{"id":35995,"date":"2018-04-28T12:46:00","date_gmt":"2018-04-28T19:46:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/?p=35995"},"modified":"2025-02-18T11:01:28","modified_gmt":"2025-02-18T19:01:28","slug":"maggie-smith-the-willow-springs-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/maggie-smith-the-willow-springs-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Issue 83: Maggie Smith: The Willow Springs Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
\n\n
\"issue<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Found in\u00a0Willow Springs\u00a0<\/em>83<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n

\n\n

April 28, 2018<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

JOSH ANTHONY, CAYLIE HERMANN, KIMBERLY POVLOSKI, & TAYLOR WARING<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

A CONVERSATION WITH MAGGIE SMITH<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\"Maggie<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Photo Credit: Devin Albeit Photography<\/em><\/p>\n\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\n\n
<\/svg><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n

THROUGHOUT HER WORK, <\/strong>Maggie Smith presents vulnerability and softness that comes from someone writing a love letter to the very thing that is trying to destroy her\u2014and everyone else. Smith pulls from fairytales, imagined natural disasters, and biblical stories, but reminds us that the dangers we face are often human. Without an edge of anger or despair, her poems balance love and fear and demand that the reader not lose hope, even when that seems like the most logical choice. Her precise and often mystical imagery and her unwavering lyricism encourage her readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maggie Smith is the author of three books of poetry: Good Bones <\/em>(Tupelo Press, 2017), The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison <\/em>(Tupelo Press, 2015), and Lamp of the Body <\/em>(Red Hen Press, 2005). She is also the author of three prizewinning chapbooks. In 2016, her poem \u201cGood Bones\u201d went viral after appearing in Waxwing<\/em> and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Smith is a 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also received six Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, and a Pushcart Prize.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a review of Good Bones <\/em>for The Rumpus,<\/em> Julie Marie Wade says, \u201cI think if [Good Bones<\/em>] has a moral, it\u2019s about learning to grow where planted.\u201d Smith was born in Columbus, Ohio, and remains rooted to her native Ohio today. She has taught creative writing at Gettysburg College, Ohio Wesleyan University, and in the MFA program at The Ohio State University. She\u2019s currently a consulting editor to the Kenyon Review<\/em>, and a freelance writer and editor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maggie Smith\u2019s poems often feel as though they\u2019re balanced on the edge of catastrophe, just trying to hold themselves (and their readers) in place. She explores the fears of childhood, the fears of motherhood, and the fear and excitement of being alive. Through this buzzing exploration of world-fear, she never lets her readers fall into despair, urging them that \u201cThis place could be beautiful, \/ right? You could make this place beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We met with Maggie Smith in Spokane, where we discussed birds, the power of observation, writing within today\u2019s political landscape, and mom poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

KIMBERLY POVLOSKI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Good Bones <\/em>has a lot of what you\u2019d call mom poems, and I believe in an interview you said you\u2019d never want to become a mom poet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MAGGIE SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s true. I\u2019m a poet who is a mom. And I\u2019m a mom who is a poet. But I have a terrible fear of writing mommy poems, which I feel is a derogatory term for a subgenre of poems that are sentimental about one\u2019s children. So I resisted writing about my kids for a long time. Or I wrote about them in oblique ways, hence the fairytales. I wrote an article for the Poetry Foundation about poets like Sharon Olds, Beth Ann Fennelly, Rachel Zucker, and Brenda Shaughnessy, poets who were writing about being mothers in smart, difficult, challenging ways, that weren\u2019t just saccharine. Because that\u2019s the trick: I don\u2019t want to be saccharine about anything. I don\u2019t want to be saccharine about birds, or about trees, or my grandmother, or my parents, or my kids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The longest period I ever went without writing was the period after my first daughter was born. I just couldn\u2019t do it. Part of it was sleep deprivation, and sanity, but part of it was, what am I going write about? The baby? Am I just going to be someone who writes about babies now? Am I going to write a poem about how much I regret this? Because I have postpartum depression and she screams all the time? Or am I going to wait until that passes and everything is hunky-dory, and this is the best thing that ever happened to me? Does anybody need that poem? Actually, people probably need the first poem. So it took me a long time, and writing The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison<\/em>, to get to a place where I felt like I could not just do justice to the experience, but be honest and do it my way. Being tender and acknowledging my love for them, but also not really writing about <\/em>them.The poems are more about me, more about the existential shift that comes with being in charge of other people in this world when I can\u2019t even sort it out for myself. I don\u2019t know to process 21st<\/sup> century existence, but I have to because I have to process it for other people. That is the biggest challenge and what inspired a lot of poems in this book. How do I do this? The difficulty of it. The bittersweetness of it. And also, there is, let\u2019s be honest, a gendered response to poems about children. I\u2019ve said this before: when women write poems about their