Published by The Puddin’head Press
Perfect Bound, 62 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches, 2007
ISBN# 978-0-9724339-6-9
$15.00
Praise for Where Images Become Imbued With Time
Jared Smith’s voice and hypnotic technique creates a vivid world in which images and ideas appear as easily as in a dream. His poems have a sense of urgency and purpose. We face the modern world, from nanotechnology to the darkness between trees, with an intelligent, observant and visionary guide. He seems to name every nameable thing with an unnameable energy that helps define who we are in our world. This is what poetry is about! His poems are imaginative, passionate, personal, and expansive. This collection echoes and stands up to its title. WHERE IMAGES BECOME IMBUED WITH TIME is truly an important work of art. – Michael Spring – poet, author of Blue Crow and Mudsong.
Jared Smith is an excellent poet; who has learned to live and believe with conviction that the entire world belongs in and of poetry, not just pieces and bits like nature poetry, dramatic stories or the demands of friendship and love. His new collection WHERE IMAGES BECOME IMBUED WITH TIME is a moving example of how poetry can bring them all together in a synthesis of trees, crops, the universe, airplanes, gears, history and industry, sea birds and land animals, rusted iron and surgical knives. Since this is a rare synthesis, except for Whitman’s and Crane’s attempts, it deserves a careful reading by those who have a serious interest in the poetic art. Witness this splendid line — “A dust mote upon a string played obbligato between galaxies”. – Andrew Glaze – poet, Pulitzer Prize Nominee for Damned Ugly Children
Praise for Jared Smith’s work
Jared Smith’s work deals with the Here and Now, yes, but is so involved with All-Time/All-Culture that, if you don’t keep totally focused, at times you’re liable to step over the connections. Smith is a kind of Cro-Magnon-Neanderthal-Indus Valley-Mesopotamian-Tiawanaku Combo-Man watching the late news, buzzarding over the contemporary world and seeing its miserable negativity… but ultimately always referring back to the basic sanity of the universe around us. Sane Nature verses Idiot-Man. There is a tremendous Keatsian-Witmanesque visionary sweep here, moving over the earth’s surface, always concentrating on light, the Here and Now, but always in cosmic context. Smith’s work, carefully read and meditated on, is a course in cosmic-personal sanity. – Hugh Fox
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. – Joseph Bruchac – poet, novelist, editor, Greenfield Review Press
He is a master of interplay between sensuous detail and the universal, illuminating the facts of our electric civilization and evoking the earth from which it rose. Esthetically, discerning readers will see his spiritual kinship to C.K Williams and compare his work favorably. – 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.” – Walter James Miller – poet and verse dramatist, Author of Love’s Mainland and Joseph in the Pit
There’s a lovely muscularity pervading Jared Smith’s work that’s reminiscent of the more obvious long-lined poets’ efforts, Whitman’s and C.K. Williams’, for example. But Smith’s poetry is unique in that he seems, unlike these other two writers, not to think in terms of an “overflowing line” but to peer, consistently, beyond it. What this means is that while Whitman’s long lines are incantatory and Williams’ are loquacious in a relaxed, double-hexameter sort of way, Smith’s work, much like an Action Painter’s, serves the ambition of the gesture and thus, of necessity, stretches beyond the canvas. – Terri Brown-Davidson – reviewer
For Smith, there is a kind of pathos in human attempts to replicate the unfathomable beauty of a mountain or a star-filled sky a pathos which is worthy of regret, even mocking, but never rage, scorn, or absolute despair. Though his tone could not be called gentle, it is sympathetic to the human condition and the futility, frustration, sorrow, and bewilderment that accompany it. This sympathy elevates his poetry to the levels of the masters who have influenced him. – JoSelle Vanderhooft from The Pedestal
Other Books by Jared Smith: Poetry: Song of the Blood: An Epic, Dark Wing, Keeping the Outlaw Alive, Walking the Perimeters of the Plate Glass Window Factory, Lake Michigan And Other Poems
Technology: Introducing Personal Computer Use in the Gas Industry (Bukacek. Smith, eds.), Integrating Microelectronics Into Gas Distribution (Rush, Huebler, Smith, eds.), Gas, Oil, and Coal Biotechnology (Akin, Smith, eds.)
About the Author
Jared Smith’s poetry, essays, and literary commentary have appeared hundreds of times in literary magazines and e-zines in this country and abroad over the past 30 years. His six books of poetry include: Where Images Become Imbues With Time (Puddin’head Press, Chicago, 2007); Lake Michigan And Other Poems (Puddin’head Press, Chicago, 2005); Walking The Perimeters Of The Plate Glass Window Factory (Birch Brook Press, NY, 2001); Keeping The Outlaw Alive (Erie Street Press, Chicago, 1988); Dark Wing (Charred Norton Publishing, NY, 1984); and Song Of The Blood: An Epic (The Smith Press, NY, 1983). His CD Seven Minutes Before The Bombs Drop (2006), is available from ArtVilla Records and can be downloaded via any digital download service or through The Puddin’head Press. His work has been adapted to stage at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and in the Chicago suburbs.
