The Dangerous Poems of Dave Smith

"No threat, no poem."

—Dave Smith, Southbound, 29

Our complacent culture avoids danger. Most animals avoid danger, but we overdo it. Creature comforts, ease, oversimplicity, the satisfaction of desire—these are the engines that drive the world of our work, our commerce, our entertainment, indeed our daily lives. The avoidance of pain overbalances the pursuit of pleasure. But life is full of dangers, unpleasant facts of all sorts, and avoiding all dangers can be dangerous itself, while confronting and overcoming them can be satisfying, even pleasurable. What links pleasure and danger? I am not talking about psychosis or Liebestod here. Some poems provide emotional and physical pleasures while dealing with the human situation from its everydayness to extremes of danger. Reality includes disease and disaster as well as sunshine and wildflowers. In a recent interview with Ernest Suarez, Smith speaks of his "religious reverence for the natural world—though I think we can easily step over into New Age gunk here. The worst kind of poems are those which gush over nature's glorious spots but fail to recognize the threat that reality always holds. No threat, no poem" (29).

Dave Smith writes intense, honest, dangerous poems. How can poems be dangerous? To use two of his own terms, obligation and orchestration, Smith's poems take risks in both areas, risks related to the poems' insistence on complexity. To engage and encompass life's complexity, Smith writes complex poems. They are not, however, complex in the sense of arcane allusions or deconstructing the very language. Life is not simple because it brings us obligations, obligations sometimes difficult to specify. That difficulty shows in his phrasing in his interview with the astute Suarez, who observes that Smith's poems often present "several emotions that are often at odds with one another," and Smith replies: "That kind of complexity is what I would vigorously like to have. It's what I admire in other poets. I have said before, and have always thought, that what I write about is 'obligations.' This is a Horatian ideal. I think mine is a poetry that pays attention to things done for which one feels some obligation toward change, and to things not done that should have been done. Also to things and to people for whom one feels the obligations of complex emotions" (24). As I said, difficult to specify, but remember that he is speaking on the fly.

This sense of obligation to one's people and subjects informs the best of Smith's poems, and makes his enterprise heroic. Later in the same interview, he asserts, "If I am permitted a small philosophy, it is that life consists of one's obligations, the handling of responsibilities" (37). Perhaps I use the term heroic too freely. Clearly, Smith shies away from it by referring to his "small philosophy." But still he accepts the poet's responsibility, and if a poet has not the ability to respond, who does? He is quite literally obliged, "bound to," compelled by the power of moral responsibility. Many of his poems are dark and pessimistic, and even the hopeful ones vigorously resist transcendent leaps of faith. I suggest that this is dangerous ground to tread, especially in our cynical and complacent era. Smith is driven to great risks of ambition, overstatement, sentimentality, and confusion, but I will argue that not all but many of his poems are up to the challenge.

Orchestration is Smith's second term I am preempting to describe the dangers of his poems. Just as with essays or sermons or e-mail messages, the way poems are said becomes an integral part of what they say. Using the term orchestration to describe his style, Smith again tells Suarez, "I like the way language loops in and out of linear narrative and asks you to care for things other than plot events" (23), and he calls attention to his use of varying image patterns, "variations which are tangential rather than repetitive," and an Anglo-Saxon diction with a heavily stressed, muscular line (24). These are the positive qualities, earned at the risk of overwrought images...