We often think of setting more when we think about fiction - you know, setting, character, and plot - but I find that the poems I’m able to quickly enter and move into as I write are poems that take place in a specific setting. It’s something that comes up in my poems. While it’s not like being cloistered in a literal way like we have been for the past year, I still live in my hometown, so I’m always thinking about place as something that holds you and nurtures you, and also as something that you push against as a kind of constraint.
I know one poem that you’re thinking of, and I wrote it a couple of years ago, so that’s a pre-pandemic poem. Do you think that being sequestered during the pandemic contributed to this ? Or is it quite separate? Even if I only work on a few poems or one book manuscript a month, I continue to do it because I love it so much.ĭiving into Goldenrod, I notice that much of your work explores architecture - whether it be outside with the structure of air and birds, and how the trees fill in space, or in a room. I have been doing a lot less editing, with two kids at home during the pandemic and my own writing schedule, but I can’t give it up because it’s my favorite work. MAGGIE SMITH: Right! The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison came out in 2015, so that would be right. It is astounding that even with your fame and schedule, you continue to invite writers to work with you, reviewing line edits and larger manuscripts. We began that editing relationship, and you also sent me The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison. I discovered you then, and reached out via email, asking if you would spend some time editing my poems. Yours is the beautiful piece that starts the whole book. Both of our work appears in the anthology Mothering Through the Darkness. MELISSA UCHIYAMA: I realized that we began our email conversation back in 2015. Keep Moving was borne from the author’s tweets and written, at least initially to herself, as the poet went through a divorce.Īs we talked via Zoom, her evening in Ohio, and my morning in Tokyo, we recounted our previous connection. Maggie was poised for the launch, though this is her second book launch in a pandemic. Indie Books has already placed Goldenrod on the Indie Next List for the month of August, but this is just a drop in the deluge of praise that is to come from her 68,000 Twitter fans alone. Its impact continues to extend the poet’s vulnerable belief in the beauty of a world that also knocks the wind out of us. The poem, written in a coffee shop in Smith’s hometown of Bexley, Ohio, has been translated into well over a dozen languages. Smith is considered a “viral poet” after her poem “Good Bones” filled the hearts and minds of thousands. I SPOKE WITH poet Maggie Smith on the precipice of the publication of her fifth book and fourth collection of poems, Goldenrod, available July 27, 2021.
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