![]() ![]() ![]() One of them was Edward Field, whose book, Stand Up, Friend, with Me, surprised me for its frankness and the directness of language it employed. In terms of what I was trying to say, the poems themselves were probably not terribly interesting-maybe I was imitating the few twentieth-century poets whose work had, haphazardly, crossed my path. And in high school, I remember enjoying the process of composing poems on an early Macintosh computer, playing with the layout and trying to imagine what different kinds of effects the words could have from differently imagined placement. Smith: Growing up, I loved the feelings I would get from reading poems in and outside of school. Smith answered many of the questions in the air.Įlizabeth Alexander: First, I think readers will appreciate a short narrative of your growing up, and your path to becoming a poet. We conducted this interview by e-mail across the cyberwaves between New Haven, Connecticut, and India. Smith’s music is wholly her own, and Duende is a dolorous, beautiful book. I want to last.” If Duende were wine it would certainly be red if edible it would be meat cooked rare, coffee taken black, stinky cheese, bittersweet chocolate. This dark force is nonetheless a life force, which, in the poem “Flores Woman,” concludes, “Like a dark star. Rather, in the strange music of these poems, I think Smith is trying to walk us close to the edge of death-in-life, the force of hovering death in both the personal and social realms, admitting its inevitability and sometimes-proximity, and understanding its manifestations in quotidian acts. Smith is not interested in sadness, per se. Writers and musicians have explored the concept of duende, which might in English translate to a kind of existential blues. And they are pristinely beautiful without ever being precious. They are deeply satisfying and necessarily inconclusive. Her poems are mysterious but utterly lucid and write a history that is sub-rosa yet fully within her vision. Smith synthesizes the riches of many discursive and poetic traditions without regard to doctrine and with great technical rigor. ![]()
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