kids, they\u2019re soft. When men write poems about their kids, they\u2019re sensitive\u2014and they end up in The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em>. It\u2019s the same way you would never say a woman is babysitting her kids, but you might say that about their father. Something about that response really gets my hackles up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CAYLIE HERRMANN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned in an interview that your daughter wanted to be either a writer or a botanist. Do you think that urge to be a writer is hereditary, like a poet gene, or do you think it\u2019s nurtured and you’ve nurtured it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I definitely would not say that there is a poet gene. I\u2019m the only person in my family who really did anything artistic, so I\u2019m the anomaly. My son\u2019s five now, but even as early as four, before he could write more than just his name, he took a writing notebook to preschool and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle pencil case with a pen. I said, \u201cWhy are you taking a writer\u2019s notebook to preschool?\u201d and he said, \u201cYou never know when you might have an idea.\u201d He\u2019s heard me say that, because I carry around a notebook or talk into my phone. Even if he can\u2019t write, he thinks his ideas are valuable. I find that really moving, and Violet is the same way. She\u2019s a bookworm. I brought her up in a house that\u2019s obsessed with reading. I praise her a lot for her ability to read and tell a good story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She actually said, \u201cI\u2019ll study plants during the day and at night I\u2019ll come home and paint.\u201d And I thought, first of all, I love you, and second of all, what you need to be a scientist and a writer, maybe an artist\u2014they\u2019re curiosity, attentiveness. You have to be observant and quiet and patient and really plumb the depths of the thing. It made a lot of sense: yes, study the cactus and then paint it and then write a poem about it. I think the botanist thing has kind of slipped. She told me the other day that she wants to write mystery novels when she grows up. She loves mysteries. I told her, \u201cYou might be the only writer in this family that makes money. You should totally do that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POVLOSKI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019ve spoken previously about the hawk as a talisman, something that brings you good luck. Was there ever an experience that you had where you were able to observe this in action?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No magic has ever happened. I wish I could say, once I fell off the side of a cliff and a hawk came and lifted me up and carried me. That never happened. Growing up in Ohio, I used to do all of these backroad drives in high school, and every time I\u2019d see a hawk, it was this amazing bit of wilderness. I feel the same way about deer and foxes. I see them fairly often. It\u2019s an amazing thing to be able to live in a suburb or a city and see wild things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So no, I don\u2019t know what it was. It started in high school, and every time I\u2019d see one I\u2019d think, \u201cIt\u2019s going to be a good day.\u201d Now even when my kids see one, they\u2019re like, \u201cHawk! It\u2019s going to be a good day.\u201d I don\u2019t know why that bird more than others. . . . I\u2019m very attached to crows also because they\u2019re so smart. Birds in general. Somebody asked me last week, \u201cWhat\u2019s with all the birds?\u201d Well, they\u2019re the one bit of wilderness everyone gets to see all the time. Even if you don\u2019t see deer or red foxes, you see birds, and they are wild. You might forget that because you see robins or wrens or sparrows or blue jays or grackles all the time. They\u2019re wild animals you get to see regardless of where you live. We\u2019re coexisting. And I love that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My parents still get deer in their backyard even though they\u2019re pretty deeply entrenched in the suburbs, and they still get herons and foxes. A creek runs behind their house in some woods, so I spent most of my childhood outside, using my imagination, collecting polliwogs and guppies and salamanders and just exploring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s basically a stand of trees not much more than the width of this room, but when you\u2019re five, it\u2019s the woods. When you\u2019re forty-one it’s just the trees in your parents\u2019 backyard. But yeah, I was an explorer and a reader, and I loved art, and I really just wanted to spend the summer inside with a book. Not much has changed. If I had to choose a vacation, I would choose a cabin in the woods over a beach any day of the week. That\u2019s where I feel at home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HERRMANN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is your daughter the same way?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 They\u2019re both like that. But Violet just wants to read now. She\u2019s reading To Kill A Mockingbird<\/em> and I\u2019m like, \u201cIs that maybe too advanced?\u201d She\u2019s in third grade, but she seems like she\u2019s really liking it. I figure if she has questions, she\u2019ll come to me. We\u2019ll see. She\u2019s not as interested in being outside. But my son is obsessed. He wants to dig in the dirt and find bugs all day. He\u2019ll bring them in to me. And every time I do the laundry I find acorns, rocks, dirt. His pockets are full of \u201cnature treasures,\u201d which is what he calls them. I\u2019ve made the mistake of putting clothes in the laundry without checking the pockets before, and it\u2019s like silly putty, stones, three rocks, three seed pods. I love that. That\u2019s something I want to foster in them. That it\u2019s all magic and it\u2019s all around you, and you get to experience that all the time if you want to. So maybe you should go outside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TAYLOR WARING<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What were you curious about as a child?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh my god, everything. I was probably not the easiest person to live with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

