The poems in this selection range from 1983 to 2008 and are drawn from seven collections with one previously unpublished poem. The book includes the long poems which comprise two long out of print volumes, The Song of the Blood and Dark Wing. This book will be available in 2010.
Jared Smith is the author of seven critically-acclaimed volumes of poetry, two CDs, and two stage adaptations of his poetry into multimedia presentations, in addition to hundreds of publications in domestic and international literary journals. His previous volumes include The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations (Higganum Hill Books, 2008), Where Images Become Imbued With Time (Puddin’head Press, 2007), and Lake Michigan and Other Poems (Puddin’head Press, 2005. Having earned his degrees in American Literature from New York University, Jared served on the editorial and business boards of several national literary journals including The New York Quarterly, Home Planet News, and The Pedestal, as well as coordinating reading series at several New York and Chicago venues. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, Colorado State Poetry Society, Colorado Poets Center, and Illinois State Poetry Society, as well as being past president of Poets & Patrons and Poetry Editor of Trail & Timberline. Jared spent 25 years as an educator, researcher, and administrator in the energy industry, culminating in advisory work for several White House Commissions under the Clinton Administration, and the position of Special Appointee to Argonne National Laboratory before returning to fulltime literary activities in 2001. For more information please visit http://www.jaredsmith.info/.
Over the course of a long and notable career, Jared Smith has continually made his poetic sense surer and has developed his technique to the level of clear mastery. Looking Into The Machinery demonstrates how his poetic vision, always expansive, has been refined over the course of seven collections. The vision of these poems is comparable to that of other American poets--Whitman and Jeffers come to mind. These poems also display how Smith has made his own techniques that reflect the work of Pound, Eliot, and Neruda. Perhaps most startling is Smith's ability to make such longer poems sing.
Wow, let me say, for these long poems carry the reader, seemingly without effort, through world after world. For more than twenty years, Smith has been writing long poems that constitute adventures through time and space and language. With a wide-ranging and accommodating style, from story to song to meditation to cosmic vision, his energetic poetic spirit brings everything it touches to vivid and memorable life. —Robert King, Old Man Laughing
Jared Smith is Poet All-Reality, mountains, rivers, cities, history, his own personal life, nothing is left out of his work. It’s like reading travel bulletins, history, The Confessions of St. Augustine, you name it. And always with a sense of transience, things falling apart, down, being replaced by a Present Tense of reality that itself instantly begins to weather down into nothingness. No other poet on the scene today has such a vibrant, prophetic sense of magnificently capturing the overview of All-Time, All-Place and turning it into personal visions. —Hugh Fox, Defiance and Home of the Gods
LOOKING INTO
THE MACHINERY
Look into
the machinery, I said, the metal
gears, covered in grease with their
teeth eating at each other. Look into
the spaces between them, with the
noxious fumes, the urine, the unwashed
flesh and sex, look into
the dark pressed sediment rolling
through space and time, the spider’s
leg poised. Look into the
sweat, there is nothing deus ex machina about this unless it is in the gears
turning where men work together in
tunnels beneath the moon with
electric headlamps, hammering at the rock
walls that enclose them.
Had to grow
everything you could. When we
first came through, who woulda’ traded
anything you grew for metal made in some
small town back east, or ribbons, bows, glass?
Who woulda’? Because you had to grow. Not now, but
even if you planted seed it took all
you had to harvest it yourself and sometimes
you had to shoot something small for meat. Deer and
buffalo stayed well away because we shot them
just for eating the grasses and the seed
before it grew into anything useful. Of course
the metal helped at last in the shape of blades to
haul along behind us or the horses. Still, it
was hard to harvest out the food until the
machinery came in from back east and we were
wondering what made a city grow like that,
why didn’t we manage that here. Takes a lot
of folk I guess with time on their hands.
The
machinery has life and the life machinery
ticking in the back-lots odd lots
subplots of society, steeling itself
against the stropping of flesh. Look into
the darkness and there are eyes and mouths
and muscles straining, giving up
light for each other’s dreams, lurching
drunkenly against each other, laughing and
dying in each others teeth.
We got the
ore down from The Morningstar right above
the cabin and milled it— more steel
there from back east somewhere-- after Rich
died in the cave-in, hit his head trying
to get out before the fuse went off. We carried him out and paid enough to
get his widow back out east. Lord knows
she still comes back to visit, but we got
the ore milled down in Marysville and bleached
it out with arsenic and mercury. Got a gold
watch from that I did, and gave it away to a
woman ‘cause I thought we had time. Trees grow
there now. And rocks, they grow. I guess she
pawned it in a shop or got it lost.
Passing
through, that’s what we’re doing now from one
red-roofed saltbox to another, rolling over the
paved over seed beds we used to lay-out in federally
platted catalogues of fertile land laid out about
the size a man might grow with his own and feed
himself and his family god knew why that’s what
we did each day, speaking only to ourselves
around the dinner table and then packing off. God knows
how we feed each other now, but its clearly in
the machine, down within its gears.
I remember
meeting Mary down by the gate one day maybe one
hundred years ago after the dust blew through and there
wasn’t anything growing then either, not any more, but I
handed her a piece of something golden warm that had
been across the country twice at least, and she looked at me
and then out across the dead landscape and she said
wasn’t it beautiful and we walked back to the old
Ford, kicked it over at last, and went on one more
time.
Jared Smith is the author of seven critically-acclaimed volumes of poetry, two CDs, and two stage adaptations of his poetry into multimedia presentations, in addition to hundreds of publications in domestic and international literary journals. His previous volumes include The Graves Grow Bigger Between Generations (Higganum Hill Books, 2008), Where Images Become Imbued With Time (Puddin’head Press, 2007), and Lake Michigan and Other Poems (Puddin’head Press, 2005. Having earned his degrees in American Literature from New York University, Jared served on the editorial and business boards of several national literary journals including The New York Quarterly, Home Planet News, and The Pedestal, as well as coordinating reading series at several New York and Chicago venues. He is a member of the Academy of American Poets, Colorado State Poetry Society, Colorado Poets Center, and Illinois State Poetry Society, as well as being past president of Poets & Patrons and Poetry Editor of Trail & Timberline. Jared spent 25 years as an educator, researcher, and administrator in the energy industry, culminating in advisory work for several White House Commissions under the Clinton Administration, and the position of Special Appointee to Argonne National Laboratory before returning to fulltime literary activities in 2001. For more information please visit 
Over the course of a long and notable career, Jared Smith has continually made his poetic sense surer and has developed his technique to the level of clear mastery. Looking Into The Machinery demonstrates how his poetic vision, always expansive, has been refined over the course of seven collections. The vision of these poems is comparable to that of other American poets--Whitman and Jeffers come to mind. These poems also display how Smith has made his own techniques that reflect the work of Pound, Eliot, and Neruda. Perhaps most startling is Smith's ability to make such longer poems sing.
