Poetry Centered

Maggie Smith: A Conversation with Our Own Minds

August 26, 2020 University of Arizona Poetry Center Season 1 Episode 5
Poetry Centered
Maggie Smith: A Conversation with Our Own Minds
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Maggie Smith approaches poems as a poet’s best teacher in this episode, calling poems “a conversation we have with our own minds.” Smith shares a poem by Donald Hall that shaped her early days of writing (“Gold”), a Lynn Emanuel poem that she prizes for its perfection of word choice (“Stone Soup”), and a prose poem by Jenny Boully that engages the listener through its forward momentum (“Tether”). Smith closes by reading her poem “Ohio Cento.” 

Listen to the full recordings of Hall, Emanuel, and Boully reading for the Poetry Center on Voca:
Donald Hall (1972)
Lynn Emanuel (1993)
Jenny Boully (2013)

Listen to a 2018 reading by Maggie Smith on Voca.

Julie Swarstad Johnson:

You're listening to Poetry Centered, where we invite a guest host to introduce three poems from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center's online audiovisual archive of poetry dating from 1963 to today. We close the episode with a poem by our host. Today's episode features the poet Maggie Smith, author of three books of poetry, including her most recent, Good Bones. In October 2020, her book of essays titled Keep Moving will be available. Toward the end of this episode, you'll hear Maggie refer to poems as"a conversation we have with our own minds." This idea of a conversation with ourselves and with other writers shapes her selection of poems by Donald Hall, Lynn Emanuel, and Jenny Boully. Enjoy the show.

Maggie Smith:

Hi, this is Maggie Smith, recording here at home in Columbus, Ohio. The first poem I chose is"Gold" by Donald Hall, recorded on Wednesday, September 27th, 1972. Accessing this archive, I first wanted to hunt down poems that were dear to me when I began writing. One of the first books of poetry I bought myself with my babysitting money was Donald Hall's Old and New Poems published in 1990. I came across it at a little bookshop near the house where I grew up and I imagine I did what I do now encountering a book by a poet I don't know. I flip through, read a few poems, and if I like what I see, it comes home with me. My original copy of Old and New Poems is falling apart at this point. The spine is cracked, it's dog-eared to death. Teenage me underlined favorite lines in the poems, and even jotted down some notes for early poems of my own in the margins of some pages. In this battered copy, the whole last stanza of"Gold" is underlined in blue ink, beginning with the line,"we made in those days." There was also a little heart drawn next to the title of the poem. It's a love poem, a sensual poem, a poem of spending a whole day in bed with someone you love. Something I knew little to nothing about when I bought the book. But the stanza break is so masterful, and I think I could sense that then, even if I could not have articulated it. You'll hear the first longer stanza which contains the description of the day, the lovers touching, sleeping, touching again. Then note that the second shorter stanza is a single sentence, broken over five lines. You'll hear the line breaks because Hall pauses at the end of each line, in that second stanza. I have to say the metaphor of the tiny identical rooms inside their bodies, shining and whole, feels as apt to me now as it did then. And the sounds in that first stanza, all those vowels, especially the Os, are just lovely. I stand behind the underlining and the drawn in heart.

Donald Hall:

I'd like to read a few poems from The Yellow Room. Yellow Room came out a year ago, and it's very hard to read from because it is a sort of one long poem. I didn't know it was until I really, I guess, until it came out. Some of the poems have titles and others just exist, a few lines in the middle of the page, no title. What it is, one man reading it said, it was a, like a novel with all the words left out. It's a story of a love affair, but it's not a story. I mean, the events are not here for the most part. It's just the feelings. It's in four parts. And the first part is sort of a happy love, where you're really happy because you think you're so good cause somebody loves you. And then there's a second part, which is sort of stretched out to rather secure loving, but in all of the parts, even the first and the second, there is some anger, some irritation, some fears of what may happen. And then the third part is total abandonment, but even there to see some of the opposite, cause of course there's the recollection of the old days. And then the fourth part, the lovers come back together again. And it all happens over again. That's the plot. But, I will just read a few sections from it. Some of them titles, sort of whole poems, and then other things where you'll just hear a lot of pause and you'll know it's a little fragment thing. I'll start with the poem called"Gold." Pale gold are the walls. Gold are the centers of daisies, yellow roses pressing from a clear bowl. All day, we lay on the bed, my hands stroking the deep gold of your thighs and your back. We slept and woke entering the golden room together, lay down in it breathing quickly, then slowly again. Caressing and dozing. Your hands, sleepily touching my hair now. We made in those days tiny identical room inside our bodies, which the men who uncover our graves will find in a thousand years, shining and whole.

Maggie Smith:

This next poem is"Stone Soup" by Lynn Emanuel, recorded on Wednesday, February 10th, 1993. I came across Lynn Emanuel's work in 2000 or 2001 when I was in graduate school. I wonder if maybe Kathy Fagan turned me onto her work. It would make sense. At any rate, I have a copy of two books in one, The Dig, a National Poetry Series winner, and Hotel Fiesta. My copy is marked up, underlined, bracketed, and yes, dogeared. What attracted me to her work then and what I still admire about it now, you'll be able to hear in her reading, the perfection of the word choices for both specificity and sound. And her metaphors, which are undeniably original and also packed with assonance and consonance, the sounds so intricately layered. For example, her description of a gas burner,"the blue root, the little tiara of yellow fire." Metaphor was what I returned to these poems again and again to learn. I think poems are a poet's best teachers. It's worth noting that this recorded version of"Stone Soup" from 1993 varies slightly from the print version in my book, which begins simply,"She wants to get born." Enjoy.

