Bruce Smith was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the author of six books of poems, The Common Wages (Sheep Meadow Press, 1983); Silver and Information (University of Georgia Press, 1985), a National Poetry Series selection by Hayden Carruth; Mercy Seat (University of Chicago Press, 1994); The Other Lover (University of Chicago Press, 2000), which was a finalist for both the National Book […]
In the singing school there were weepholes and rats, preternatural creatures in sequins who spoke a Creole no one understood. There was a pain threshold feedback from the amps. There were harlequin opals in the navels. There were flames of cellophane the exhaust fan flamed. I behave like what I am – a legitimate gypsy […]
I rode the Greyhound watching the twitchy things of the North give way to the sticky, bloodshot things of the South. No ground so burnt there’s not a church where I heard the Reverend amplify, rarefy, and glorify the word so that we were all in some state of sweating July. The ashy black man […]
Write like a lover. Write like you’re leaving yourself for another. Write like you’re de Beauvoir, object and subject. Write like you must rescue yourself from yourself, become scrupulous to the body and the rain that floods you with rage and the crude sublimities: there was a lip print on the plastic glass wrapped in […]
Bruce Smith reads and talks about his favorite poem, Emily Dickinson’s “398.”
Bruce Smith reads and talks about two poems he wishes he’d written, “Song for Billie Holiday” by Langston Hughes, and “At One O’clock in the Morning” by Charles Baudelaire (translated by Michael Hamburger).