltroonish behavior of politicians, the corruption of ordinary citizens, the daily evil we know and endure is, well, the world, and I don’t possess the saintly selflessness to love that in abstract form such as Jesus of Nazareth and Al Sharpton do. A part of my temperament is conservative, medieval, belligerent. But I do love the world that is wildly, natively, and idiosyncratically alive, and so resplendent in intense self-hood only the best artists can evoke what James Dickey called “the little more.”

I think every person feels, in best moments, that little more, and wants the power to convey it to another, perhaps even as agent of conserving it. Seamus Heaney refers to the poet as one of the “venerators.” Musicians venerate; painters venerate; film makers and architects venerate. Poets do this with words, their sounds and their bricks. A poet loves the color and texture and weight and airiness, the tensile strength and useless delicacy and wicked weaponry of words.  I love them for all the things they can do but I am uninterested in word games (etymology excepted). I do not work crossword puzzles. I am not dazzled by a poem which merely embeds a surprise word, as so often lights up verse writers. I love words the way a plumber loves quality copper, as  something necessary but having secretive, approachable qualities and uses. There is a story by John Updike in which a plumber, summoned by a man whose old house has problems, crawls with his client into the open space under the house. There the two of them lay on their backs with the plumber’s light playing over intricate joints of copper and lead, the system of flow made visible. The plumber “reads” what his client cannot decipher yet, which old father made which elbow and juncture, and when, and with what style, quality, and wisdom. Plumbing, in Updike’s metaphor, is transformed into a vital language. The plumber, venerable and disciplined, is now artist, keeping with us the human story complexly layered.

Some poets write about the world. Some enact it. My imagination is totemic, even historical. I believe life is random beyond the cause-effects we identify in science, philosophy, religion, even art. Yesterday a few miles from where I sit, a 14 year old boy took a grapefruit across the street from his own row house and gave it to an elderly house-bound woman, an errand his mother gave  him. In minutes, coming home, someone, so far unknown, shot him dead. We can adduce the socio-political circumstances, the historical shadows, the likely human configurations that left him bleeding to death before his home steps. We cannot say why life goes this way, not finally, not in that instant, that day, that place. Things happen randomly, awfully. Art, however, is not random. It is potential, an image, and it must have its logic or it is finally useless.

I consider every image, every act resonates with statement, perhaps multiple, even contradictory.  The way we know statement is the shape of narrative. We tell ourselves to the world and we tell the world what we know. You called my writing “transformational” and that seems, upon hearing it, grand. I tell stories, short ones in poetic form, in order to shape life’s options, to enact choices. Poems do many things, as everyone knows. For me, the poem’s primary act is to give pleasure, the next to yield discovery, the next to store what is known. If we spoke of making bread, would you say “transformational”? Making poems is as vivifying as making bread, as necessary. People who are not poets make poems all the time. But they don’t mark the act, the language, as special; they do not publish. They may be unaware of what they do, it is so habitual. And, in the poet’s view, they are amateurs, as a woman is who wraps her sink joint with duct tape and hope. What poets do is the work of an elitist, like it or not, but it is not different in kind from what all do. We  express narrative shape in idiosyncratic language to grasp, understand, and express what reveals itself to us. The value of a poem lies in the intensity and durability of what we call, casually, its beauty–but beauty comes either as statement or enactment.

I don’t think what lured me to poetry, fundamentals such as I mention here, has changed much from the days when I covertly read poems in serious English courses.. Did I love Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” less when as a college freshman, age 18, than I do today, now aware of forces contingent on the man writing in the last minutes of 1899? I did not understand why I loved it so well, but I loved it then as now. Styles, poetries, I read as a would-be poet could be correlated to changes in how I have written; change comes to anyone who lives and thinks about experience and seeks to make an accounting. Good poets make deliberate choices, hence changes in verbal structure; they also trip into the unexpected. How much change is overt in comparison to change that is less visible? One tree that stands exposed to the light in my front yard grows much more robustly than its nearby twin in another tree’s shadow. Changes are, to me, mysterious and I try to comprehend them in poems.

