Kenneth John Smith was born on 4 December 1938 in Rudston, a village in the North Riding of Yorkshire, the son of a farm labourer, John Patrick Smith (1904-71) and Millicent (Milly) Emma (née Sitch) Smith (1911-90). Harsh conditions and an unyielding temper ensured that his father never kept a job for long. The first of the wanderer figures that haunt Smith’s poetry were his own family, moving on at the end of harvest:
a darker blur on the stubble,
a fragment in time gone, we left
not a mark, not: a footprint.
The isolation of this life meant that he grew up ‘talking to myself and inventing mates’, which is where ‘the habit of inventing people and dialogue, stories and fictions’ began.
Solitude intensified when he moved to the city at the age of 13. The horizon shrank, the world became small and hostile. His conversation with himself became silent and turned to writing. His father had saved enough to buy a grocer’s shop in Hull, an independence with which he rapidly became embittered. He prospered and bought a second shop, which Smith ran when he left school. But there were continual violent arguments, in which Smith had to defend his mother. It was a situation Smith was locked into until, at the age of 19, conscription released him.
In the Air Force he became a typist, and assuaged his boredom by reading widely and completing his university entrance qualifications. He was demobilised in the spring of 1960, returning to Hull, where he married Ann Minnis, a secretary, on 1 August. In the autumn they moved to Leeds where he read English at the university.
Leeds had become an important literary centre. The school of English included Wilson Knight, Douglas Jefferson and Geoffrey Hill, who was then teaching contemporary poetry. Jon Silkin had just completed two years as Gregory Fellow in Poetry and was now an English undergraduate himself. His successors as Gregory Fellow were William Price Turner and Peter Redgrove. Literary activity centred on the weekly magazine Poetry and Audience, of which Smith became assistant editor. Through Poetry and Audience he met Silkin, and in 1963 he became a co-editor of Stand, an association that lasted until 1969.
For a few months after graduating with a B.A. in 1963 he edited, reviewed, and wrote full-time. But his daughter Nicole had been born in 1961 and the pressure of supporting a family soon forced him into teaching, first at a school in Dewsbury (1963-64), then at Dewsbury and Batley Technical and Art College (1964-65). His son Danny was born in 1965 and his daughter Kate in 1966. In 1965 he moved south, to teach complementary studies at Exeter College of Art. The teaching proved complementary for him too. His own education had been literary and linear: from the art students he learned to think laterally, by image and association, and acquired a much sharper visual sense. It was a development that was to prove crucial to his poetry.
His first pamphlet, Eleven Poems, was published by Northern House in 1964 and his first collection, The Pity, by Jonathan Cape in 1967. The Pity was very well reviewed. P.J. Kavanagh wrote in the Guardian, ‘Anyone who despairs of contemporary verse should be led by the hand to this book.’ The most arresting poem is the title-poem, which incorporates the lines Mao Tse-tung wrote in prison when his pregnant wife was garroted in the next cell:
I cut my hands on the cords at the strangling-post
but no blood spilled from my veins;
instead of blood I watched and saw the pity run out of me.
Writing in Mao’s voice, Smith gives a restrained and sensitive account of that moment of inner revolution when ‘Compassion… takes the hawk’s wing, diving.’
In one sense Smith’s poetry was released as soon as he was free from study. He wrote ‘The pity’ and ‘Family group’ in the week that he graduated. In another sense the poems still felt like studies, the results of conscious writing strategies. Despite the achievement of The Pity, he felt the need to break his habits of mind, to break free from his cultural inheritance: ‘Part of being English is that we entertain really only a few footholds on the imagination.’
In 1969 he moved to America, where he took up a post as writer in residence at Slippery Rock State College in Pennsylvania. Once outside England he felt free ‘to take much bigger risks…to follow out ridiculous ideas…I could invent much more, push a particular image in ways that in English poetry would be regarded as luxurious.’ He learned from the work of American poets: James Wright, Robert Bly, David Ignatow, William Stafford, and the Alaskan poems of John Haines.
He learned still more, perhaps, from oral and primitive poetry, in which there was a revival of interest in America at that time. His second collection, Work, distances/poems (Swallow Press, Chicago, 1972), includes ‘Ghost songs’, ‘Ghost dances’, and an adaptation, ‘From the Nahua’: but particular borrowings are important only as indications of a deeper influence on his poetic language that persisted on his return to England. When he walks beside a playing field in Exeter and writes of
accepting my birthday.
How the shadows move in
at such news and are strange
in the light. This feather
left for his marker my brother
the crow had dropped by the goalpost
seems a dead man’s finger
keeping his page
in the unfinished biography,
he is re-entering, if only for the space of a metaphor, a universe that is a unity, where the poet can discern his own myth taking shape in correspondences, reflections, foreshadowings. Poetry ceases to be what it so often is in England, an art of framed observations: it becomes the spelling out of a selfhood, ‘a language to speak to myself’. The practice of the poet becomes a matter
of silence
and waiting, how to forget,
how sleep, to see and not notice
the moment the mind
takes to its channel, its
leaping and threading and listening,
the business of dreams, visions,
and distant barely perceptible sounds
– how they effect
what is brought to the world’s gate.
One sequence is literally ‘the business of dreams’. ‘The Eli poems’ sprang, as Smith describes in a prose passage, ‘the door’, from insistent dreams of a landscape through which two figures moved, Eli, a lodging-house keeper, and Kate, a mill girl he had got with child. The first poem, ‘Eli’s poem’, was dreamed complete as a poem on a page in a book and typed out immediately on waking. The final poem, ‘Half songs, 1790’, came from a waking dream a year later, a daylight glimpse of Kate that was like ‘a going and a showing at the same time’.