HERRMANN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do your current curiosities come off in your writing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah, I\u2019m writing some poems right now that were inspired by phrases in other languages for which there is no English word. For example, there\u2019s an Italian phrase for dreamer that translates literally as \u201chead full of crickets,\u201d which I find really fascinating. If you explain that someone is a dreamer<\/em> and in their own head all the time, you\u2019d say they have a head full of crickets. What a metaphor. And in Yiddish the same idea is luftmensch<\/em>, which translates literally as \u201cair-person.\u201d So I\u2019ve been researching foreign phrases, building poems off of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of the new poems have to deal with language as language, and I\u2019ve been trying to think of why that is. A lot of the poems in Good Bones<\/em> are grappling with what to make of the world\u2014so much I\u2019m unable to articulate. That\u2019s the real trouble, and I think part of that inability to articulate is pushing me into exploring other languages and the idea of the untranslatable, or the things we struggle to translate for ourselves, which is sort of what metaphor is, right? It\u2019s a way of translating ideas. I find myself writing a lot of\u2014I won\u2019t call them nature poems, but poems about botany, poems about plants and flowers, and different kinds of trees and things. Then I thought, \u201cWhy am I writing nature poems now of all times?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somebody always asks me, \u201cWhat is the role of the poet in these times?\u201d And probably the answer that they don\u2019t expect is, \u201cTo write poems about goldenrod and ivy,\u201d but maybe that\u2019s it. It\u2019s a resistance to having to write a poem about anything else. Love is attentiveness\u2014this is the only world we have, so I\u2019m going to pay attention to things that give me joy. I\u2019m thinking of that Brecht quote: \u201cOne cannot write poems about trees when the forest is full of police.\u201d I feel myself pushing against that: don\u2019t tell me what my poems have to be about, you know? The trees are going to outlast the policemen, and it\u2019s not the trees\u2019 fault that the policemen are there, and I can write about the trees if I want to. And maybe the policemen will make a cameo, but it\u2019s not my job to ignore the trees to write about the police. Maybe to not write the overtly political poem is a kind of political act in itself, and the freedom to write about what we wish and to not give our poems jobs outside of just being poems, which I feel pretty strongly about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POVLOSKI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You said in an interview with Upright Magazine <\/em>that a lot of your work is concerned with vision and revision, orientation and disorientation, your obsessions\u2014could you speak more about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some of that has to do with still living in my hometown. I was saying this morning to my workshop that when you live in your hometown, these things become really important. Everywhere you go, you\u2019re thinking, \u201cWell, that used to be a. . . .\u201d There are so many constants that I\u2019m the variable, or my life is the variable. Being in the same place makes me notice changes in myself more than if I moved around a lot because then I\u2019d be like, \u201cIs it because I\u2019m in a different place or because I have new friends or. . . ?\u201d But no, it\u2019s just me. I\u2019m changing, and I know it\u2019s me because I\u2019m surrounded by the same people and the same place, so it’s easier to tell those incremental differences. Thinking about Ezra Pound\u2019s \u201cmake it new\u201d\u2014it\u2019s a love\/hate thing, staying in the same place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of what I need to do to make it interesting is to never let it be the same place. That means always trying to see things that I didn\u2019t see the day before or hear things that I didn\u2019t hear the day before. That\u2019s part of what I\u2019m doing with my kids, constantly asking, \u201cWhat does that bird sound like to you? What does that tree look like to you? If you noticed the way your shadow looks today . . . and look at my shadow touching your shadow.\u201d I\u2019m always trying to see things and re-see things. It\u2019s a way of keeping things fresh when I could get really bogged down in the sameness of my experience. I feel like a lot of people resist the idea of rootedness. You know? Like, \u201cWell if I move, this change or this experience will give me so much more to write about.\u201d But I\u2019m still in my hometown and I find there\u2019s no lack of material. Part of it is that constant, weirdly vigilant attentiveness to things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

JOSH ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think that observance is something that isn\u2019t taught as often as it should be?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think it\u2019s taught at all. Is it? I think research is taught, which isn\u2019t the same thing, right? If you\u2019re taught research methods, it\u2019s not about noticing things; it\u2019s about reading and inquiring. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re ever really taught to observe. We either grow up as kids who do it or kids who really don\u2019t. I\u2019m not going to be that old person who\u2019s like, \u201cKids now on their phones!\u201d because I\u2019m always on my phone. I\u2019m always checking email, so I\u2019m not anti-technology. But whenever one of my students says, \u201cI don\u2019t know, I can\u2019t get any ideas,\u201d I\u2019m just like, \u201cPut your phone down and take a walk. You will find something. Do you hear that? Do you smell that?