Listen, you upstate hillsides
Which I have loved
So loyally, your woodlots
And trailers and old farmhouses,
Your satellite dishes –
– From “Money Musk” by Jordan Smith
So begins a poem by Smith that practically scolds the
local landscape for refusing to reveal its history.
“I always had the sense that landscape involved history
and the history was mostly gone because the landscape had been
so transformed,” says Smith, explaining the poem that is
part of a recent collection titled Three Grange Halls.
The chapbook was co-winner of the 2002 Swan Scythe
Press Chapbook competition. A full-length collection (including
some of the poems from the chapbook) received first prize in the
Tampa Review poetry competition. It will be published in the fall by
the University of Tampa Press.
The title poem refers to Grange halls in Grooms
Corners, Brunswick Center and Malta. Like others in the collection, it
is peppered with references to landmarks that retain a sense
of the area's history – rural roads, boarded-up taverns,
overgrown family cemeteries, dilapidated buildings.
Smith, a Rochester native, recalls a childhood bicycle trip
to an 1800s communal farmstead: “I was fascinated by the feeling I
got from being around those old buildings. There was a sense
of the past persisting in the present. The past had a lot more
character to me.”
Smith says he prefers the hardscrabble upstate
landscape to, say, the quaint villages of New England or the sprawling
mid-west farms. “They're more scrubby and rundown,” he says
of the local landmarks. “I find that more picturesque, more
interesting.”
Smith does acknowledge, however, that he may be
adhering to the creative writing theory that a good poem or story depends
on something being amiss. “If everything's right, there's
no mystery. We have to have some level of tension to have
the impulse for writing.”
If landscape influences Smith's poetry, so does
traditional music.
Smith grew up on The Band and Bob Dylan. And his
father was a fan of Charles Ives, a composer who worked folk
tunes into his pieces to remind the listener of voices from
another time, Smith says.
“You have that sense of musical history and of
cultural reference that went back beyond the present,” he says. “A lot of
my impulses to write poetry came from liking American music
and hanging around with the musicians and not really being
a traditional musician myself.”
But Smith would become a musician, a fiddler, when his
son began violin lessons a decade ago.
“Music and poetry are analogous experiences,”
Smith says. “When you're playing music, you're really involved in
the moment. It's not just the notes. It's where you're sitting,
who you're playing with, what's going on in the atmosphere
around you.
“The experience you're trying to capture when you're writing
a poem has that kind of complexity,” he says. “One of the things
I say to students is that any moment that you're in – even if
it seems ordinary – is a really complex moment.”