Maggie Smith’s poems don X-ray glasses.
While deeply humane, and so acutely tender, her lines fear no skin or bone, peering into the soul with its many tells. Who we love and what we hate about ourselves. What causes breath to catch on its way out of our lungs, what makes us shiver, and how we know we’re still alive.
Smith’s poems call out for intimacy with every angle and angel of our nature—not the better ones per se, as if our lives bend toward measurable improvement, some eventual arrival. But the purer, truer forces which attend and compose us.
“A Suit or a Suitcase,” recently published in The Nation, represents Smith’s rare gifts. Craving integration between body and soul, image and self, the poem traces the speaker’s every curve, within and without, and like Adam fumbles over their names.
Pick up with me in the poem’s middle, as Smith puzzles over potential—to diffuse the mind, or perhaps the soul, throughout her body:
I don’t even know
what to call the me of me. I imagine
filling my body completely, filling it,
every inch, to the skin. Shh. Listen.
Reaching the final punctuation mark with Smith—in her timing and the cadence she resolves—I rise to weave my way down an endless alley of gratitude. Somewhere I rarely travel in these days, with their saturated morning hours and sighing evenings. I am lucky to live at the same time as Maggie Smith.
And yet I chafe at suggestions, that words from 1922 inevitably outweigh words typeset months ago. That virtue lies with the past, not the unproven present.
Between the poems I read, I manage to answer emails. Puzzled over how to end anything, I weigh signatures, settling for “best,” comma, name. Only my fingers type “beset,” comma, name. How natural to wish for another time, another place. We are beset.
No doubt, this wishing expresses itself across plots of land and life. Most familiar with writers and their particular longings, I hang around as friends extol great books. The older they are, the more trustworthy. The more trustworthy, the greater the salve for our day.
The impulse resonates. My daydreams fill up with visions of being eighteen again, using knowledge now possessed to pick a different major. English, not music or journalism. I would still pocket the same money, but hide more books inside my chest. In the past two years, I’ve read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Williams’ Paterson, selections from Rilke’s Book of Hours, Larsen’s Passing—all for the first time. The gap in my reading remains a river too wide to cross, sourced by ever more timeless waters.
And yet I chafe at suggestions, that words from 1922 inevitably outweigh words typeset months ago. That virtue lies with the past, not the unproven present.
Call me into conversation with my fathers and mothers. I want to attend a camp meeting; to sit at their feet, absorbing their sermons and their stories. Certainly, wisdom survives, endures, travels.
But virtue also attaches to the act of hearing out my neighbor here and now. Their offered wisdom, never divorced from the human continuum, sets one foot in front of the other before the hour changes. Present-tense writing transmits electric currents between sender and receiver, two people caught in the process of figuring something, anything, out.
The unseen liturgies of our age require interrupters, poets, and would-be priests who offer bread crusts and wine from a table that, yes, extends before and beyond them.
Don’t ask me to predict how history will remember our writers, who will wear the word classic. History will show up when it’s good and ready, filtered, translated, right and wrong in its way.
This need explains my sense of good fortune to live in the time of Maggie Smith. To be found in the same age as Alina Stefanescu and Scott Cairns. An age where Jane Zwart writes minor miracles and Hanif Abdurraqib invents rhythms. What mercy to finger spines of books by Richard Powers and Colson Whitehead, Ada Limon and Louise Erdrich, filled up with words in moments after I learned their names.
Their sentences reshape my loves, make my eyes wider and my own words better. Their writing soaks through to the heart’s muscles, massaging them with oil and wine, to borrow an image from the late songwriter Keith Green.
Don’t ask me to predict how history will remember our writers, who will wear the word classic. History will show up when it’s good and ready, filtered, translated, right and wrong in its way. All I know: the future is written in the present, as the latest, long-expected words touch me head to toe, rearrange my thoughts, cure my warped tongue. I will be different tomorrow thanks to words passed down today.
Grant me permission to embrace any and all art. My eyes need to trace every last stalk of Van Gogh wheat—and feel colors vibrate from a still-drying canvas. My heart needs to soak up every last Willa Cather comma, and hear Joy Harjo’s voice like she’s in the room with me. She is in the room with me.
The best words, penned by ghosts and by the living, whisper the same themes.
Wander the woods.
Tune to Ravel. Turn up John Coltrane.
Reach for your nearest neighbor.
Let your kiss linger.
Stare at yourself in the mirror until you see something behind the eyes.
Stop surrendering your presence.
Never settle for anything less than messy human connection.
Pray without ceasing, even if that prayer passes the lips in four-letter words.
Go, do and be. Before this minute is damned, giving way to the next.
This is what people did in the day of Dostoevsky, and what they’re doing in the age of George Saunders. This is what it means to love in the time of Maggie Smith. The time of you and me.
