Poet Bruce Smith's Reading: Introduction by Katherine V. Halsey

Good evening. I am honored and deeply humbled tonight to introduce the man who at this point, for you students anyway, needs no introduction. Bruce Smith, poet, teacher, father, friend... son, brother, running-back.

Typically, such an introduction would start by listing biographical data and degrees earned, work experience, and maybe selected excerpts of critical acclaim. But I have chosen instead to leave that to you and Google. And those of you who attended last night's writers' workshop will understand why I offer these brief remarks with the title:

I met Mr. Smith 25 years ago when I arrived at Phillips Academy, Andover where our teaching careers overlapped briefly. I tutored math, English and French in a tiny office on the second floor of a small, peripheral building called Graham House; he held Creative Writing Court in (and I am not making this up) "The Pillow Room." The intellectual connection was quick and deep, the friendship inspirational. Our time was all talk and ideas, the books we read and music of note. It was not so much about poetry. Until the note I found one day on my Graham House desk: "Heaney, Seamus. Poet. Reading tonight at 6:30 in the Underwood Room. Be there."

And I was hooked. Hooked by Heaney. Hooked on Heaney, whose voice was, and still is, an occasional drug for me..... Seamus Heaney who wrote that

     There are the mud-flowers of dialect

     And the immortelles of perfect pitch

     And that moment when the bird sings very close

     To the music of what happens.

Some of what I heard in Mr. Smith' s classes this week:

•Emily Dickinson said that poetry comes from philology (the study of language) and cherubim (the angels). Mr. Smith says that his poetry comes from his five college football concussions.

•From Picasso: "Art is the lie that allows you to tell the truth."

•Blake: "Excess is bliss."

•Metaphor yokes two things together—sometimes likely pairs, sometimes not. In making metaphor, seek to make the familiar thing strange, and the strange thing familiar.

•[Maybe my favorite anecdote, a freshman reporting: "I had NO idea what was going on, and now I do; and all it took was being in a room with him.”

[Which makes me ponder: Student yoked to Mr. Smith→maybe he'll write his version and call it:

Self-Portrait as Metaphor]

•"A good poet steals; a bad poet betrays an influence." T. S. Eliot

•"Turn your limp into a dance step."

•"A poem can be seismic."

•Whitman as poetic precursor to rock and roll: all long lines, big breath and high volume.

•Sonnet, from the Italian, “sonnetta,” little song. Only 14 lines, and how the restriction of it offers a kind of freedom, the release in the restraint.

•The turning point in a sonnet, the "volta," is like when a billiard ball hits the felt on the other side of the table and veers off in another direction.

•Rhyme as sonic metaphor.

•Rhyme as “a kind of kiss.” Keats

•Off-rhyme and its dissonance can be cooler than exact rhyme.

•The iamb as heartbeat ---

a handful of heartbeats,

the rhythm of our speech.

Critics have raved about Mr. Smith's most recent collection, Devotions, which was a finalist for last year's National Book Award: Listing Bruce's book on his short list of favorites of the year, Dan Chiasson of The New Yorker wrote: "Certain books defy sentimentality as their primary triumph. Smith’s poems about working-class regular joes could have been treacle. Instead they’re marvelous."

Book Award."

And it's not just poetry for tough guys. Smith's poems explore male experience for sure, but they also explore notions of the female, the teacher/student, mother /son, father/daughter, birth/ death—the private and the political, things seen and unseen.

And they often come very close to the music of what happens.

As Bruce would say: enough about me.

Please join me in welcoming Bruce Smith to the stage.