John Smith, Prince Edward Island’s inaugural poet laureate, has been publishing books of poetry since 1972. In spite of his on-Island acclaim, and despite the fact that a Google search of his name – in quotation marks! – turns up nearly six million hits, he remains, I think, very little known outside the cozy confines of the Maritime peninsula still known as PEI.
His obscurity can be chalked up to several factors, besides a name that sounds like it was invented for the guest registry at a no-tell motel. For one, until recently Smith has published his books with very small regional presses. His 1982 collection Sucking-Stones (which incorporates two chapbooks published in the ’70s by Réshard Gool’s Charlottetown press, Square Deal), was published by Gary Geddes’ subscription press Quadrant Editions; PEI’s Ragweed Press published both Midnight Found You Dancing (1986) and Strands the Length of the Wind (1993); Ragweed’s successor Acorn Press published Fireflies in the Magnolia Grove (2004), which was shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize. 2005 marked Smith’s first publication by a bigger press, with Fitzhenry & Whiteside’s publication of Maps of Invariance, a sequence of essayistic prose poems.
A more cynical explanation for Smith’s lack of renown is that unlike other Maritime poets who have transcended geographical obscurity to achieve notoriety – Acorn, Nowlan and Thompson – Smith has neither the eccentric public persona nor the turbulent biography of the iconoclastic bad-boy, which, for better or for worse, can help put a poet’s work under the public eye.
But I think the causa prima is that Smith has over the course of his career followed a path (references abound in Smith’s oeuvre to “The Road Not Taken,” which is clearly a touchstone for him) down which few readers are prepared to follow.
Which is to say that Smith’s poetry is unabashedly intellectual; as Ross Leckie has said, it “does not apologize for its massive intelligence.” This goes against the grain of the Purdyesque self-effacement and plain speech that has had so much currency in Canada. To give you an idea, the section headings of Fireflies in the Magnolia Grove are “Specifications,” “Contributions to a Theory of Identity,” “Histories,” “Reports of Sexual Dimorphism,” “Epistemologies” and “Disquisitions on the Question of Being.” Smith espouses a complicated polysyllabic vocabulary and his poems range over vast swaths of human endeavour, including, to name a few, philosophy, theology, geology, mathematics, physics, music, and dance. His is a style that few poets can manage convincingly. Certainly, few have tried, most poets adhering earnestly to the Poundian dictum to “go in fear of abstractions.” Sensible advice in the main, for most poets’ attempts at deep thought in verse come off affected and irredeemably trite. But Smith’s uncommon breadth of learning (although he is Professor Emeritus of English, he also has a degree in Mathematics and Physics and has studied, in his own words, “numerous things both systematically and otherwise”) and nimble, capacious mind, in concert with an elegant formal touch and keen ear for the music of a line, make his best work appeal to both emotion and intellect.
Smith occupies realms of intellectual investigation; he doesn’t merely visit them for brief walking tours, as do so many contemporary versifiers incorporating science and philosophy into their poems. Take, for example, “Mind Insists”:
Mind insists on rambling. The mountain, after all, is so
vast, so intimately fissured, so accommodating.
There are so many ways of getting to the top, it’s hard
to stay fixed on the flower of one asketic microcleft.
Trickles can start at any point where conditions are right
for condensation. They come to meet you with disarming
merriment, most of them dedicated to the deepening of
features already on record, but a few to true innovation.
When a rockface does break free, you go catatonic and cling
together. Once admit there’s no escape, you’re gratified
to have so much time to watch the avalanche approach. A wall
of air hits you first. Death is in effect spontaneous.
Or, both saved, you’re bridged over by a boulder. Climbing out
reincarnate, the mountainside is a frozen surge of raw
seafloor. You don’t get down to make a new start from the valley
till you’ve been parched and mummified by the naked dust of
the catastrophe. The other option would have you go extinct in the rubble
and so, as it were, achieve the summit by euphemism only.
But on a still summer’s day, you’re oblivious to such extremities.
Slopes compacted of ancient tragedies are simmering with bees.
Rocks here have been locked in place for more lives than you remember.
I’ve quoted the poem in its entirety because Smith’s syntactically sinuous work is particularly difficult to excerpt, in spite of such brilliant phrases as “frozen surge of raw/ seafloor” and “mummified by the naked dust of/ the catastrophe” and the deft assonance and consonance of a line like “When a rockface does break free, you go catatonic and cling.” What I find most impressive about a poem like this is the poet’s sustained control of the extended metaphor, the smaller metaphorical nuggets embedded within it, the contrapuntal interplay of abstract general statement and concrete particular detail. “[H]ard/ to stay fixed on the flower of one asketic microcleft,” indeed. In the introduction to Maps of Invariance, Smith writes of “a metaphor that is not actually stated, but rather is acted out, phrase by phrase, as the very body of the poem.” It’s precisely such an enactment embodied in a poem like “Mind Insists.”