You ask if my “ideals” are the same now as when I was a younger poet. “Ideals” means thin ice to a poet. I want to write more clearly than I have. I want to display how the world manifests joy, though I do not want to falsify the evidence of my senses. I want a poetry with the solidity and the dreamy vision of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I want to be the Michael Jordan of poetry.

AMK: You are one of those poets who, it seems to me, is ever-present in his work.  I don’t read “Roadhouse Voices” and think that Dave Smith isn’t the one talking to me.  Sure, you might have made the whole thing up, and, sure, there’s always some degree of separation between poet and speaker, but you’ve certainly put yourself into this story of life, death, upbringing, hard work, etc…and the result is a certain sort of personality within the lines and within the story itself that I don’t think could exist without Dave Smith the poet as Dave Smith the speaker. 

Similarly, now that I look more closely at the most appealing properties of your work (a love of life, language, and stories), it occurs to me that these are properties of a poet rather than of poems themselves, which, many argue, are separate things. 

But I’m not so sure this is true…what do you think?

DS: There was a man who was a carpenter, teacher, magazinist, real estate developer, bar bon vivant, and Brooklyn resident who was called, and signed documents, by the name Walter Whitman. There was later a visionary dreamer, nurse, poet, sexual myth who was not often seen in any real neighborhood whose name is Walt Whitman. In his great poem “Song of Myself” he is precisely  “Walt” and there is little he doesn’t tell you about himself (“that lot of me and all so luscious”), his habits, his details, though much is embedded in the riverine rush of the poem. Many readers have insisted the narrator of that poem is a “universal I” and not Walter himself. This is what poets mean who say that when we compose we enter a sort of trance, becoming a second self, an “other.” Then we revert and take out the garbage or attend an Obama rally. The poet is always in and out of the poem you read, two selves. What we may say of the fusion of those selves is surely dangerous, partial, and slippery. The best of what a man or woman is, with cooperation of fate and luck, goes into the poem. I think we readers respond to that character as we would to meeting someone new. Poems attract us by flirtation, often by an erotic signaling. The best engagement is, as Miss Dickinson said, physically evident on the back of your neck.? Is the poem more than adequate? Is the moment auspicious? Well, read more, submerse oneself, as Joseph Conrad says, and judge. Reading is judgment.  We experience another’s story and compare it to our own. We do, in this sense, transform experience. Thus, too, we become more fully individual selves.

AMK: I just love “The Last Morning.”  It’s a wonderfully simple story of transformation and of the emotional power of that transformation. 

But this simplicity is not in and of itself simple.  We have the simplicity of the narrative: “”Alone in the camp…I get up and go down to the river.”  Then there’s the simple beauty of the language: the dew flashing “like brilliant insects,” the cold water calling to “the sea-born salmon,” the dimple the trout makes in water “like the soul rising.”  And, finally, there’s the statement of its simplicity: “It is that easy to begin a passage.” 

But we all know that to experience such a transformation into the past and into the lives of others is no easy task.  The result, I think, is a poem that speaks more to the desire that such a traverse from one life and into another could be so easy…a poem that seems to emit more from dream than from reality.  What do you make of this?

DS: It may appall you to hear me say that I did not remember the poem until you mentioned it. I don’t recall having written it, or any circumstances prior to it. The poet Lyn Emmanuel introduced me for a reading not long back by reading part of a poem whose title and author she did not cite. I was astonished to find it I had written those lines. “The Last Morning” feels familiar, like a person I once knew, but back so far memory hazes. You read the poem as a dream of desire. I can’t disagree, but all I can say is that I was the person who made the poem, who stood in its saying, in the writer’s tranced self. I cannot claim to know more of it than any reader may know.

AMK: What do you think of simplicity in poetry?  Is it something to be suspicious of as a reader?  Is it something to fear as a writer?