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think a lot of times we don\u2019t spend enough time looking up. We spend a lot of time looking in our hands and in our laps and we don’t spend enough time absorbing. It\u2019s not something that\u2019s taught at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think about what people do when they need a break. People who work long hours want to go to the beach. They want to go to a cabin in the woods. They want to unplug. People talk about unplugging as if it\u2019s something you can only do one week out of the year. We all have time for half an hour, even if it\u2019s at lunch, where you leave your cubicle and you walk around outside and maybe you listen to music. I need it. It makes me feel better, and it brings me joy. And even if I weren\u2019t writing, I think I would still need it. I don\u2019t think poets need more fresh air than the average person.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But are we taught to be observant? I think kids are taught much more to be compliant than they are to be observant. I\u2019m not trying to teach my kids not to be compliant, but I\u2019m definitely teaching them to question before blindly complying. Questioning and observing are two things that if we\u2019re not teaching, we\u2019re not doing anybody any favors. Those are high priorities for me. I hope my kids\u2019 teachers don\u2019t mind. \u201cOh yeah, your mom\u2019s the poet . . . that\u2019s why you\u2019re always asking, \u2018But why? But why do we have to do it that way?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, my daughter had poetry in school, and when the teacher asked her to write a rhyming poem, her hand shot right up. She said, \u201cMy mom\u2019s a poet and not all poems have to rhyme.\u201d Like, don\u2019t poet-splain your teacher. She came home and said, \u201cI told her!\u201d and I said, \u201cOkay, you\u2019re right, Violet. You\u2019re right, you\u2019re right, simmer down. But some poems do<\/em> have to rhyme. There are forms that have to rhyme, so if your teacher asks you to write a rhyming poem, that\u2019s a valid assignment and you should still do it. But maybe your next poem will be free verse. Not all poems have to not rhyme either.\u201d But I love that she felt like she could assert herself regarding poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POVLOSKI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In another interview you said that, often, you start writing a poem because of a \u201cseed\u201d\u2014a line of dialogue, an image. You\u2019ve already talked about untranslatable language. Are there any other seeds that are developing in your brain? Is there one in particular that you could share with us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, I just finished a poem that I\u2019ve been working on in some way, shape, or form for a few years. It\u2019s not about Sandy Hook, but it references the idea of, \u201cWhy don\u2019t we leave the flags at half-mast all the time?\u201d I don\u2019t understand why we even have kids go out into the snow in front of their elementary schools and move it down and up again when they just have to go back out the next week and move it back down. A couple days after Sandy Hook was my daughter\u2019s birthday, and I had to drop her off at school and send her inside. I remember seeing the kids pulling the flag down, so I wrote some notes about what that felt like. Do the kids pulling down the flag to half-mast at an elementary school know that they\u2019re doing it for kids who were shot at an elementary school? Probably not. They probably were like, \u201cFlag Corps, you\u2019re up!\u201d and they sent them outside. I wrote that down, and I didn\u2019t know what to do with it and so let it sit in a legal pad for two or three years. I just went back to it pretty recently and monkeyed with it for like a month and finally, finally finished it. Ilya Kaminsky just took it for Poetry International<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve been working on wrapping my head around the idea for so long. How do you approach that idea? Of the things that we ask of our kids? Of what they know and what they don\u2019t know. My daughter, I\u2019m quite sure, doesn\u2019t know that there\u2019s ever been a school shooting. They have something called lock-down drills at her school in case a bad person gets inside, but I\u2019m pretty sure based on things she\u2019s said, she thinks the bad person\u2019s there to steal computers or something. I don\u2019t think she has any idea that the bad person could have a gun or that the bad person would want to hurt kids. And I\u2019m not about to tell her that because I want her to go to school and not be afraid. But this is the kind of stuff, the high-stakes stuff, that as much as I would love to write about birds and trees, I can\u2019t. Because I have to drop my kids off at elementary school where the flag is half-mast most of the time. For good reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of this big stuff I have to sit with for a long time because I don\u2019t want to bungle it. Somebody recently on Twitter was like, \u201cPoets don\u2019t have to be first responders.\u201d You don\u2019t have to write and publish a poem about a disaster the day after it happens. And I kind of laughed about it, but I think it\u2019s true. We can be really clumsy about things if we\u2019re not careful. Some poets do the political, post-disaster grief poem really well, even in the midst of it, but I think it never hurts to tap the brakes and take a breath and process it because some of this stuff is just so big.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I was reading The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison<\/em>, I kept reading hints and murmurs of \u201cGood Bones.\u201d Do you feel like you\u2019ve been writing the same poem? Could you talk more about that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, that\u2019s so interesting. I didn\u2019t realize that until the magic of the Internet, and someone posted \u201cGood Bones\u201d adjacent to a poem from The Well Speaks<\/em>. And there was a hint of \u201cGood Bones\u201d in the last book: \u201cWhat will you tell your son about this world? That children can be unzipped from the bellies of beasts? No one is out of danger.