Memories and Re-Imagined Myths:
An Interview with Maggie Smith
by Karin Cecile Davidson
Maggie Smith’s poems speak of the dangers and beauty, the tragedy and sadness, and the unforgiving joys of the world. Her poems recall the past with reflection and nostalgia, while looking through a fierce lens at the present and hoping wildly for a future, with nuance and precision and the kind of rhythmic breath that runs down a spine. And they call for attention, serious attention, to the proximity of perils, hopes, fears, dreams, desperation, lost girls, unclassified stars, motherhood, home, nature, and death. Shaping her collections to deliver warnings and reminders, memories and re-imagined myths and fairy tales, Smith constructs dwellings from her words, spaces originating in nature, in domestic life, and then shakes out their meanings so that we understand so much more than the words ever intended.
Award-winning author of three books of poetry—“Good Bones” (Tupelo Press, 2017), “The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison” (Tupelo Press, 2015), and “Lamp of the Body” (Red Hen Press, 2005)—and three prizewinning chapbooks, Smith has received international attention for her poem “Good Bones,” which has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Her poems are widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Tin House, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere.
Life, we’ve been warned, doesn’t taste like it should in stories.
—Maggie Smith, “Unclassified Stars”
KARIN CECILE DAVIDSON: In many of your poems—and here I’m thinking mostly of those in “The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison”—the language of myth, folktale, and fairy tale weave and drift and at times tangle. Gretel lives with her grandmother by the sea, and in this version, Hansel doesn’t exist. In the original version, the children’s version, in the forest “under the unclassified stars,” we don’t see the way Hansel gazes at his sister’s body. Wolves, red apples, twelve daughters, seven sons, a woodsman, well water, lanterns of skinned rabbits, mother’s milk, light, dark: these are the elements leading us from danger to danger.
Tell us, what leads you to the world of the fairy tale?
MAGGIE SMITH: The oldest poem in “The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison” is “Unclassified Stars,” which I wrote as an undergraduate. I was inspired by my favorite book as a child, which was a 1977 edition of “Dean’s A Book of Fairy Tales,” illustrated by Janet & Anne Grahame Johnstone. I don’t know what happened to that book, but someday I’ll buy myself another copy. The illustrations were phenomenal, and I remember Hansel and Gretel’s blond hair and one particular image of them sleeping beneath a large tree in the dark forest.
A few years later, when I was an MFA student, “Unclassified Stars” won the Fineline Prize at Mid-American Review, judged by Alberto Rios. At that time, I knew it didn’t belong in “Lamp of the Body,” my first book, but when I began writing the Apologues and the other fairy-tale inspired poems for “The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison,” I remembered this poem and pulled it in.
I revisited the Brothers Grimm when I was writing the poems for that book, and found so much magic there that I’d either forgotten about or had never encountered. After all, the versions of “Cinderella,” “The Little Mermaid,” and “Red Riding Hood” I’d known as a child weren’t the Grimms’ but Walt Disney’s. The original tales are brutal and strange and full of metaphor. They’re perfect seeds for poems.
DAVIDSON: Your collection, “Lamp of the Body,” introduces “The Poem Speaks to” series, in which Memory, Danger, Doubt, Nothing, Progress, and Desperation are deciphered and distilled. There is something more than personification happening in these pieces, something deeper and more defined.
Tell us about the inception of this series and any discoveries made in the drafting period up to the final versions.
SMITH: I wrote “The Poem Speaks to Danger” first; it was the first poem I was able to write after 9/11. I was in graduate school at the time, in the MFA program at The Ohio State University. I’m a writer who tends to work in spurts. I’ll have a couple of weeks of productivity—sometimes so many ideas that I’m irritated that I have responsibilities other than working on poems—and then I’ll have a period where my mind is quiet. I think of those quiet times as part of the writing process, too, though—it’s a time of letting ideas steep until they’re ready for the page.
