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.
Available to the trade through Ingram and Baker & Taylor (ISBN: 978-0-9796684-2-5)
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
Looking into the Machinery is a book of epic scope, breadth and importance. Spanning centuries, continents, galaxies, Jared Smith’s narratives address essential epistemological concerns while documenting their impact on the miniscule and the mundane. In the “Song of the Blood” poems the reader not only encounters worlds, but inhabits them—through interwoven generations and successive lifetimes. With a vision hopeful as it is insightfully dark, Jared Smith gives us an intimacy with the outlaw, the hero, the working man and woman. Their comradeship calls us to unite “without our savagery” and become unlawful unto justice. —Maureen Tolman Flannery, author of Destiny Whispers to the Beloved
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 INTOTHE MACHINERY
Look intothe machinery, I said, the metalgears, covered in grease with theirteeth eating at each other. Look intothe spaces between them, with thenoxious fumes, the urine, the unwashedflesh and sex, look intothe dark pressed sediment rollingthrough space and time, the spider’sleg poised. Look into thesweat, there is nothing deus ex machina about this unless it is in the gearsturning where men work together intunnels beneath the moon withelectric headlamps, hammering at the rockwalls that enclose them.
Had to groweverything you could. When wefirst came through, who woulda’ tradedanything you grew for metal made in somesmall town back east, or ribbons, bows, glass?Who woulda’? Because you had to grow. Not now, buteven if you planted seed it took allyou had to harvest it yourself and sometimesyou had to shoot something small for meat. Deer andbuffalo stayed well away because we shot themjust for eating the grasses and the seedbefore it grew into anything useful. Of coursethe metal helped at last in the shape of blades tohaul along behind us or the horses. Still, itwas hard to harvest out the food until themachinery came in from back east and we werewondering what made a city grow like that,why didn’t we manage that here. Takes a lotof folk I guess with time on their hands.
Themachinery has life and the life machineryticking in the back-lots odd lotssubplots of society, steeling itselfagainst the stropping of flesh. Look intothe darkness and there are eyes and mouthsand muscles straining, giving uplight for each other’s dreams, lurchingdrunkenly against each other, laughing anddying in each others teeth.
We got theore down from The Morningstar right abovethe cabin and milled it— more steelthere from back east somewhere-- after Richdied in the cave-in, hit his head tryingto get out before the fuse went off. We carried him out and paid enough toget his widow back out east. Lord knowsshe still comes back to visit, but we gotthe ore milled down in Marysville and bleachedit out with arsenic and mercury. Got a goldwatch from that I did, and gave it away to awoman ‘cause I thought we had time. Trees growthere now. And rocks, they grow. I guess shepawned it in a shop or got it lost.
Passingthrough, that’s what we’re doing now from onered-roofed saltbox to another, rolling over thepaved over seed beds we used to lay-out in federallyplatted catalogues of fertile land laid out aboutthe size a man might grow with his own and feedhimself and his family god knew why that’s whatwe did each day, speaking only to ourselvesaround the dinner table and then packing off. God knowshow we feed each other now, but its clearly inthe machine, down within its gears.
I remembermeeting Mary down by the gate one day maybe onehundred years ago after the dust blew through and therewasn’t anything growing then either, not any more, but Ihanded her a piece of something golden warm that hadbeen across the country twice at least, and she looked at meand then out across the dead landscape and she saidwasn’t it beautiful and we walked back to the oldFord, kicked it over at last, and went on one moretime.
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.