\u201d Those are all cautionary tales, mostly, about bad things happening to children. That\u2019s what fairytales are. So I think I was starting to go into that territory, and maybe that\u2019s why \u201cGood Bones\u201d happened so fast. They say if you write something fast, it\u2019s not because you were hit by lightning, but that stuff had been cooking in the back of your brain for a long time. Instead of saying it through the framework of fairy tales or some other persona or narrative, I think \u201cGood Bones\u201d was the first time I said it directly, as myself. There is no distance between the \u201cI\u201d and me in that poem; \u201clife is short, though I keep this from my children\u201d\u2014that is how the poem started because that\u2019s what I was thinking at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had my first child about halfway through The Well Speaks<\/em>, and so suddenly the stakes went up. It all felt much more present and real to me. And when I was working on Good Bones<\/em>, I had both of my kids. I was working out the same issues, just in the real world with real people and real stakes and without the . . . I\u2019ve described it before as oven mitts\u2014using persona or other received narratives as a distancing device for holding hot material without dealing with it in a really direct way. I was doing that through persona poems as far back as my first book, and then through a lot of third person narrative poems where I was writing about other characters in The Well Speaks.  <\/em>Then something just happened and in Good Bones<\/em> I was like, \u201cI\u2019m going write these poems as close to me as humanly possible,\u201d and so for most of those poems I took the mask off. Which is what made those poems so scary to write.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do you think that unmasking had to do with having children?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do. So Good Bones <\/em>has two narrative threads running through it. One is the poems that are close to me, the \u201cI\u201d poems, and the other poems are the \u201chawk and girl\u201d poems, the \u201che she\u201d poems, and those poems\u2014I had like forty of them\u2014I had been considering as a kind of a novel in verse. And then the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of their being in conversation with poems that were a little more contemporary and a little bit closer to me because a lot of the subject matter is overlapping. It was also a bravery test for me, like wanting to do something different. I\u2019ve done the other stuff before, so how do I do it my way, but push myself a little bit? I felt a little bit backwards. I think a lot of people start out writing autobiographical poems, and their work gets more experimental or more elliptical. My last book was a bit pushed away from me and more esoteric, and in this book I just stripped it all down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POVLOSKI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wondered if you\u2019re a batch writer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like . . . series? Yes. Yes, I am. A lot of this started in undergrad, honestly, because I had deadlines. I\u2019m not an every-day writer. I know some people are like, \u201cEvery day I write for an hour.\u201d I do not do that. I try to do something every day in service of my writing, so that may be thinking, looking, listening, revising. It may be researching a magazine or sending something out. But it might not be working on a new poem. I just don\u2019t quite work like that. So when I was in undergrad and I had to come to workshop, suddenly I had deadlines. I had to bring a poem in and share it. I thought, well what am I going to write about? And so I started working on series because it gave me a way of having something that I could pull from and do every week and know I always had a fallback. I did the same thing in grad school, which is how those Bible persona poems started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDelilah\u201d was the first one I workshopped. It was based on a picture of my then-boyfriend having some woman cut his hair in Poland. He had really long dark hair. I was looking through some snapshots at his mother\u2019s house, and there was a picture of this woman cutting his hair on a patio in Poland. I was like, oh, Samson and Delilah, which is why Poland is mentioned in a poem about Samson and Delilah, which otherwise wouldn\u2019t make any sense. I had so much fun writing it. I thought, I\u2019m going to do this again. I also think it helps us dive into our obsessions, to not write a one-off poem, but to really dig down into something, and ultimately, I end up being happy I did it because it helps me bring my books together when I have enough to make one. I\u2019m always thinking, how can I pattern these throughout the book to make it feel like a book and not like just the sixty best poems I\u2019ve written since my last book came out. A series is one way of creating an arc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like to work on a series, and I like to leaf it through the book. I think Disasterology <\/em>is the only outlier, because one section is the movie-inspired poems and one section is other poems. If it had been a full length book, it wouldn\u2019t be like that. In a chapbook there isn\u2019t enough space to get away with that. But in a book, instead of having one chunk of the same thing and then another chunk of something else, I like the idea of having a series as support beams, a sort of scaffolding, and then you can leaf other things around them. I like that when I\u2019m reading a book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And let\u2019s be frank: contest culture is brutal. When I\u2019m editing books for other poets, I\u2019m always thinking about the first fifteen pages. Because screeners and judges have a lot to do and a lot of manuscripts. What if you had a series of poems that you thought were really strong, and you put them in the front of the manuscript? The first fifteen pages might be the same kind of poem, over and over, which is great if that judge or screener happens to love that kind of poem. It is not great if they don\u2019t. So hitting a few different major notes in the first fifteen pages, and yes, putting a lot of strong poems up front, is good. It\u2019s not fun to see how the sausage gets made, but I do think, as poets, we have to think about this stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You mentioned the contest culture being brutal. I think a lot of us are just barely stepping into it now. So maybe you could\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Buckle up. It is brutal. My first book, Lamp of the Body<\/em>, was my MFA thesis with a couple of undergrad poems pulled in at the end, which my committee read and I don\u2019t think realized I wrote them as an undergrad. When I left Ohio State, I sent out the book to like ten presses, at like twenty-five to thirty bucks a pop. I didn\u2019t have that kind of money\u2014who has that kind of money? We\u2019re poets. And it won the Benjamin Saltman Prize, which was crazy fortunate, right? But it gave me a completely unrealistic idea of how easy it is to get a book of poems published.