But I digress: I wrote “The Poem Speaks to Danger” as a way of speaking on behalf of the poem—on behalf of poetry—in the face of terror and what felt like a completely new world. The poem insists on itself. Then, because I was in grad school with regular deadlines, I was always trying to give myself assignments so that even if I was in a quiet rather than a particularly productive period, I would have something to write about and turn in to workshop. So I thought I would try to do it again because it was a fun and challenging kind of poem to write, and I kept writing the poems until I felt I’d exhausted the project.
One thing I recall doing during the drafting stage with some of these poems was creating word banks for myself. “The Poem Speaks to Nothing” was built this way; I started with the concept of the personified character—Nothing—and made a list of words that I might use in the poem, words like blank, hollow, zero, and snow.
I am grass rusting.
In the lake, you are a fistaround a ponytail, the hum
of nearly stopped breathing.A plane wrinkling a sheet
of night air. The beliefthat everything ripe,
everything that will everripen, has been picked.
—Maggie Smith, “The Poem Speaks to Danger”
DAVIDSON: The poet C.D. Wright is referenced in an epigraph to “The Poem Speaks to Danger.” Her line, “Beautiful things fill every vacancy,” from “Deepstep Come Shining,” allows the reader to step into your poem with a sense of curiosity, if not trepidation. Reverence for Wright’s work echoes throughout “Lamp of the Body” in the way in which universal language is laid bare on the page—black dogs, smoke, memory, deep waters, love, moonlight, bones, witness, death, nightfall, nature wrecked and revisited.
In a 2013 interview with Paul Magee for American Poetry Review, Wright speaks of regard for another poet’s work when it becomes more: “Part of the gratification is overridden by wondering, ‘How did she do that? Is that something I can do and make my own?’ I read with covetous, vested interest, with a sense that I really would like to reach such exactitude on my own terms … I am interested in techniques, and strategies, artfulness put together out of somebody else’s consciousness—the practical effects that I have missed, whatever offers a little idea, a wee leap to attempt.”
There is much to be admired in Wright’s precise, honest way of defining this process. How do you work within this process, from inspiration to “exactitude on [your] own terms,” and what other writers and poets have called to you?
SMITH: C.D. Wright’s work has been so important to me over the years. Her death was such a huge loss for poetry, and I’m so glad that this February, Copper Canyon published a new book of hers, “Casting Deep Shade.” I read “Deepstep Coming Shining” as an MFA student, at a time when I was also reading Carole Maso, Meena Alexander, Lyn Hejinian—writers who thrilled me and showed me what was possible. To this day, I read primarily poetry and nonfiction, genres I work in, and I can’t read either without considering them craft models. I’m always looking to learn from a writer’s sentences. And if I’m ever feeling stuck, I go to my bookshelves. I go to writers who are beautiful sentence-makers: Maggie Nelson, Carl Phillips, Linda Gregerson, Ishion Hutchinson, Sarah Manguso, Deborah Digges, Natasha Trethewey, David Baker. Often what I need to haul me out of the mire is a beautiful sentence—the structure, the rhythm, the cadence. If I have syntax to start with, I’m off and running.
In the land where all is forgotten, where no one remembers anything,
birds cut off their beaks to share your sorrow, Little Torn Shoe.—Maggie Smith, “Apologue (I)”
DAVIDSON: The “Apologue” series in “The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison” returns to the world of the folktale. There are warnings for children and reminders for adults: “life does not taste as good as it should”; “many things we tell our children are kind but not true”; “you know better than to marry anything that could clamp its jaws on you.” And in the rarest moment, there is hope: “But it’s not too late. Even a fox with blood on its muzzle can wish on red clover and be a girl again.”
What winding path led you to the Apologues?
SMITH: Years ago I worked in publishing, and one of my responsibilities was reading galleys of books for children and young adults and writing catalog copy for each book. One of the books that came across my desk was “Tales Our Abuelitas Told: A Hispanic Folktale Collection” by Alma Flor Ada and F. Isabel Campoy. I was immediately taken in by the turn of phrase, the imagery, and the differences in plot, character, and narrative style as compared to the fairy tales I’d read as a child.