The nature of that metaphor and its enactment has long been a preoccupation of Smith’s. It appears, for instance, in one of his finest sonnets, “There is one,” from Midnight Found You Dancing:
There is one metaphor for everything. If it is money,
then poetry is redundant. If not—ah, if not, then
is it that single nonsense syllable sung by the indefatigable
oarsman setting his back against the tide of things,
groaning out the strokes of his trade, but hearing
in each groan a new thwack of the sea ring
like an unstoppable tonic chord reached at the last
expiring bar in the last sonata of a long career
as the boat turns to flotsam? Yes, it is that.
There is one metaphor that serves for everything in turn,
and it is like enough to all metaphors at once that it hardly differs from
the things themselves that hardly differ from the effort to achieve them.
Bend, address the moment—this is an old see-saw—drop
—get it right—heave, breathe, groan, hear, swing up, again, again.
It could be argued with some validity that Smith’s poetry suffers from a somewhat restricted range of tone, subject and form, that one John Smith poem too closely resembles any other, particularly since Midnight Found You Dancing. It’s true that Smith has explored similar thematic territory over the course of his career and has done so using primarily a sort of meditative free verse sonnet, whether in fourteen lines or in caudated variations thereof. Smith himself says of Strands the Length of the Wind, “I tend to think of these poems as individual pieces in an open mosaic. Each piece of the mosaic is an abbreviated meditation that takes a run, often from what I think may be an unexpected angle, at one or more traditional themes.” In a more recent statement of poetics he referred to his sonnets as “randomly ordered facets of a polyhedron, a polyhedron constantly in process of extending the number of its facets. That polyhedron represents the wholeness, uncompleted and perhaps defiant of completion, that these privileged moments and their sonnet-embodiments compose.” A poet’s appraisal of his own work is always to be taken with a grain of salt, and I would hesitate to say that such an explanation necessarily justifies repetition. However, I think in this case that Smith’s statement provides the key to an appreciation of his tessellated oeuvre, or “the art of perfect repetition,” as he puts it in the opening poem of Fireflies. Each piece is on the surface similar in colour and texture, but contains important subtle differences that make it integral to the picture as a whole. From above, the assembled fragments coalesce into a hologram-like image that changes depending on the angle of the observer; from up-close, the overall picture is lost, but one becomes aware that each individual tile is a similarly variegated whole, that “the part / also contains the whole.” Certainly, the sonnet is nothing resembling a “closed form” in Smith’s hands, not simply because he does not feel bound to restrict himself to fourteen decasyllabic lines in fixed rhyme schemes, but because his three volumes of sonnets are the very essence of expansiveness.
Another aspect of expansiveness in Smith’s work is performance. “Inevitably,” he says, “a poem is performed, whether by a reader on a public platform, by a member of a coterie, or, most likely, by a solitary encounterer in the silent cave of the private mind.” While there’s nothing stopping those silent solitary encounters from taking place, anyone who has never heard Smith read his own poems – or others’, as he often does – is missing out. Smith, whose style is antithetical to the drone of what’s become known as “poet voice,” is one of the best performers of poems in the country. His readings add dimensions and colours to his poems, making explicit their multiple voices, their coy ironies and farcically authoritative pronouncements. His dramatic readings often clarify the reasons for quicksilver shifts and disjunctions; they concretize beautifully the manifold abstractions that jostle about in his sonnets and offer invaluable clues as to how one might go about performing one’s own readings of his work. Fortunately, for readers who haven’t yet had the pleasure of encountering Smith’s poems live and out loud, the University of Prince Edward Island – where Smith is Professor Emeritus of English – has published a multimedia package, including two DVDs of Smith reading his own poems and a CD containing an hour-long lecture-with-readings: “This Hour Has 1338 Years: A Quick Journey Through Thirteen Centuries of English Poetry.” During Smith’s term as Poet Laureate, there were some poets on PEI who grumbled that he should have used the position to promote local writers. But Smith’s mountain-top perspective reveals the here and now to be but a speck; his lectures on canonical poets are the very model of what a laureate might be.
Through electron microscope and Hubble telescope – a device to which Richard Lemm has compared Smith’s work – John Smith probes the opposite realms of infinity and nothingness, the self becoming, as in Pascal’s Pensées, “un milieu entre rien et tout.” Reading Smith’s work, which belongs as much to the Renaissance (or for that matter, to the thought of the pre-Socratics, especially Heraclitus) as to our own age, I am put in mind also of Newton’s supremely humble statement that he seemed to himself “to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” This is another way of accounting for Smith’s lack of stature in the Canadian canon. So much of what has been anthologized is poetry of the strongly individuated ego or “voice,” strong-stanced poetry of passionate conviction, evocations of specific places and times. Smith’s work in no way lacks passion or intensity, but for him it is not glorification of the self and its credos, not specific landscapes, but “the need… // for the hook of questioning/ and quest” that animates his writing. His poetry thus bears marked affinities to the writing of Hopkins, Dickinson, Borges and Stevens, and is bound to be appreciated by admirers of such artists, as well as by readers of such contemporary Canadian poets as Moritz and Bringhurst, who value inquiry over easy answers and who find wonder and joy and terror at every touch and turn.