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison<\/em> I sent out for almost five years. I think it\u2019s a better book. It was a runner up or a finalist for every prize I sent it to: National Poetry Series, Cleveland State University, Barnard Woman Poets Prize, Green Rose, etc. It was like: bridesmaid, bridesmaid, bridesmaid. Thirty dollars, thirty dollars, thirty dollars. I don\u2019t know if I broke even. I had one offer on it about halfway through that I ended up turning down because I didn\u2019t like the distribution agreement. And I don\u2019t regret that because I\u2019m also not an academic, and I felt no pressure to publish. I really wanted to wait for a \u201cjump up and down when I got the phone call\u201d situation because I didn\u2019t need it for tenure. I just wanted people to read the poems. So after five years, I got a call from Jeffery Levine at Tupelo that Kimiko Hahn had chosen it. One book got taken right away, and the next took almost five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Were you editing the manuscript?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would add a couple new poems and then take a couple old ones out. This is going to sound so crazy, but it\u2019s true. Near the end of the long nightmare, of me sending this book out over and over, I had a dream. And this is true. This is the magic, not the hawk. I had a dream that I took it back to basically draft one, and in the dream I was like, that was so smart, it was so much stronger before I started monkeying with it and putting in all the new poems and getting away from the original premise. I woke up in the morning, and I was like, \u201cOh that was so smart . . . I\u2019m so glad I did that. Wait, I didn\u2019t do that, that was a dream.\u201d So I ended up actually going back in, taking out a bunch of the new stuff, going back to some earlier versions, and thinking about what made me write the book in the first place. I wanted to get back to some of the original integrity of the manuscript, with a few new poems at the end. That was the push. It came to me in a dream. I listened. And I think that was smart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POVLOSKI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Has that happened ever again?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

No, never. Most of my dreams are terrible nightmares where buildings are falling on me. So if I ever get one about poems, I listen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then in the winter of 2015, I sent Good Bones<\/em> to Tupelo, and in the spring they took it. And that was six months before the poem \u201cGood Bones\u201d went viral. It was called Weep Up<\/em>, the name of the first poem in the book, even into cover design. Then, April of last year, the poem was on Madam Secretary<\/em>, and a week or so later, Meryl Streep read it at the Lincoln Center. My press was like, \u201cWe need to talk about this.\u201d It seemed to them a missed opportunity, so that\u2019s when the book changed titles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But yeah, the contest circuit is brutal. I describe it as a many chambered lock and each chamber is like a level of the review process\u2014the first screeners, the second screeners, maybe the editors, maybe the final judge. To get your book to go all the way through, they have to line up just perfectly, and if one is slightly turned, your book won\u2019t get through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I\u2019m helping an organization screen, I\u2019m not just sending along art that confirms my own aesthetic. We don\u2019t need that. We should be sending on the most interesting, the most fully realized. Does this book deserve to be in the world? What\u2019s the urgency of this book? Which book do you most want to see in the world? And, unfortunately, there\u2019s usually only one, or maybe two, or maybe three, that get picked out of thousands of worthy manuscripts, good, whole, well-written, strong manuscripts. It\u2019s heartbreaking. I don\u2019t take it lightly because when I read for a press and I have to put something in the no pile, I\u2019m putting that in the no pile remembering that somebody put years of their life into that manuscript, and you\u2019re in charge of sorting it out. That\u2019s a weighty responsibility. But yes, it\u2019s brutal for all those reasons and more. I wish there was some other model. I wish more presses had open reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POVLOSKI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s really hard not to be swayed by the prestige culture in poetry sometimes, so I think that\u2019s great advice. It seems like a lot of times we\u2019re in competition to be acknowledged or to be published in what we consider fabulous, \u201cprestigious\u201d journals. That can be very discouraging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

