Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedA Word about Stevie Smith (1902-1971)

Is poetry what its profession and professors sayor does it bubble carelessly in its own way?

Is the nursery lilt a childish way to keep time?Simplicity simple-mindedness? Rhyme a crime?

I blush to like what it isn’t proper to,gummy balls and fart jokes – I like them too.

If you like writing you like thinking about how to do it. Only people who don’t really like writing will tell you, no ifs or buts, how it’s done. Strict grammarians are prelapsarians when it comes to the intoxicating complexity of actual utterance.

I love writing – I hope that’s evident – “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” (Frost) – I do it even without much to say – like humming in the shower. Composing is how I compose myself after a bruise. I love you because you let me write to you. When daughter Becca was small, she let me read her my poems because no one else in our house would have even if I’d asked, which I didn’t dare to. Smart as she is (and that’s very), she couldn’t possibly have understood my poems at age nine but thinking back thirty-some years, smiling, she insists otherwise. And maybe she’s right. For a poem is only secondarily the words on a page; it is the heave and swoon of its maker’s heart and of these affection, not argument, is judge.

Stevie Smith’s childlike (but never childish) verse spits in the eye of modernism not because it means to but because Smith was born a poet, she never decided to be one. She was a poet long before anyone told her how to write a poem and when they tried to teach her – I’m guessing they tried – her bad habits couldn’t be fixed, like a dog who’s never been housetrained. That nursery lilt with its rhymes and dum-de-dums suited her, so that’s what she made, which the profession and professors knew for sure was wrong. Orthodoxies aren’t truths but consensuses too concretized to crack. Smith didn’t defy the consensus, she ignored it, which was annoying. A reader could understand her poems without a professor’s help, the very idea!

A few brave name-brand talents read her poems not her reputation. Philip Larkin (“Miss Smith’s poems speak with the authority of sadness”). Sylvia Plath (“Stevie Smith’s poems are dry, sly, and surprisingly moving”). Dame Helen Gardner (Her poems combine “the simplicity of the nursery rhyme with the sophistication of the drawing room – and the terror of the dark”).

My Stevie Smith volume glitters with stars (asterisks). Poems I’ve enjoyed get one or two checks or one or two stars. Two-star poems are unicorns: a dozen in a lifetime is a bumper crop. Stevie Smith has only one so far. But she has a galaxy of single-stars and checks.

I’m still chuckling over this couplet, forbiddingly entitled “Beware the Man”:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedBeware the man whose mouth is smallFor he’ll give nothing and take all.

Then there’s this tender envoi to an intimacy, “Portrait (1)”:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedShe was not always so unkind I swearAnd keep this thought that’s all I have of herWho was upon a time my only thought and care.

Sweet memory, hid from the light of truthI’ll keep thee, for I would not have thy worthQuestioned in Court of Law nor answer for it on my oath.

But hid in my fond heart I’ll carry theeAnd to a fair false thought I’ll marry theeAnd when thy time is done I’ll bury thee.

We’re past our 600-word curfew but just track the effect here of the archaic “thee” and “thou.” And the tragic music of “carry, marry, bury.” Be still, my heart.