Lynn Emanuel:

"Stone Soup." But first she has to get born. So she invents a mother to hold the long wooden wand of a cooking spoon fast in her fist. She invents the big black zero of the iron pot, the stone of the pig's knuckle, the buzz of the fridge, the tap scalding the soap into suds, the tureen dunked again and again. She invents the tintinnabulation of the milkman's bottles in their wire basket and the sigh of the clutch as he disappears and the match that touches the gas burner, the blue root, the little tiara of yellow fire. Beyond the window it is nearly dark. A sudsy ocean is coughing up a beach as hard and gray as poured concrete. She has set herself this task like a train lugging its hard body toward Portland. So she now must make a father's coat come home from the day shift, its pockets drooping like the jowls of a hound and his long black shoes with their dew of glitter under the fluorescent light of the breakfast nook, his mustache like a school janitor's broom. She begins as talk of labor and of wages. His big hand turning over the leaves of the light and water bills, like a boring book. And it will not be long now until she will make them make her, from nothing, from a stone, from a pot.

Maggie Smith:

This next poem is"Tether" by Jenny Boully, recorded on Thursday, October 24th, 2013. I recently read a book of Jenny Boully's essays, Betwixt and Between: Essays on the Writing Life. And I was floored by the writing and by her thinking. If a poem is a conversation we have with our own minds, I'm particularly interested in reading poems by writers whose minds fascinate me, and hers is one of them. She describes this poem"Tether" as a flash piece, a prose poem or essayistic poem, less than 750 words. And I think it sounds like a prose poem, more conversational perhaps than verse. What strikes me listening to it more than reading it on the page are the rhythm and the momentum of the piece. The number of"ands," that piling up of narrative in long sentences. This is a poem that grapples with motherhood and with want. What we want to do for our children. What they want that we cannot give them. The moon, for example. Even if the child says,"mommy, let me have it." The other poems I chose were old favorites of mine, but I encountered"Tether" for the first time in this archive. It's interesting to me to see how the pleasures of this poem and the things I admire most about it are the same things I've been most drawn to all along, the poem's metaphor and its music.

Jenny Boully:

So I'll end with one really short flash piece, prose poem, or essayistic poem. It's less than 750 words. That was the constraint. It's called"Tether." I didn't realize until later, after the lights were out and the sheets were tucked around her, that my daughter asked that I hold on, that I hold on tight to the balloons. That what she really wanted was for the party to not end. And she thought that if we held onto the balloons that the party would not end and she needed my help in this one sure party saving act. And that is why she had what we call a meltdown. Her mother failed to help her in this one act that was sure to keep us at the party forever. She had asked me previous to the balloon time stopping attempt to give her the moon. Can't reach it, she said. I too could not reach it, knew I could not reach it, but showed her that I was trying, that I would, if I could. And she has said the sentence as clear as a bell tonight, Mommy, let me have it. And it was stunning, the message, the sentence, the want, the clarity of that. We have given her the balloon at the top of the balloon tower. It is a giant shimmering silver star balloon that, after we had dismounted, it was discovered to be full of the buoyant helium. Hold it tight, I tell her, so that it doesn't fly away, so that it doesn't go up and stay with the other stars that are too far away. I try to placate her so that she will not cry the whole ride. Someday, Mommy will get you the moon. I realize now that that is what I do when I hold her at night. I am trying to keep us here. I'm trying to keep her from floating away and staying where I cannot reach her, and between the darkness and the bad dreams, it is solely the hold that makes her trust the deep drowning of sleep. Thank you guys for listening to all that.

Maggie Smith:

Finally, I'm happy to share one of my own poems with you. This is a cento, a poem made up of lines from other poems. So it's a collage of sorts. This one is made up of lines from other Ohio poets. It's called"Ohio Cento." Today, summer is slang a psalmist might've written. I cup in my hands an idea of an idea, bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace. I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air, the incredible bigness of, you know, all that sky, wealthy with rustling leaves all over Ohio, gathering a reflection, of what? Listen, you hear that bird? Cardinal, calling his wife for something to happen. Nothing happens. Life is funny, but not. The worst things are all true. I have been the girl, a bird almost of almost bird alarms. And then again and again, and then was gone.

Julie Swarstad Johnson:

Thank you so much, Maggie. And thank you out there for listening. In two weeks, you can look forward to the last episode of season one, hosted by TC Tolbert. Find us on your favorite podcast app or by visiting the Poetry Center's website. Poetry Centered is a project of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, home to a world class library collection of more than 80,000 items related to contemporary poetry in English and English translation. Located on the campus of the University of Arizona in Tucson, the Poetry Center library and buildings are housed on the indigenous homelands of the Tohono O'odham people. Poetry Centered is supported by the work of

Diana Marie Delgado:

Diana Marie Delgado

Tyler Meier:

Tyler Meier

Julie Swarstad Johnson:

And I'm your producer, Julie Swarstad Johnson. Explore Voca, the Poetry Center's audiovisual archive online at voca.arizona.edu.

Introduction
Donald Hall's "Gold"
Lynn Emanuel's "Stone Soup"
Jenny Boully's "Tether"
Maggie Smith reads "Ohio Cento"