You know, it\u2019s funny. \u201cGood Bones\u201d was published in Waxwing<\/em>, which was then a small online upstart managed by two guys and a woman who have babies, who live in different parts of the country. It\u2019s still relatively new. And the poem was rejected by a couple of, as you say, very \u201cprestigious\u201d places before they took it. But the prestigious places that rejected it were print journals. And none of this would have happened had one of those print journals published the poem. It wouldn\u2019t have gone viral. Not as many people would have read it. It would have been a poem only read by those subscribers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The older I get, the more interested I get in readership and sharing. Online journals do that in a way that some of those old-guard print journals can\u2019t. They just don\u2019t have the readership. And granted some are having online components now, or will share online. And some of them have strong social media presences, which is great. Now, if someone gave me a choice, I would rather have a poem online. Because it\u2019s easier to share. I mean, isn\u2019t it about having people read the poems?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POVLOSKI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Something you said\u2014when you\u2019re reading manuscripts, you\u2019re looking for things that are most urgent for readership. What do you mean by that? Or what do you think is urgent right now?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It could be anything. I\u2019m never looking for anything in particular. That\u2019s important to say because it might be easy to think that poems that are somehow grappling with our current moment should be considered more urgent than poems that aren\u2019t, but I\u2019m looking for the poems that are the best. And \u201cbest\u201d can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But in the moment, can I not keep coming back to this poem? Can I not imagine that this person\u2019s manuscript would sit for five years or ten years and not get published? Do I want to own this book and have it sit on my shelf? Do I want other people to hold this book? Do I feel like it\u2019s important for me to help shepherd this thing into the world? Right? Because that\u2019s what you get to help do whether you\u2019re the final judge or whether you\u2019re reading the slush. You\u2019re one of those chambers in the lock. Whether I\u2019m reading magazine submissions or book manuscripts, I\u2019m always thinking, what needs to be out there? And it\u2019s never the same type of poems. That\u2019s what excites me the most. It might be really experimental\u2014like the language is doing something that I never would have thought to do in my own\u2014and it might be something political, and it might be something tender and elegiac. Maybe it\u2019s that you know it when you see it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In talking about urgency, you might have answered this a little bit, but what makes a poem political? Is it just the urgency? Is it the topic? You write a lot of nature poems, but that can be a canvas for a reader to extract something political.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

They can come in different shapes and sizes. I think of a poem like \u201cA Small Needful Fact\u201d by Ross Gay about Eric Garner. That\u2019s a very clear and needful and necessary poem. You know what it\u2019s about. It\u2019s not cloaking itself in anything else. Some of Danez Smith’s poems  are so masterful, and handling super-hot, burning subject matter so well. I have a hard time doing that. When I think about political poems, if I try to do it, I worry I\u2019ll bungle it. That\u2019s the problem. A lot of us do. Part of the issue is that whenever we come to the page with an agenda\u2014like, \u201cI\u2019m going to write a poem about school shootings, I\u2019m going to write a poem about the need for gun control, I\u2019m going to write a poem about race relations in the 21st<\/sup> century\u201d\u2014it\u2019s so big that we\u2019re giving the poem a job other than just being a poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of just observing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes. I think that\u2019s the only reason I was able to write the poem about the flag being at half-staff. The only reason I gave myself permission to write that poem is because the seed for that poem was an observation about kids in winter coats standing in the snow, moving the flag down after Sandy Hook, at my daughter\u2019s school. And thinking, I don\u2019t know how to process this. What do they know? What are they telling my kid? And how do we do this? But I couldn\u2019t have written that poem without that observation. If I hadn\u2019t ever seen that image, I don\u2019t think I ever would have accessed the poem because it would never be in my nature to write down. I really start with an image or a metaphor or an idea or a question or a problem, and then the poem sort of works itself out from there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I might get to a political place based on whatever that image is, or a place that could be read as political, or timely. \u201cGood Bones\u201d was an example. I wrote that poem in 2015, long before the Pulse nightclub shooting. And I remember some reporters here and in the UK erroneously saying that it was written in response to the shooting, which was just not true. I never would have written a poem in response to the Pulse nightclub shooting. That\u2019s not what I do. And I wouldn\u2019t know how to do it except in a way that was really inelegant. After something bad happens, I want to cry, I want to donate to causes, and I want to act. But I don\u2019t want to write a poem. To me, those are like different kinds of activism, and that\u2019s not my wheelhouse\u2014although, for some poets, it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes a poem political? In some ways, it\u2019s how you read it. There were probably poems written during World War II that maybe don\u2019t feel like political poems, but when you consider the time and space in which they were written, they take on a different kind of resonance. And I bet there are poems being written today that people will read in thirty years and feel like, \u201cOh, that\u2019s got this<\/em> all over it.