The Collected Poems of Jared Smith 1971-2011
Jared Smith
NYQ Books
ISBN: 978-1-935520-70-2

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft

          Jared Smith has produced some of the finest and most complex poetry in generations about working class life, the American landscape, and the spiritual and ethical future of our technology-obsessed society. As with any but the most high-profile poets, however, tracking down all of his work can be difficult and expensive, particularly in the case of several volumes published in the 1980s. Thankfully, Smith’s fans and curious readers alike can now find a good chunk of his work in one mammoth omnibus. If you think this sounds like an advertisement, I suppose it is—though one written with the best of intentions and in the highest of spirits. I’ve made no secret about my love for Smith’s work, and I’m thrilled that readers can now access so much of it so easily. This collection includes Song of the Blood: An Epic (1983), Dark Wing: Book Two of Song of the Blood (1984), Keeping the Outlaw Alive (1988), Walking the Perimeters of the Plate Glass Window Factory (2001), Lake Michigan and Other Poems (2005), Where Images Become Imbued with Time (2007), The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations (2008), Looking into the Machinery: The Selected Longer Poems of Jared Smith (2010), and Grassroots (2010), as well as a number of “uncovered” (previously unpublished) poetry written between 1971 and 1987. As I have already reviewed all but Grassroots and the two epics, this review will elide these collections; curious readers can easily find my thoughts about them elsewhere on this website.

          It will start, instead, with these earlier poems—with a Jared Smith many Pedestal readers may not know.

          As with any poet, Smith has developed in fascinating ways throughout the thirty years of his output that this collection represents. His early work written during the Vietnam War, the Carter and Reagan administrations, and the rise of the computer industry is, in many places, less structured and wordier than his later output, which is often the case in a poet’s first years of writing. As is also the case, these early gems show us the first glimmerings of the subjects that will preoccupy Smith further down the line: the beauty of America’s untouched natural spaces (“Estuary,” “Dead Stalk Watercolor,” “Eternal,” and “The Beehive” to name but a few), the subtle pains of interpersonal relationships (“The Insomniac Groom,” “The Wedding Night”), philosophical meditations on poetry and the arts (“The Only Man Who Lives”—about the death of Ezra Pound), and personal accounts of travels or landscape that wrestle with the meaning of being an American (“Because No Space is Now Mine,” one of the finest poems in this section). This last poem (here reproduced in full) gives us a peek at the poet Smith will become.

Because I have gone far from where my father died
I begin to approach him.
The distant country where he was young
and I was never young
is inevitable in this time of jets.
When my father was nearing death men went to the moon.
When he was young he read they might in sci-fi books.
They have not ridden the absence of light for years
and I think they have lost the notes that let them go.
Some man rode to President on that and let it go.

The dark of crickets now fills my life
and lets me go; its caustic rubbing urge of youth
   in timelessness
is the dark of a woman’s back curving into time.
It is a girl’s eyes.
Snow falling into a western sunrise.
At last I begin to have all things that can be
traced into my space where the cool water of spring runs down.

          As in later poems, “Because No Space is Now Mine” gives the reader an expansive view of U.S. history, family life, and the natural world in just a few short lines. Here, the speaker (as in so many of Smith’s later poems) feels a disconnection between his own generation and the previous generation, a disconnection that the older Smith, incidentally, will consistently explore from Walking the Perimeters of the Plate Glass Window Factory into his most recent releases. This is a disconnection that can only be partly mitigated by the beauty of the natural world in the country where his father was young and which he is now visiting. Thus, the speaker, and the reader by extension, is left with a feeling of deep existential sorrow. Something profound has been lost here along with the speaker’s father: the ties to place and landscape that his father’s generation shared.

          Unlike future poems, however, the expression of this idea is a bit unclear. The transition between the two stanzas is somewhat abrupt and may take the reader a few passes to fully understand. It is clear, for example, that the speaker has now returned to his father’s home, but the similes that follow are less clear. How, for example, does “the dark of a woman’s back” and “a girl’s eyes” fit into the picture Smith is trying to give us here? After several read-throughs, I can honestly say that I don’t know. Unclear similes and metaphors, abrupt transitions, and (in some cases) outright vagueness haunt much of Smith’s early work. However, as I mentioned previously, these are problems that often plague many poets in their early years, when they are first learning not only the techniques they like best, but also how to use language for poetic effect in general. Further, these flaws don’t render Smith’s early work unenjoyable—far from it—but rather offer us a promise of greatness to come.

          Aside from the two epic poems included here, Smith did not publish another full collection until 2001’s Walking the Perimeters of the Plate Glass Window Factory. In this thirteen year gap, his work grew even more. His line became more controlled and his metaphors more powerful. The problem of transitioning between stanzas disappeared entirely as well. Nearly thirty years later in Grassroots, Smith’s work has taken on a maturity not only in style, but also in tone and subject matter. By 2010, the youthful anger of Smith’s verse has taken on the perspective of an older man, a man who has not only seen Vietnam, but also the excesses and follies of the Reagan years, the first and second Gulf Wars, 9/11, the War on Terror, and the rise of the information revolution. His perspectives on society, the natural world, and humanity itself are now vastly different, and his work shows it. Consider, for example, “Knowing What Grows” (quoted below in its entirety), a poem of war that can only be described as a song of experience.

Not the obliterations,
not the light leading into shadow,
nor the eviscerated bellies bleeding into mud,
nor the jagged holes in a skull which held
all that man loves and needs and fears…
these come soon enough to any of us
in the name of old age, disease, accidents.

It is the forced tearing of the fabric of those living,
the emptiness and building of bomb-proof souls
that is most terrible of all war’s seeds,
seeds that cut across generations, deserts, oceans
and plant themselves sandpaper dry in immutable rock.
Why do we hasten the passing of those who pass
about us when there is not passage from this time?

          The Smith of 2010 knows that he is not immortal and has witnessed the effects that half a century of near-constant warfare has had not only on Americans, but also on the world as a whole. But despite the sorrow of these lines, the work in Grassroots is still as impassioned and fiery as that of his youth. The book’s title poem, for example, is a fascinating and never didactic history lesson about the life of Joel Emmanuel Hagglung (better known as Joe Hill), an immigrant folksinger whose pro-union folk songs put him in front of a Utah firing squad in 1915. In celebrating Hill’s life and legacy, Smith tells the reader that poetry is still important, both to politics and humanity, that it can still effect change in the world because it is what ultimately makes us human. Hardly the views of a jaded man.

          Jared Smith is as fine a poet as Robert Frost, Woodie Guthrie, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and the fact that he is not recognized as such is a sad testament to how little importance contemporary society gives to poetry. This omnibus is essential reading to any fan of the above poets and to any reader interested in tracking the evolution of a single poet throughout several political and social upheavals. For that matter, I also enthusiastically recommend it to young poets currently in the position Smith was in the 1970s—passionate and eloquent and still learning their craft.