More often Smith works from a kind of personal archaeology. The sequence The clearing came from exploring an actual clearing (set in ‘Minnesota perhaps’ but in fact in Massachusetts) and sifting through the settler’s abandoned house. Once again a prose passage, ‘Concerning the clearing’, gives the genesis of the poems. Into this reconstructed history, the sense of ‘poverty rising out of the ground’, he weaves elements of his own mythology. The hawk of ‘Hawk vision’, who in a moment of liberation ‘diving / somehow upward’ vanished, now returns ‘hungry, / weary, wrong-muscled, / grey bird of my death’. The fusion of personal myth with documentary material is Smith’s way of relating his own life to the unity of lives, of reaffirming that he is ‘a cry among cries’.
‘Tales of Urias the shape-shifter’, an intermittent sequence, began to take shape in Yorkshire beside Colden Water, a moorland stream that became a mill stream in the Industrial Revolution. One root of the poem is a local belief, recorded by Elizabeth Gaskell, that ‘there were little people, there were spirits here…until the machinery came’. Another root is Smith’s own sense of
something very surly and crushed that for the sake of a metaphor…for the sake of a fiction you could say was the spirit of that water…My sense of the world is not much in common with my time…The universe is articulate, it is trying to speak, we are one of the agencies by which it speaks,
part of how the world thinks
so through us the blank
stuff of space knows itself.
But we’re not the only agency.
Here again Smith’s poetry forms part of an older tradition. ‘The kingdom’ of which he writes is the kingdom of William Blake’s grain of sand, of Thomas Traherne’s Orient and immortal wheat. ‘The other world’ appears when we give proper attention to this world:
Describing the buds of the sycamore
coming out boxed each 4 to unfold
is to be in the other world
listening in this one.
Three years at Slippery Rock were followed by a year as poet in residence to the College of the Holy Cross and Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Work, distances/poems, which had been rejected by three English publishers, was well-received in America. Ralph J. Mills, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, welcomed Smith as ‘a poet of formidable range and strength’. Smith returned to England in 1973 but continued to travel extensively in America and to have his work published in America. He continued to be better-known in America until Bloodaxe’s publication in 1982 of The Poet Reclining: Selected Poems 1962-1980 re-established his reputation in Britain. The Poet Reclining is a testament to Smith’s integrity and endurance. A major imaginative enterprise ‘in the American grain’, it had to be sustained against the grain of contemporary English poetry.
There is no stylistic or thematic division between Work, distances and The Poet Reclining as there is between Work, distances and The Pity, and the above discussion of Smith’s work ranges freely between them. But ten years separate the two volumes, ten years in which Smith became virtually an underground poet in Britain. He received an Arts Council Bursary in 1975 and from 1977 to 1979 he was the founder editor of South West Review. But his own work surfaced only in pamphlets. From 1976 to 1978 he was Yorkshire Arts Fellow at Leeds University, commuting from Exeter, where his wife Ann held a secretarial post. Immediately after the Leeds Fellowship was over, the marriage broke up.
Smith moved to London and into the experiences of his long poem Fox Running (1980), a brilliant recreation of a man under stress encountering the city. Rapid, compulsive rhythms create flicker pictures of the Underground and the seedier districts, in which Fox glimpses his double, the shadow he could so easily become:
Faces
mentioning defeat saying
bankruptcy desertion failure redundancy
lost bottle. Their light
that had gone or never lit
or they burned now on the lamp oil
of necessity the pure oil
of ageing euphoria.
All that separates them is the survival instinct, whatever it is in Fox that ‘speaks / from the lengthening floor / of his blood his conviction / not me not me jack’. Smith finished up as a live-in barman in an Irish pub in Kilburn. As a poet he survived, in the words of Jeff Nuttall’s Guardian review, by ‘taking heartbreak in both hands and using it like bricks and mortar to build art…Fox Running is an astonishing leap in compositional scope’.
Through the University of Antioch in London Smith met the American writer Judi Benson and made a new home with her and her son Todd. From 1979 to 1981 he was writer in residence at Kingston Polytechnic, and they moved to East Ham.
The Poet Reclining was widely acclaimed, even critics like Peter Porter, who would be hostile to the element of projective verse in Smith’s poetics, being forced into ‘a new respect for his powers’. His subsequent collection Terra (1986) included the sequences Hawkwood and The London Poems. Hawkwood is based on the figure of Sir John Hawkwood, a 14th-century condottiere, whose career enabled Smith ‘to write about war and aggression and masculinity …under this metaphor of the wanderer’. The poems are like ‘late night work Hawkwood might have done…a closed book I’m opening’. The London Poems are all short, 12-line poems, ‘sonnets without the concluding couplet’, his interest being partly formal, to see how much he could pack into three four-line stanzas.
Terra was followed by A Book of Chinese Whispers (1987), a collection of prose pieces. Smith’s prose is closely akin to his poetry. Some ideas simply develop into prose: ‘the stories are really very convoluted metaphors’. Because there was a limited market for experimental fiction, the prose pieces had only appeared in five pamphlets. A Book of Chinese Whispers collected these together with more recent prose, adding another dimension to the work of a poet who sees his development as a long ‘learning to let be…to let a set of images or patterns or obsessions form itself into shape’.
[1985/2004]