Inspired by those tales, I wrote the first “Apologue” poem . . . and then I wrote another, and another, and another. I had such fun experimenting in those poems; they are different from anything I’d written before and anything I’ve written since. I didn’t know it at the time, but those eight poems would later become the scaffolding for “The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison.” They led me to drill down deeper into other folktales and fairy tales as I wrote the poems that would become the book.
From the air
everyone you loved was scattered confetti.
The speck of one, the speck of another.—Maggie Smith, “Seven Disappointments (2)”
DAVIDSON: In “Seven Disappointments (2)” and “First Son,” to be born a girl is to disappoint. The perspective in the former is from below, “a boy’s. Swimming in the green-black lake,” and then above, “a bird’s. Preening your blue-black wings”; and in the latter, there is the mother’s madness, the father’s fault, the son’s discovery, and the twelve sisters flown into the wilderness, “wild, winged creatures,” no longer girls. As warnings, these poetic tales promise freedom to children who take flight.
What do you think of these messages in terms of children growing up in the world right now?
SMITH: Fairy tales have always been cautionary tales. In them children are eaten, changed into beasts, imprisoned. Mothers are always losing their children—to the woods, to wolves, to poisoned water and fruit. When I began writing the poems in “The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison,” I was not yet a mother. The children I wrote about were hypothetical. But in the middle of writing those poems, I had my daughter. By the time Tupelo Press published it, I also had a son. Suddenly the stakes were higher. The children in danger, the children I need to keep safe, were my own. My kindergartener already has lockdown drills at school. They lock the classroom door and hide in the corner of the room. They hide from “bad guys.” This is the world we live in. In my poems, and in my parenting, I try to strike a balance between acknowledging darkness and turning toward the light. Hope, after all, is imaginative: it’s about being able to envision a future that is better—safer—than the present.
The landscape sings in you like a dial tone,
Flat and constant: a trick of patience.
But your own voice rasps, alwaysOn the verge of breaking.
—Maggie Smith, “Ohio”
DAVIDSON: Maggie, your poem “Ohio” not only pays homage to William Matthews’ “A Happy Childhood,” but is also a testament to “memory … assembled,” the persona’s relationship with “this place that raised you as its own: blue as ink and almost as useful.”
Tell us about this relationship in terms of terrain, topographical and emotional.
SMITH: I am an Ohioan through and through. My children were born in the hospital where I was born and where my mother was born. I’ve lived here my whole life and feel attached not only to the people here, my family and friends, but also to the landscape. I wrote a poem recently called “Homebody” that touches on the idea of home:
How constant almost rhymes
with constraint. How with fewer
variables, I become one. I see
myself change against the backdrop.
Driving around my hometown
is a game of that used to be a
that used to be a
When you stay in one place, you watch the place change though the years. But staying in the same place also makes it easier for you to see changes in yourself—you’re a variable. I wonder sometimes if my preoccupation with memory in my poems—a theme since the very beginning—has something to do with staying in my hometown, where I am always steeping in the past in one way or another.
DAVIDSON: “Good Bones” is structured in terms of the calendar: fifty-two poems call up the fifty-two weeks in a year, set into groups of thirteen in four sections, these marking the four seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. There is a natural order inherent in the way birth and infanthood and a mother recalling how her own mother must have seen the same light of dawn, childhood with songs and “this soft hand-me-down of darkness” a mother gifts her daughter, young adulthood with survival and hunters and fashioned with illustrations and invincibility, and then the time of honesty and the fact that “life is short” and incredibly dear, and yes, the rain will continue to fall.
Thinking of “Good Bones” as an illustration, how do you decide on poetic form and the shape of a collection?
SMITH: As I’m writing the individual poems, I’m typically not thinking of them in the context of a book. I just welcome them one by one, thankful they showed up, and then I file them away in a folder on my desktop. Once I realize I have enough poems for a book-length manuscript, it’s time to see what I have. I print everything out and shuffle the poems in my hands, pulling out the poems that don’t excite me or don’t seem to fit with the others. Once I whittle the large stack down to the stack of likely keepers, I start to think about how the poems are in conversation with one another. I consider the sequence of the manuscript: Does it need sections? If so, which poems are the best choices to open the section, and which poems are closers? Both within sections and overall, I try to integrate thematic and imagistic strands, and I spend time looking at the openings and closings of the poems and considering what transitions would be the most natural and the most impactful.