\u201d Disasterology<\/em> was written in the beginning of the \u201cWar on Terror,\u201d and that was the framework for why those doomsday poems were so important to me. We\u2019re always writing from within the framework of our politics or fears or anxieties. We\u2019re writing in our times, and for different poets and in different poems, it can express itself in different ways. Sometimes it might be about the police, and sometimes it might be about the trees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ANTHONY<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So The Corrections<\/em> by Jonathan Franzen is written pre-9\/11, though a lot of people say it feels like a post-9\/11 book because it encapsulates a lot of the anxieties built into that time. I was really young at the time of 9\/11, and I think a lot of us here were too. Could you talk about the change that happened around that time?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I grew up thinking that bad things happened other places. There\u2019s a poem in Good Bones<\/em> called \u201c20th<\/sup> Century,\u201d . . . \u201cyour horrors were far away and I thought I could stand them\u201d is the line. That\u2019s how I grew up. War doesn\u2019t happen here. People don\u2019t come here and attack us. We go there. That\u2019s our M.O. It was such a weirdly vulnerable feeling to have that happen here. Everything was different\u2014your feeling of safety in your own country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It feels like a completely different world. It makes me a little bit sad that you don\u2019t remember what the world was like before. Because I do. It was kind of nice. It was kind of nice to feel safe. Whether that was real\u2014safety or perceived safety\u2014is a totally other argument. Also, the privilege of feeling safe in your own country is something that many other countries have never had. We really got knocked down in that moment, in not a metaphorical way. So yeah, writing about those movies was a way of addressing some of those things. But again, I didn\u2019t want to sit down to write a 9\/11 poem. I didn\u2019t want to write a Towers poem. At the same time, I didn\u2019t feel, especially at that moment, that I could write poems about trees. It was really hard. I just didn\u2019t know what to do. How do you write? Writing the end-of-the-world poems was a way of me writing my way through that initial shock. \u201cOh, so this<\/em> is the world now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think there\u2019s a poem in that chapbook called \u201cGreen\u201d\u2014did it make the chapbook? I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s about the color code system and how green was the safe color code, but the reason that the color code system was needed was because there was no more safety. So they named green, but we\u2019d already lived all the green we were ever going to get. Before we even knew it existed, the green that you had had until the fifth grade was gone, and we didn\u2019t even know we were living in it, and we weren\u2019t even soaking it up, because we didn\u2019t know we had it. That poem was an elegy to the time we didn\u2019t know was\u2014we didn\u2019t know we were on a clock. And maybe we should have. Maybe some of us did. But I didn\u2019t know we were on a clock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote Good Bones<\/em> before the election cycle. The world I\u2019m talking about trying to love while I\u2019m reading it now feels like \u201cTrump\u2019s America.\u201d But I didn\u2019t write those poems in Trump\u2019s America. I didn\u2019t even write those poems in Trump\u2019s election era. I had no inkling that he was going to run for president when I wrote those poems. I just thought the world was a fraught, dangerous place, which it was; it\u2019s just more fraught and more dangerous now. Those poems are speaking to a moment\u2014like you\u2019re saying The Corrections<\/em> is speaking to a moment coming down the pike\u2014that I didn\u2019t even see coming. Now the book is out, and I\u2019m traveling all over and reading from it. I say I\u2019m trying to love the world, but my god, it\u2019s a mess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poor green! We really should have enjoyed that more. Maybe in writing poems, we\u2019re making our own little greens. I feel like all the time I\u2019m trying to dig up some sort of artifact from the unspoiled past. And maybe that\u2019s why birds, and that\u2019s why trees. When everything else feels tenuous, there\u2019s these things that were here before us, and before all of this stuff, and those things will be here after us. And somehow the serene permanence of those things I find really grounding in all this flag-hoisting mayhem of our current times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

POVLOSKI<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finding a kind of security through poetry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SMITH<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yeah. Even in language. It\u2019s an anchor. The only thing that\u2019s been constant. I\u2019ve had my kids for nine and five years, but I was writing poems before them. That love of language and also love of nature, really, love of the world, and love of family, whatever that looks like, have been things that pervaded and lasted through everything. I don\u2019t know how to not include that stuff in the poems. That would feel really strange. To only be political, for example, and ignore what gives me joy. I really want to be able to glean some joy. We deserve it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THROUGHOUT HER WORK, Maggie Smith presents vulnerability and softness that comes from someone writing a love letter to the very thing that is trying to destroy her\u2014and everyone else. Smith pulls from fairytales, imagined natural disasters, and biblical stories, but reminds us that the dangers we face are often human. Without an edge of anger or … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9086,"featured_media":1690,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpo365_audiences":[],"wpo365_private":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35995"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9086"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35995"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36797,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35995\/revisions\/36797"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test-inside.ewu.edu\/willowspringsmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}