SMITH, Ken(neth John) 1938-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born December 4, 1938, in Rudston, Yorkshire, England; died June 27, 2003, in London, England. Educator and author. Smith was a prominent British poet whose verses about the environment, human relationships, and the conflicts of rural versus urban and subjective versus objective also gained wide popularity in the United States. He served in the Royal Air Force before attending Leeds University for three years. Though he left the university in 1963 without a degree, he got a job as editor of the Stand. At the same time, he taught elementary school in Dewsbury for a year and at a technical college in Batley for another year. From 1965 to 1969 Smith was a tutor at the Exeter College of Art, and then decided to move to the United States, where he taught creative writing at Slippery Rock State College until 1972 and was a visiting poet at Clark University the following year. Smith's main motivation for teaching was to support his family financially, but his heart was in poetry. He released his first collection, Eleven Poems, in 1964, and his 1967 collection, The Pity, received positive reviews. Though he returned to England in 1973, Smith had become better known in America than in his native country, where he drifted into obscurity. However, he continued to write steadily through the 1970s and 1980s, completing such verse works as Work, Distances (1972), Henry the Navigator (1976), and Fox Running (1981), the last of which is considered among his most important collections. By the 1980s Smith had become a well-established poet and was cited as an inspiration by British poets of the so-called "New Generation." He was also notable for becoming the first poet-inresidence at a prison, H. M. Wormwood Scrubs Prison, where he taught inmates to improve their skills in writing and appreciate poetry. The influence of this experience can be seen in his books Wormwood (1987) and Inside Time (1989). Smith's last collections include Wild Root (1998) and Wire through the Heart (2000). He was also the author of a book of short stories titled A Book of Chinese Whispers (1987).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Poets, seventh edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 2001.

PERIODICALS

Independent (London, England), July 2, 2003, p. 14.

Times (London, England), July 2, 2003.