Rod Smith (born 1962) is an
American poet
The poets listed below were either born in the United States or else published much of their poetry while living in that country.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I–J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
*George Quasha (born 1942 in poetry, 1942)
R
...
,
editor
Editing is the process of selecting and preparing written, visual, audible, or cinematic material used by a person or an entity to convey a message or information. The editing process can involve correction, condensation, organization, a ...
and
publisher
Publishing is the activities of making information, literature, music, software, and other content, physical or digital, available to the public for sale or free of charge. Traditionally, the term publishing refers to the creation and distribu ...
.
Life
He was born in
Gallipolis, Ohio
Gallipolis ( ) is a village in Gallia County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. It is located in Southeast Ohio along the Ohio River about southeast of Chillicothe and northwest of Charleston, West Virginia. The population was 3,313 at ...
.
He grew up in Northern Virginia and moved to
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...
, in 1987. Smith has authored several collections of poetry, including ''
In Memory of My Theories,
Protective Immediacy,'' and ''
Music or Honesty''.
He has taught creative writing at
George Mason University
George Mason University (GMU) is a Public university, public research university in Fairfax County, Virginia, United States. Located in Northern Virginia near Washington, D.C., the university is named in honor of George Mason, a Founding Father ...
where he is finishing his MFA.
Smith currently teaches Cultural Studies at
Towson University
Towson University (TU or Towson) is a public university in Towson, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1866 as Maryland's first training school for teachers, Towson University is a part of the University System of Maryland. Since its foundin ...
, and was a visiting writer at the
Iowa Writers' Workshop
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 89 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2 ...
in the Spring of 2010.
Smith is co-editor of ''The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley,'' along with Kaplan Harris and Peter Baker (
University of California Press
The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by faculty ...
, 2014).
Publishing and the DC poetry community
In 1984, along with Wayne Kline, Rod Smith began the journal
Aerial Magazine, a poetry magazine devoted to
avant-garde
In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...
and experimental writing. Soon after, Smith began publishing books under the name EDGE Books. Smith published the first Edge Book in 1989.
After Rod Smith moved to
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly known as Washington or D.C., is the capital city and federal district of the United States. The city is on the Potomac River, across from Virginia, and shares land borders with ...
, in 1987, he became part of the DC poetry community which included the writers
Tina Darragh, Lynne Dreyer,
P. Inman, Doug Lang,
Joan Retallack, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and others. This group expanded over the years to include such writers as Leslie Bumstead, Jean Donnelly, Buck Downs, Cathy Eisenhower, Heather Fuller, Mark McMorris, Carol Mirakove, Maureen Thorson, Ryan Walker, Mel Nichols, Tom Orange, and Mark Wallace.
During the 1980s Smith began intense self-study in poetry and poetics, particularly
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound (30 October 1885 – 1 November 1972) was an List of poets from the United States, American poet and critic, a major figure in the early modernist poetry movement, and a Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Ita ...
,
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and ...
,
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. His '' Spring and All'' (1923) was written in the wake of T. S. Eliot's '' The Waste Land'' (1922). ...
,
John Ashbery
John Lawrence Ashbery (July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017) was an American poet and art critic.
Ashbery is considered the most influential American poet of his time. Oxford University literary critic John Bayley wrote that Ashbery "sounded, in ...
,
Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara (March 27, 1926 – July 25, 1966) was an American writer, poet, and art critic. A curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara became prominent in New York City's art world. O'Hara is regarded as a leading figure i ...
, and
George Oppen
George Oppen (April 24, 1908 – July 7, 1984) was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism and moved to Mexico in 1950 to avoid the attentions o ...
. He met
John Cage
John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and Extended technique, non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one ...
in Rockville, Maryland in 1987 and saw him regularly, playing chess (usually losing), in Washington and New York until Cage's death in 1992.
Smith’s own poetry is written, as
Lisa Jarnot writes, “With the sweeping vision of
Whitman, the noun-play of
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright, and art collector. Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), and raised in Oakland, California, Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and ...
, and the slant political commentary of the
New York School”.
Smith managed Bick's Books from 1989 to 1992 and since 1993 has managed Bridge Street Books in Washington. While at Bick's and as a founding curator with Buck Downs, Joe Ross, and Sylvana Straw of the DCAC "In Your Ear" series he organized readings for
Charles Bernstein, Cage, Kevin Davies,
Carolyn Forche,
Bob Perelman,
Tom Raworth,
Leslie Scalapino,
Diane Ward, and others.
Books
Poetry
* "Touché", (Wave Books, 2015)
* ''Deed'', (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2007)
*''Fear the Sky'', (
narrow house, 2005)
*''Music or Honesty'', (New York: Roof Books, 2003).
*''Poèmes de l'araignée'', (Bordeaux, France: Un bureau sur l'atlantique, 2003).
*''The Good House'' (New York: Spectacular Books, 2001)
*''The New Mannerist Tricycle'' - with Lisa Jarnot & Bill Luoma (Philadelphia: Beautiful Swimmer, 2000)
*''Protective Immediacy'' (New York: Roof, 1999)
*''The Lack'' (love poems, targets, flags...) (Elmwood, CT.: Abacus, 1997).
*''In Memory of My Theories'' (Oakland: O Books, 1996)
*''A Grammar Manikan'', Object 5: featuring Rod Smith, (New York, NY: Object, 1995).
*''The Boy Poems'', (Washington, DC: Buck Downs Books, 1994).
in Anthologies
* "A Tract," in "Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s", ed Mark Wallace and Steven Marks, (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002).
* Four poems from ''In Memory of My Theories'' and ''Protective Immediacy'', in ''Antologija novije americke poezije'', ed. Dubravka Djuric et al. (Serbia: Oktoih, 2001).
* "Ted's Head," in ''100 Days'', ed. Andrea Brady and Keston Sutherland, (Cambridge, UK: Barque Press, 2001).
*“4 poems from In Memory of My Theories,” in ''New (American) Poetry'', ed. Lisa Jarnot, Leonard Schwartz, and Chris Stroffolino, (Hoboken, NJ: Talisman House, 1997).
* "from CIA Sentences," in ''A Poetics of Criticism'', ed. Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristen Prevallet, and Pam Rehm, (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994).
* “XCII (cinder-sifter)” and ''poetics statement'', in ''o blek 12: Writing from the New Coast'', ed. Peter Gizzi, Connell McGrath, and Juliana Spahr, (Stockbridge: The Garlic Press,1993).
References
External links
Rod Smith, poet , Wave BooksRod Smith Author Homepagelocated at the Electronic Poetry Center
GHOSTBRAINSmith's Blog which he began in February 2006
''Aerial/Edge'' Publisher's PagePoems by and an interview with Rod Smith– brief interview with Smith that discusses his editing of the Creeley letters
::
{{DEFAULTSORT:Smith, Rod
1962 births
Living people
American male poets
American book publishers (people)
American editors
People from Gallipolis, Ohio
Towson University faculty
Poets from Ohio
21st-century American poets
21st-century American male writers