DS: I don’t think it exists in fact. The term describes the confident, utter, objective quality we feel in some styles. It means a lack of confusion. It may refer to a visionary field where much has been pared away, not offered to the reader; it may mean a decoded sequence of events, a narration of minimal character and subdued or quieted consequence. But what appears simple is never so. Multiples of  factors are prominent: decisions, fields of choice, partiality and contradiction in image, syncopation in rhythm, etc. Every poem is a scene of shadows playing, puppetry. Beyond what may be observed, as Plato says, more operates, and behind that more yet. Language, our only tool, is a calloused set of fingers, as Howard Nemerov once remarked; skin which has had its feel impaired by long and continual usage.  When Updike’s plumber lies down to reveal the flow-chart of pipes and joints, he self-reflexively plays upon simplicity apparent to the least eye and he attends to sophisticated, complex engineering. The philosopher Snoopy says “Happiness is a warm puppy.” Simple. Every child understands. But isn’t happiness the ultimate mystery?  Ask any poet, any country-western musician. The older I get, the more I want a poem to be simultaneously plain and complex, undeniably multiple and singular as a pine cone is.

AMK: “Roundhouse Voices” is a poem that covers an immense landscape of experience.

First, we encounter a young man’s rebellion.  Then, we’re told the story of the roadhouse itself as a key aspect of this young man’s upbringing.  Then, we start to see this as a story about memory and death, the language moving us back and forth in time, place, and perspective.  Eventually, we realize that the real story is about the language we use and how, in the face of death, this language changes, which in turn changes how we see ourselves; our relationships with others forever altered, our stories and memories ever-movable.  The result is a poem in which the language transforms from a tool used to tell a story and into an element of the story itself. 

What do you think of this reading?

DS: Any poet would be delighted to have his or her poem described by your phrase.

Wallace Stevens remarks somewhere that every poem is about writing poetry. How could I disagree with the corporate giant, the attorney of prodigiously gifted poems? But your question hides, really, another question, which is, was I deliberately writing about writing poetry when I composed it? Well, no. Then, yes. The poem is a funeral elegy, which you know is a distinct form. “Lycidas” is such a poem. So is “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” That form, historically, seeks an opportunity to address large, resonant issues. I knew it had something to say about death’s mystery–why we die. In the face of death which we cannot change, what good is any art, any language? The poet views language as active faith. In crisis faith is sorely tested and often appears of no consequence. If language lies, what good is a poem, the instrument of faith? Or the poet, who is priest of this faith? In “The Roundhouse Voices” I think I tried to compose answers to questions I could not resolve. For the religious believer, faith is its own answer, its own value; it cannot be proven. Perhaps in my poem the speaker seeks to claim what despair seems to prevent. If I am correct ( I am now years away from memory of what I may have meant to do), the poem perhaps attends more to the insufficiency of language than the actual writing of a poetry, even its tiniest decisions. But perhaps they are synonymous.

AMK: Can you tell us much about the writing of this poem?  How you managed to
combine all of the voices you heard as a poet with the voices of the past and of the speaker and of the various presences within the poem?  No doubt this poem was taxing…

DS: Much, as I say, is now lost to my memory. In 1974 I had a dream, a small one. When I woke I remembered an image of a group of men lying head to head, their legs pointed outward so they seemed spokes in a wagon wheel.  I tried but could not make a poem of this image. Perhaps because I knew nothing of the men. My habit is to keep drafts in the drawers of an old desk my sister gave me. When I cannot make a poem live, into a drawer it goes. At some point I bring it forth and try again. This wheel image stayed in for some years, looked at but saying nothing. Then it spoke. Or someone did. There arose a story of a man traveling to the place of ancestors where someone had died. This had happened to me, too. I had grown up in eastern Virginia but my parents were from Cumberland, Maryland, 300 miles and different cultures north. When elders died, my parents drove home for the funerals and I was put in the care of a family member so as not to be gloomed by the experience. My uncle Lloyd, foreman of the B&O roundhouse in Cumberland, sometimes took me for car rides or took me fishing. Once we played softball in that building where train engines came for repair. You can see such a building in Baltimore. The huge engines would rotate on a wonderful hydraulic table, become repaired, then rotate to the door out, and away they would go, redeemed spirits. I recalled that place as having sooted glass ceilings with occasional star-like holes. Uncle Lloyd had probably broken a rule by letting me into such a secret place, but there was no guard except himself. It was all joy to me. Joy is not easy to write about, as it is not easy to come by.

