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Lake Michigan and Other Poems
Jared Smith
The Puddin’head Press
ISBN Number: 978-0-9724339-4-5
Reviewer: Terri Brown-Davidson
There’s a lovely muscularity pervading Jared Smith’s work that’s reminiscent of the more obvious long-lined poets’ efforts, Whitman’s and C.K. Williams’, for example. But Smith’s poetry is unique in that he seems, unlike these other two writers, not to think in terms of an "overflowing line" but to peer, consistently, beyond it. What this means is that while Whitman’s long lines are incantatory and Williams’ are loquacious in a relaxed, double-hexameter sort of way, Smith’s work, much like an Action Painter’s, serves the ambition of the gesture and thus, of necessity, stretches beyond the canvas. He seems, unlike those poets who grow more parched in terms of content as they age, to have too much to say to pack into the confines of a slim, sixty-six-page volume of poetry.
But this is not to suggest that his work isn’t technically superb: it is. It’s just that Smith sees and records everything in his poetic world with an acuity of vision that can also be described as omnivorous. Whether he’s writing of Lake Michigan in his masterful title poem, a long-poem that represents an explosion of ingenuity and poetic chutzpah, the lines meandering in a fluidly water-like way and yet channeled by Smith’s strong sense of purpose and direction and sonicism, or writing of the absence of a loved one in my favorite poem in the collection, "Controlled by Ghosts," or evoking a landscape soon to be leveled by a bomb (war and its devices figure prominently in this collection) in "Seven Minutes Before the Bomb Drops," Smith reveals himself as a poet who is both hungry for the world he inhabits and repulsed by it, its cruelty, its inhumanity, its plethora of societal and political ghosts. How wonderful for us, then, that out of this repulsion, this junkyard of the imagination, Smith is able to weld structures of keen, glinting beauty and insight.
His fervency, sometimes, it’s true, can lead Smith into a kind of verbosity that can only be described as psychologically compulsive. Some people might view this as a negative in his work, and certainly it appears, sometimes, to influence the overall quality of his poetry. I don’t view this as a negative, though, because I’m actively thrilled by those poets who consistently reach for the magnificent failure rather than the safe little success, and certainly Smith would count himself among the members of the former group. If, like Browning (another long-lined poet), Smith’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp, the attempt alone is reason to keep reading him, especially if, like me, you’re an aesthete who eschews the perfect conversational "box" that passes in many journals for poetry these days. Smith may not always achieve his goal, but he’ll never stop striving for it, and, amidst his occasional "weaker" poems, I always find myself struggling for a glimpse of this truly remarkable mind at play and the concomitant insights it can offer me. So "Trout Fishing Along The Alagash" is a trifle, maybe, but I’d rather read Smith’s philosophical trifles than an academic poet’s "masterpieces" of stopped imagination and control:
A trout moves up into moonlight
and sucks life from the surface of his pool.
The life knows of nothing larger below it,
but is gone before it is aware of life.
Each day, year beyond year, the river dimples.
We are folded into our desks, ears clamped to a wire,
fingers tapping tabulations.
But Smith’s poems don’t simply address the political, social, and natural realms that he loves to investigate in this collection. Among all of his other rangy and ambitious poems, most of them serious or dramatic in nature, Smith reveals an aesthetically playful side that makes him, in my mind, the occasional campy poetic equivalent of Andy Warhol or at least of Walt W. on hallucinogenics. I enjoyed, in particular, the magic and linguistic sleight of hand of "Reflecting on the Visions":
If I were Pablo Van Gogh
and were to go to a window, and looking out, say
I see a multi-faceted tower of lights that moves when I move
and the sun gets in my eyes so that I squint and see bright swathes
of color,
would I know if the far side of the window were backed with silver
and the gyrations of the tower were gusts of wind slamming against
that thin sheet, or
would I know that slumping red and brown Monet beasts hunched
down in fields,
and would I hurry to take their sketches as I imagined them;
or would I look at that flat misshapen beast slouching toward me
and say this is me because I recognize the ravages of war?
Would I hear John Cage playing in the music from a farther room?
And in such confusion, what would I tell you then, or where would I
lean,
when I do not know the color of my eyes or shape of my limbs?
The photographs I have seen are of an old fat man with flappy
hands,
not the lone wolf who streaks through silent streets at night.
I shall be Hamlet listening for rats behind the curtains,
and their toenails ticking on the castle floors will be the minute
hands of clocks;
I will put them in a shining metal case and wear it on a chain
beneath my vest
for important evening parties, for the white haired Albert Einstein
scribbling on a board.
If I were to go to the window again and again and again, I would
take you all
and write that my name is Henry David Thorough and I will simplify,
and either I will miss it all or take it in.
Smith’s poetry has grown in its excellence as it’s developed in its range and ambition. He is one of our premier American poets, and I can only assume that, as strong as Lake Michigan and Other Poems is, like a rich and satisfying artistic buffet, his next collection will constitute an even greater and more ambitious poetic sampling.
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