SMITH, Ken(neth John)

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Nationality: British. Born: Rudston, East Yorkshire, 4 December 1938. Education: Hull and Knaresborough grammar schools; University of Leeds, Yorkshire (assistant editor, Poetry and Audience),B.A. in English literature 1963. Military Service: Royal Air Force, 1958–60. Family: Married Ann Minnis in 1960 (dissolved 1978); two daughters and one son. Career: Teacher at an elementary school, Dewsbury, Yorkshire, 1963–64, and Batley Technical and Art College, Yorkshire, 1964–65; tutor, Exeter College of Art, Devon, 1965–69; instructor in creative writing, Slippery Rock State College, Pennsylvania, 1969–72; visiting poet, Clark University, and College of the Holy Cross, both in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1972–73; Yorkshire Arts Fellow, Leeds University, 1976–78; writer-in-residence, Kingston Polytechnic, Surrey, 1979–81, and Wormwood Scrubs Prison, London, 1985–87. Co-editor, Stand, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1963–69; editor, South West Review, Exeter, 1976–79; since the mid-1990s co-editor, Stone Soup, London. Awards: Gregory award, 1964; Arts Council bursary, 1975, 1978, award, 1988; Lannan Foundation award for poetry, 1997; Cholmondeley award, 1998. Address: 78 Friars Road, London E6 ILL, England.

Publications

Poetry

Eleven Poems. Leeds, Northern House, 1964.

The Pity. London, Cape, 1967.

Academic Board Poems. Harpford, Devon, Peeks Press, 1968.

A Selection of Poems. Gillingham, Kent, Arc, 1969.

Work, Distances. Chicago, Swallow Press, 1972.

The Wild Rose. Memphis, Stinktree, 1973.

Hawk Wolf. Knotting Bedfordshire, Sceptre Press, 1975.

Frontwards in a Backwards Movie. Todmorden, Lancashire, Arc, 1975.

Wasichi. London, Aloes, 1975.

Anus Mundi. Hardwick, Massachusetts, Four Zoas Press, 1976.

Island Called Henry the Navigator. Glen Ellyn, Illinois, Cat's Pajamas Press, 1976.

Blue's Rocket. Privately printed, 1976.

Tristan Crazy. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1978.

Tales of the Hunter. Boston, Night House, 1979.

Fox Running. London, Rolling Moss, 1980.

The Joined-Up Writing. Croydon, Surrey, X Press, 1980.

What I'm Doing Now (and for the Rose Lady) (30/4/80). London, Oasis, 1980.

Burned Books. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1981.

The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962–1980. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1982.

Abel Baker Charlie Delta Epic. Sonnets. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1982.

The Quick Brown Fox. Leamington, Other Branch Readings, 1984.

Terra. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1986.

Wormwood. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1987.

The heart, the border. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1990.

Tender to the Queen of Spain. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1993.

Wild Root. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1998.

Wire through the Heart. Budapest, Ister, 2000.

Short Stories

A Book of Chinese Whispers. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1987.

Other

Inside Time, with Dave Wait. London, Harrap, 1989.

Berlin; Coming in from the Cold. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1990

Editor, with Judi Benson, Klaonica: Poems for Bosnia. London, Bloodaxe, 1993.

Editor, with Matthew Sweeney, Beyond Bedlam. London, Anvil, 1997.

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Critical Study: "Salvaged from the Ruins: Ken Smith's Constellations" by Stan Smith, in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s:Politics and Art, edited by Gary Day and Brian Docherty, London, Macmillan, and New York, St. Martin's Press, 1997.

Ken Smith comments:

Over the years my work has developed in response to the different environments in which I have arrived as much as to travel and the spaces between; mine are portable roots, some in Yorkshire, some in America, some in Devon, some now in London. Exeter, the city I most lived in, provided me with the figure of The Wanderer from the Anglo-Saxon Exeter Book; I have identified as much with him and his homelessness as with the irony of his poem having had in the cathedral library a home for the past nine hundred years. Writing is for me the act of discovering roots and pasts behind the present I find myself in as if by some marvelous accident. I am located in the work I do and in the daily rediscovery of language, the magic liquid that connects me to all else. I live in that as much as anywhere. Devon also made available to me the ancient silences of Dartmoor, that marvelous museum of all that has happened to us, a museum I do not encourage anyone to visit. By Kestor, above Chagford, among the stony leavings of the iron makers, is where I go whenever I have a decision to make, and there I feel the strongest root into the sullen past. On other days I am gregarious and have moved recently closer and closer to dramatic expression. Community, environment, and all the minutiae of gesture and inflexion—these are all my concerns still.

Themes: environment (hence nature), domestic, human relations and human attitudes, the rural in conflict with the urban, our subjective world implanted in an indifferent objectivity. Usual verse forms: free, intuitively worked, organic. General sources: any, many accidental and incidental, but environment and history, the sense of being alive, etc. Literary sources: many and scattered, too many to mention but mostly twentieth-century.