The rain is a broken piano,
playing the same note over and over.My five-year-old child said that.
Already she knows loving the worldMeans loving the wobbles…
—Maggie Smith, “Rain, New Year’s Eve”
DAVIDSON: Many of the poems in “Good Bones” translate children’s language, lifting the words and phrases, turning them this way and that, and letting them fall. “Weep Up,” “Sky,” “You Could Never Take a Car to Greenland,” “Parachute,” “Future,” and “Rain, New Year’s Eve” extract these childish bits and bobs, whispers and stories, and places them just so, or slightly turned, until a new kind of wisdom is learned.
Talk to us about paying attention to children and how their words can inspire and teach.
SMITH: All of the poems you mention here include my daughter’s words. I think of her as the heart of this book—“Good Bones” wouldn’t exist without her curiosity, perceptiveness, and imagination. I joke that since my kids live rent-free, don’t pay utilities, eat constantly, and are always growing out of their clothes and shoes, the least they can do is toss me a metaphor or a line now and then. But truly, they are poets. All children are poets. And if we’re careful not to scrub the poetry out of them with all things sensible, if we value their ideas and encourage their questions, they’ll stay poets.
Once small enough
to fit inside the hawk’s fallen shadow,now she can almost outrun it, the dark
blade of a wingtip scissoring across her face.—Maggie Smith, “Marked”
DAVIDSON: The hawk-and-girl poems, scattered within the pages of “Good Bones,” are breathtaking and beautiful. In their entirety, they form a complete narrative of mother and daughter living in the wilderness, the father “gone over the mountain” for a year or more, a hawk keeping his eye on the girl. Perspectives alternate from the omniscient to the hawk’s, the father’s, the hunters’, eventually the boy’s, and over time the girl’s. In the final poem, “Mountain Child,” “she wears [the hawk’s] shadow on her shoulder, an epaulet. It bears the weight of allegory.”
If you would, speak of allegory in these poems, in your collections, and in the world of poetry.
SMITH: I started writing the sequence of hawk-and-girl poems at a residency at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. I met a visual artist there named Katherine Fahey who was working on an old-fashioned puppet show called a “crankie.” I went to her studio and saw this crankie that she made about a real midwife who lived in Vermont in the mid-1700s—her name was Elizabeth Whitmore. Her husband was a tinker and would leave because of his work, and so for a period of time Elizabeth and her 2-year-old daughter were alone on the mountain.
At VCCA I was inspired to write a poem about these characters—it was “Marked,” the first poem in the sequence. I imagined the character of a hawk that follows the daughter, literally shadowing her. When I came home from VCCA, I wrote another poem and another poem and another poem. These allegorical, third-person poems gave me enough emotional distance to write about some personal things that I wasn’t quite able to write about as myself yet. I wrote enough of these poems for a book, but I thought it was too monotonous. I ended up preferring them in conversation with more contemporary, first-person poems.
Allegory and metaphor are close cousins. Sisters, maybe. Allegory is the center of gravity for these hawk-and-girl poems and also for the fairy-tale-inspired poems in “The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison.” I think that the allegories and metaphors we use reveal something about our worldview—in my case, I think it’s pretty clear that I’m equal parts realist (skeptic?) and mystic.
DAVIDSON: And finally, your recent publications in Tin House, Narrative, and beyond call up color and sound, forest and suburb, dreams and the shape-shifting past.
Including these poems—“Joke,” “If I Could Set This to Music,” “This Sort of Thing Happens All the Time”—is there anything you are working on now that is leading toward another collection, another series-within-a-collection?
SMITH: I’m not working on any particular series or sequence of poems right now, but I do see some common threads running through the poems I’ve written in the past year. Many of the new poems are concerned with unraveling—of a country and a marriage—and the resulting loss of faith in government, in truth, and even in the self. One of the things I find myself returning to in these poems is the power of language, the alchemy made possible by words. So yes, I am working on a fourth book, one poem at a time.
Karin Cecile Davidson, Interviews Editor