Interview with James M. Smith, Jr.

Next up after our interviews with Natalie Diaz and Jenny Factor is one with James M. Smith, Jr. His fabulous poem "The Boathouse" appeared in the spring 2010 issue of Prairie Schooner. What follows is some compelling insight and advice from James, who wears many hats—creative writer, professor and associate editor of Southern Poetry Review. Don't miss his suggestions to fellow creative writers! Talk back to James in the comments below.

In the spring 2010 issue of Prairie Schooner, in your poem “The Boathouse,” you create such vivid images of a bay, a boathouse, even a “poison-ivied path.” You then go further in the poem to richly describe several objects in list form—"dad’s bad back, / how my brother makes you cry, his heartbreaking / tenor voice, four long tables of food at the reunion.” As you write, how do you know that you have illustrated a scene or object well enough that your readers will see and understand it?

How do I know? Well, there is no textbook answer. Intuition? I trust that for a while. In early drafts, especially, I proceed by feeling my way through an experience. Sometimes I don’t know,   but I keep going. And then, later, I call on the critic I’ve become through years of reading and writing. I tend to trust his assessments.

Considering your question, I reviewed my folder of more than fifteen drafts for this poem, spanning many years. (It took a long time to be old enough to finish what I had started.)  The details that you mention show up in my second draft, but I had included several others, too.  I had to weed through some of them (including “a field of milkweed”).

 

But I find most interesting the puzzling out of line breaks that I see in those drafts. It took several tries before I realized that the reading adjustment that occurs with “contentious / cats” could deepen the poem later on with “his heartbreaking / tenor voice.” Those breaks set the reader up for trouble at home; then, they dispel it. The speaker’s trouble, however, is not so easily swatted away, and I suppose the final and shortest line, like a broken-off piece of the preceding long one, illustrates the speaker’s particular dilemma. It took years before I wrote the last two lines as they now stand.

 

Water is one of many characters in your poem “The Boathouse.” As a resident of Savannah, GA, you are no doubt very familiar with vast stretches of water. What do bodies of water represent to you in your poetry? Are there writers who have written about water in a way that you find particularly appealing and memorable?

 

Yes, but I know for certain that I was not “thinking” about water symbolism as I wrote the poem. However, it did originate with that image of a boat suspended in a boathouse over water, and that image came from childhood, a boathouse I remembered from Lake Lanier in Atlanta. On the other hand, the poem is not “set” in a particular place. That “bay” in the opening line could very well be in Maine.

 

The body of water in this poem might help to suggest the possibility of a life lived with intention. One lowers one’s boat and sets off.  Or, one doesn’t. For a long time, there was a ten-line stanza in the middle that dramatized this idea in a clumsy way, but after many drafts I finally saw my way clear to cut it.

 

Poets and water? That would take a lot of prowling around in my bookcases, but barring that, I can mention that Eliot’s fragmentary “Marina” meant a lot to me in my twenties, along with some of Roethke’s expansive late poems from The Far Field, especially “Meditation at Oyster River.” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Bight,” “The Moose,” “Sandpiper.” Richard Wilbur. Ted Hughes. May Swenson. David Wagoner. These occur to me now. I would need more time to rummage through the pre-moderns.

 

As associate editor of Southern Poetry Review, you review a never-ending influx of submitted creative work. If you could give one piece of advice to creative writers seeking publication of their work, what would you recommend?

 

Hang on to a new poem for over a year, at least. Live with it. Put it away. When the infatuation with it is over, try to cut it back. Some of my best writing advice is summed up in that word: “cut.” Look especially at the opening and the ending. Your first opening is often a false start; it got the poem in motion, but maybe it no longer initiates the direction the poem has taken.  With endings, poets tend to overwrite, to explain too much. See how much of the ending you can take away and still have a complete and compelling poem. Too, experiment with rearranging the whole thing. Before you send it out, test many times the integrity of its form, its every line, its every word, every mark of punctuation.

 

You recently served as editor of the book Don’t Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review, published in 2009. This project required you to sift through more than 2,000 poems, old and new. You obviously are familiar with a lot of wonderful poetry, but who is a writer you wish you had learned about earlier in your life?

 

Closer to 5,000, in fact. I read through fifty years of back issues in less than a year, and I felt more than a little disoriented for a long time with that many voices in my head.

 

During my two years on the book, I came to know more fully the work of many of the contributors. I was familiar with some poems by Carolyn Kizer before Don’t Leave Hungry, but I never had read her thoroughly. She is remarkable in her handling of forms, in her sensitivity to other traditions, in her nimbleness (her light touch in poems that are never lightweight), her wit. Cool, Calm, and Collected (Copper Canyon Press, 2001) is near at hand on my bookshelf and often on my bedside table.

 

Besides the time you put into Southern Poetry Review, you are also a professor of English at Armstrong Atlantic State University. When do you make (or find!) time to write?

 

I have to be ruthless with myself. Thank God teaching and editing are great pleasures, as well as hard, consuming work. And they are work. I read every poem submitted to Southern Poetry Review, make notes on those that are viable, correspond with the poets, keep their files, arrange each issue. I used to worry that analyzing literature with my students, and then thinking through the poems of others, would sap my ability to write. And in truth, sometimes that happens. But usually when I turn to my poems, when I’ve been ruthless enough to get everything else done, they have my full attention.