Lake Michigan and Other Poems by Jared Smith

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Praise for Lake Michigan and Other Poems

There is a gentle kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith’s best work, an understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes you think of Thoreau along with a commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda. Whatever his subject matter, whether it is a man adrift in a liferaft or an epic vision of Lake Michigan, Smith’s poems are journeys worth taking. – Joseph Bruchac, poet, novelist, editor, Greenfield Review Press

The magnum opus of Jared Smith’s new collection is “Lake Michigan,” truly a major poem. Because of its reach and depth, he will inevitably be compared to Sandburg and Whitman, as his lake becomes the “sea of experience” encompassing Chicago and the other cities of its shores. He is a master of interplay between sensuous detail and the universal, illuminating the facts our electric civilization and evoking the earth from which it rose. Aesthetically, discerning readers will see his spiritual kinship to C.K Williams and compare his work favorably. These are bold poems of tempered experience, often as remarkable for their graceful sensitivity as their scope. – Harry Smith, poet, essayist, editor, The Smith Press

Again and again, Jared Smith takes us into a world that we feel is strange and impossible, only to make us see, suddenly, that this IS our life, our condition, and until now we have been shying away from reality. Years ago, on my author-interview show on NPR, I hailed Jared as “the most important new voice in American poetry since Walt Whitman.” The comparison is strengthened with Lake Michigan And Other Poems. Here is Whitman’s embrace of the vast complexity of American life, including updates in electronics and politics. Here is Whitman reincarnate making poetry out of our most casual, colloquial, idiomatic talk. But we must admit one significant difference. At his best, Jared Smith speaks with an intensity that Walt rarely reached and that only Seamus Heaney can match. – Walter James Miller
poet (Love’s Mainland) and verse dramatist (Joseph in the Pit)

Lake Michigan And Other Poems, opened, is a new territory…a vast heartland…I find myself reading in cycles, spiraling back through a passage – to catch what I’ve sensed at the edges of what I just passed through…I’m still in there reading edges, tracking vision. – Gene Fowler, poet, author of Fires

About Jared Smith

Jared Smith has a distinguished 25 year career of publication in poetry volumes and the nation’s leading literary journals, while serving as a leader in continuing education and policy formation in both the public and private sectors. This includes advising the Clinton Administration on national security policy, serving as Special Appointee to Argonne National Laboratory, serving as associate director of Education and Research at a major private laboratory outside Chicago, and spearheading various private/public sector partnerships between industry and various university and government agency groups.

He has written and published poetry extensively throughout this period, as well as supporting literary development by serving executive functions in various literary organizations. Jared’s poetry has appeared in Poet Lore, The Small Press Review, The New York Quarterly, Kenyon Review, Pulpsmith, Rhino, Spoon River Quarterly, Bitter Oleander, The Pedestal, Beloit Poetry Journal, Greenfield Review, Bitterroot, Coe Review, Fine Madness, Pembroke Magazine, CrossCountry, Trail & Timberline, and many, many others. His work has been adapted to modern dance at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and to musical drama at Crossroads Theatre in Naperville, Illinois. He has been interviewed and read his work on NPR radio programs. Jared is on the advisory board of The New York Quarterly, and Poetry Editor of Trail & Timberline Magazine, the official journal of the Colorado Mountain Club. He is also immediate past president of Poets & Patrons in Chicago, a member of The Chicago Poets’ Club and the Illinois State Poetry Society.

Lake Michigan and Other Poems is Jared Smith’s fifth book of poetry. Jared’s previous books have been critically well-received by such writers as the late William Packard, Walter James Miller, Andrew Glaze, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Harry Smith, Stanley Nelson, and others. These books include: Walking The Perimeters Of The Plate Glass Window Factory (2002, Birch Brook Press, NY); Keeping The Outlaw Alive (1988, Erie Street Press, Chicago); Dark Wing (1984, Charred Norton Publishing, NY) and Song Of The Blood: An Epic (1983, The Smith Press, NY)

Contents

Getting Ready To Move On
Passage From Home
Mood In Grays
Lake Michigan
Controlled By Ghosts
Seven Minutes Before The Bombs Drop
Finding Oneself In An American Fairytale
A Quantum Species
In Our Attraction To Electronic Media
Driving Small Town America
Evening Along The Outer Banks
An Erosion
Picking Up The Empty Packages
Erie
Eyes
Talking To My Son
Having Passed The Solstice
Imagination And The Man
It Is Time
Reflecting On The Visions
The Lessons Of Millennia
So Much Growing
Tossing Jobs Around Like Manhole Covers
Within The Islands Of Solitude
Witnessing the writer who tried to raise a family
When All Is Said
When It’s Time To Go
Trout Fishing Along The Alagash
A Space Between Time
Things To Remember
Of Moons
Returning Home
Coming Of Age
The Last Snow Fell
Hollowman
So, Here’s To The People
Brain Creature

Excerpt

Seven Minutes Before The Bombs Drop

…Everyone still has names.
Sand is gritting against my eyes when the wind blows,
scraping counterpoint to the dry coughs of my son beyond the wall.
There is no medicine that will help this, I think,
but music is playing on a radio down the street.
Everyone I know will be gathering there:
we will barter for what we need; trade scraggly chickens or dates for shoes;
trade shoes for drinking water before the sun gets high.
I will seek medicine among my friends.

Seven minutes before the bombs drop
we are sitting in the dim lights of a church reading poetry
talking with words meant for little animals we might keep tethered
or lock into our kitchens so they will not soil the rugs while we sleep.
Between the words, though, we are talking of other things,
are bartering whether we will wear chains about our necks
or will make it into old age in one piece ourselves;
and we are reflecting on the words of other solitary thinkers
who talked of war while drinking cognac in bomb shelters in the blitz.

Seven minutes before the bombs drop
we are crying, running, our bladders filled,
our muscles quickening as never before in Kansas,
and we thump our open hands down on throbbing metal fuselage.
We throw ourselves into cylinders that have only one direction to go.
The painted gray of the runway trembles, breaks loose, and falls away;
becomes the endlessly wide sere blankness of the sea…and then light
will begin beneath our wings. Sand into sand and dust into dust.
Testosterone may be a great thing, but it does not last without love.

I am going to go home when this evening ends
and sit with my wife and children around the dinner table;
we will light candles as a centerpiece, and we will drink wine.
I will turn the CD player on low and listen to the ancient songs;
the songs that are no longer written, and will cry.
Yes, I’m going to go there down the highway in my ’96 Lumina;
faster than I should, outside the law, but in my Lumina.
That’s okay; you can come too. You come too; there is no guilt
in holding onto each other in our despair through the miles;
there is no guilt unless we ever re-elect the darkness that envelopes us.
We are the light, if only by the choice of fate and mystery of words.

The Last Snow Fell

I have stayed out in the snow a long time.
The wind blew it round beneath the street lamps
until they were turned to plaques of marble in the trees.
It is easier to understand everything when I am not by your side;
I stayed beneath the big tree in the meadow across from your home,
as you turned the house lights off and passed from room to room.
I stayed as the roads grew invisible and silent and wide.
I stayed, remembering what we planned to do and see

when we were still talking to each other and had plans
to share our memories only with each other; it was a long time.
The snow fell, laying blankets over me, turning the ground cold.
My bones were cold, my eyes dark, my flesh stretched parchment.
You will never know I did not mean to leave you to grow old;
nor to leave us apart forever that evening when I went.

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