Among other things, I want to express the way we live and comment on it: the way we live in society, the way our environment is and we with it, how we form community—the minute ways in which the shapes of our lives are expressed in habits, gestures, buildings, our conscious and unconscious reactions to weather, landscape, each other—how we bind our lives down to the smallest detail distinguishing individual or community. So in this sense I am interested in custom and in speech and so in language and so in process. The poem itself is a process more than a product of this interest. I want a language that enacts and makes living, that is living rather than merely representative, a language metaphoric in itself.

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Ken Smith's first collection, The Pity, seemed to identify him as a nature poet, a category he has since resisted. The northern landscapes of his early poems have more to do with suffering than celebration and nothing whatever to do with magic or prettification. In "Family Group," for example, his father is seen "stumping / through pinewoods, hunched and small, feeling / the weather on him. Work angled him, / fingers were crooked with frost, stiffened." Throughout Smith's work figures move endlessly, haunted by an unmapped Eden that is glimpsed but never gained "in the north" of Smith's imagination.

These preoccupations led Smith away from English literary models into travels in America and the wealth of small press works gathered in The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962–1980. This selection reveals the development of an imagination that compels its poems to perform their subjects, subordinating detail to voice, aiming to reproduce rather than gloss experience. Smith's work of the late 1960s and the 1970s is often characterized by restrained vocabulary, refusal of abstraction, and extreme economy of metaphor. In place of pyrotechnics, his ear gives the plainest syllable its due, with discreet parallelism and subtle pacing: "It was a life bound / to the land, to silence / of another kind, it was / the other place" ("Another Part of His Childhood"). With Burned Books he adds a dimension of ellipsis to his resources. In the fragmentary narrative of a vanished state, as apparently told in part by the former President Perdu, seeming incoherence emerges as one of Smith's major subjects.

The pivotal work in Smith's career is Fox Running, a nightmare tour of London. Its hero, the eponymous Fox, pursues an aimless but unstoppable course along the subways, bus routes, and concealed byways of the city, haunted by loss, unable to break the circle of his desperation: "His single ticket to the city, a room / nights howling in the shower, / sleeping drunk inside the wardrobe, / dreamless, pissing in the sink." Switching between a narrative voice and the comments of Fox himself, the poem cuts a swathe through the city's subject matter—racism, violence, bureaucracy, imminent holocaust, the underlife's economy of drugs and whiskey, the offcuts of conversation. Its force derives from the energy and unsparing accuracy Smith brings to that most harrowing of derelictions, the stage when an original grievance is supplanted by the agonies of the present.

Terra again takes London, then under Margaret Thatcher, as its stage, incorporating the marriage of technology and state terrorism. After "Mister Mayhew's Visit," "the poor / are pushing to the windows like the fog," while "all the best words have moved to Surrey." "In Silvertown, Chasing the Dragon" speaks of a government "… known as sh, / they own the miles of wire, the acids / that devour forests and white words out, / and they are listening in the telephone …." Combining satire, anger, black humor, and whatliterature, though not experience, describes as surrealism, Smith emerges in the "London Sonnets" and the extraordinary manic aria of "Departure's Speech" as one of the few poets to have taken the measure of the 1980s. The decade seems to have stimulated a new suggestiveness and authority in his work, and this is sustained in his book Wormwood.

Wormwood, like his prose work Inside Time, is the product of Smith's period as writer-in-residence at H.M. Prison, Wormwood Scrubs. In a grim sense, prison has proved to be Smith's ideal subject. Even nonprison poems such as "Serbian Letter" and "The Rope" have a claustral atmosphere, while the "hulks" of Wormwood Scrubs enforce a community of solitaries, villains, madmen, losers, and unfortunates whose fury, grief, and longing have much in common with the dispossession and isolation that dog Smith's earlier work. Smith moves inward and downward, finding in jail a radical confirmation of life's crueler facts. The speaker in the prose section "Wormwood," for example, goes "down the steps in chains and down the stairs in cuffs, and backwards down the up escalator shackled to the jailer, and at last in a bodybag down the well under the cellar under the basement under the crypt under the undercroft and still some down to go." At times a blend of voices is created, so that the letter I asks to be assigned not to an individual but to a common longing:

That world you speak of, friend,
lives in another song in a tune
I can't recall, another tale
told at the road's turn where wind

moves among beeches. I know.
I was there. The wind told me.

This lyric extreme is not permitted to disguise the limits to sympathy or the need for self-preservation that underwrites solitude: "Some whose eyes I don't meet, / hands I don't shake." This frankness in turn lends value to the image of release into miraculous ordinariness: "I want rain, the lamefoot doves / crowding city monuments, the traffic / and the grainy flush of air in the tubes."

Smith stands apart from the common practices of postwar British poetry, belonging neither to the mainstream nor its experimental wings. His concern for poetry as a form of speech suggests a kinship with some American poets, but his enthusiasms in transatlantic poetry—Robert Bly, James Wright, John Haynes, and W.S. Merwin-are not those that might be expected. He looks back into elements of the English romantic tradition and beyond it to Chaucer and Anglo-Saxon. There is a constant and often satisfying negotiation between craft and impulse, between habits of puritan economy and the urge to compose the literally singing line; the result is the engraving of a voice that meanwhile continues to develop. At its best his work speaks from the commonwealth of experience across time and distance, often with the mysterious simplicity of ballads or the blues, sturdy, beautiful, and memorable.

—Sean O'Brien