Jared has served as a screener, board member, and advisory board member of The New York Quarterly; coordinator for readings at several venues in New York’s Greenwich Village during the 60s and 70s; poetry editor of Trail & Timberline; guest poetry editor of The Pedestal, and president of Chicago’s Poets & Patrons. He is a member of The Academy of American Poets, Chicago Poets’Club, and Illinois State Poetry Society.
He is a former associate director of one of the country’s largest private technical research laboratories, and has served in an advisory capacity to several White House Commissions under President Clinton, as well as being named a Special Appointee to Argonne National Laboratory. He has written and edited a number of technical papers and books in those capacities.
Contents
The Word That Had Many Voices
Storm King Mountain
Father,
The Alchemist’s Stone
If Beggar Boys Were Shamans
A Mountain in a Suitcase
Symmetries
A Matter of Degrees
Twenty Years of Empty Spaces
Unforgiving
At Christmas Just Before Midnight
In Age
Translucence
Dead People
Being Born of Bone
Fossil
Full Moon Above Main Street
Ka-Ching!
Stroke
Leaves and Spit
Ramses Visits the Cradle of Democracy
Masks and Carved Animals
Wallpaper Memories
Rivers in the Ocean
An Arborist’s Taxonomy
The Intensity of Light
The Hand-Off
Proud Ilium
Nationbuilding
The Gates Are Set To Close
Little Cowboy Geniuses
Fine Bone China
The Little Things
Not Time
With No Return Addresses
Helios
What Light?
Nanotechnology Man
Roadhouse Restaurant and Grill
Where Colors End
Asking Forgiveness
Observing The Constellations in Grand Central
Along The Back Roads From Illinois to Pennsylvania
After Sundown at Rye Beach
Where the Farthest Galaxies Roar Into Nothingness
Best Not to Know a Town Too Well
Excerpt
Storm King Mountain
Chewing on a stalk of jimson weed,
looking down from Storm King Mountain
where the river flowed its columns of autumn colors,
Pete and I would toss small bits of granite like paperweights
out over the trees and listen to see if we could hear them coming back.
Once in awhile we did hear a distant clink
like the meshings of a gear coming into place;
a squirrel’s bright eye would leap from our fingers,
a barge of rusting iron would swirl about and pause on the river below.
It would be a dingy red square upon a blue ribbon
far removed from the sun igniting our valley.
Something dark is coming this way, he said.
I nodded, but what is a man to do.
There was a military academy below us.
There was Vietnam. There were heart attacks.
There were clocks with metal tongues counting our days.
There were gray faced women with gay lit bows
wrought in foreign shops by lives long locked away.
And the sun was beating down upon us,
so that we shed our shirts and began to burn;
Would it be so bad, we thought,
if something dark were coming this way,
when we could see it all so very well.
We have the time to plan;
We have a vista spread about us.
We can feel the roots of the earth taking hold.
We looked to the sunsets and waves of grain to our west;
even there along the marsh drawn margins of the river
where mallards and mergansers nest and long legged egrets
stretch between two cosmologies to pull coins from the waters
while wild rice rises into evenings catching fire along its flaring tips.
Deer fill the dreams of our suburban alleyways,
always moving, shifting shadows at the edge of sight,
and wild maidens clasp them to their hearts, run bare-legged
into thickets of desire we cannot understand but will come to cope with.
Why would it be hard with all these flames of life
swaying with the waves of autumn and a rising sun:
if something dark were to come this way, it would be filled with light.
In time, a shirt turns into a thousand pounds of metal at 80 miles per hour.
It turns into thirty tons of metal at 100 miles per hour.
It turns into a factory of crushed stone where life sweats into the cellar seeps.
It turns into a lair built of fallen trees, wrought iron, and electric needles.
It becomes a game of rock-paper-scissors
where somehow the paper shears off mountainsides and cuts metal.
Shadows come crashing through our windowpanes
to take small pills at night from bedside tables;
And, yes, an older man needs to sleep sometimes while the world keeps up.
And, yes, I can sleep, and can still keep it up as well as any man:
even when something dark is coming toward us I am eager to pump light into it.
There is nothing gentle in a big black box barreling down a concrete river,
though its heart and soul and every shadow within its bulk is filled
with grains of the earth that could feed an endless multitude.
Not with the sun’s rays igniting all it touches at 100 miles per hour
contained within the dark.
The Gates Are Set To Close
Across the green green grass of home, iron-barred
gates are drawing down in the name of Liberty;
I take these items from the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times
in the week of May 15th, 2005 in the year of our days:
more than 80 highway gates are initially to be installed
to lock Chicago residents inside the city in an emergency;
automated they will clank down to the tintype tune of homeland security
keeping inside what is bad and inside what is good in a suddenly frozen tableau;
and in Manhattan in turn tunnels and bridges will close
while police place little trinket locks on Washington Square Park at night
where the Times says “dissenters” tend to gather after dark,
and I used to sit long hours into the midnight music of folk guitar.
There are plans in place.
There are scenarios, and either way we go, you lose,
whether caged in bars or blown across the landscape.
I have no answer;
I do not know what cars come down our roads,
nor whose fingers turn what keys or send what impulse.
In this perfect storm we are covered with the ash of autumn
from four years and three thousand lives ago.
It is getting hard to breathe, America.
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