When I began to tell the softball story, I saw the wedges of men were really slots for trains taken into the sanctuary. I saw, too, what I have just implied, the spiritual character of the place which was a conduit for men’s lives. I brought in the story of my uncle training me to swing properly, according to his lights, for a home run. The man mourned was my “Uncle” Melvin, a lodger who lived with my grandparents for most of his adult life; he happened to be a train engineer, its driver. Somehow I knew this was the single and yet multiple story of my male ancestors, a tribe who failed while doing what they were fated to do, but who might be admired. Without elegy or eulogy or even the least memorial of words. I was the last of them, and the only one who worked in words instead of metal, fire, and faith. Another way to speak of this poem, but presumptuous, is to say it wants to define heroic action even as it presumes heroism changes nothing.  I like to think the poem seeks to know what is heroic in ordinary actions, which is why it asks who we are, individually, what should be our duty, our obligation if we are not to dishonor self and tribe.

AMK: “Roundhouse Voices” is a cool poem to look at, particularly in contrast to “The Last Morning” because, while both poems are about transformational experiences, “Roundhouse Voices” displays in a much more active way how this transformation occurs when language and story collide.  The result is a much more difficult poem to read, at least for me.

Since I’ve already asked you about the simplicity of poetry it seems appropriate to ask the same questions of you regarding the hardness of poems.

Should we question difficulty when we read poetry?  Should we fear it as writers of poetry?

DS: Only if we want readers. Few real poets seek deliberately to be obtuse or vague. Some choose a language whose referential ability is diminished in favor of qualities that may make a different, even better experience, or that simply please the poet. G.M. Hopkins is difficult that way, but he seems less so when we have been taught his mysteries. So, too, Emily Dickinson. The fact is that life is complex and we want language commensurate with that complexity; few of us achieve it.  We settle for a lesser expression. But not less difficult, only less transparent. We know when the water is muddy, but pleasures we struggle for as we try to be clear are compelling. The best writer fears nothing. But awareness is another matter.

AMK:  What were your main objectives for “Roadhouse Voices?”

DS: To write a poem I would enjoy reading. To write a poem someone else would enjoy reading.

AMK: I first encountered “Blue Heron” at your reading at The Ropewalk Writers Retreat in Indiana.  I remember you saying that you didn’t think it was necessarily a very good poem…but then you read it, and I thought it was one of the better poems you read that day. 

Looking at it now, I’m still struck by that opening metaphor, the heron’s neck “like a coathanger unbent” and how it’s followed by a visual description that extends the metaphor throughout the first stanza but that doesn’t take over the entire poem.  Instead, the poem moves onto another metaphor/imagistic moment, its invisibility like a friend’s description of “the woman poets of / the South,” which moves the poem into a more social/political sort of poem that, I think, is subtle, beautiful, and worth writing.

So this has bothered me quite a bit since then because I keep wondering if I’m missing something (which, I must admit, I find myself thinking to myself more and more these days about the poetry I red)…

As I write this question, I realize I may be putting you in a bit of a spot, but what do you not like about this poem?  Do you have a problem with social/political poems?  Poems that make an overt statement?  Something else?

DS: Sometimes people say things they don’t mean, speaking when nervous or distracted, as I spoke when reading that poem for the first time. I like “Blue Heron” well enough. It is not for me to say  my poem is good or not good, though I may harbor judgments. The reader holds that job. If it has a socio/political expression, I do not object. Poems need to make statements. It is dedicated to Betty Adcock, a fine poet, who once said to me the women poets of the South are “the invisibles.” She is unquestionably correct. My poem notes that blue herons, though solitary and gentle birds, rarely share territory. They may drive off one of their kind who attempts to intrude in a chosen space. Quiet as they may be, they are formidable when confronted. My poem tries to praise the strength and solitude of the invisibles, which herons mostly are.

AMK: What are you working on these days?

DS: I used to write relentlessly, hours and hours. Now, as a department chairman, with far less time to be a poet, my poems come more slowly. I no longer have the opportunity to force words to the page, tear them apart, re-type, and forge on. I still write a poem when ti comes. I have published another essay on Whitman, have obligations to write more essays, and am editing with my friend Robert Demott a collection of essays and photographs by writers on their bird-hunting dogs. I have an idea for a fable, maybe a book for my grandsons, maybe something else. I don’t know. I am trying to recover the pleasure of play in writing, which has much to do with entertaining oneself and little to do with the business of being a poet, and publishing, a sad enterprise now.

AMK: Thank you.