World Poetry Portfolio #31: Simon Smith

Portfolio published on the online broadside of world literature 'Molossus'.

This international anthology includes poems from two sequences: Gravesend and Odes. Both sequences are poetic inquiries into the linguistic implications of alienation for the speaking subject in specific physical circumstances and political contexts. In the case of the former sequence the train journey between Chatham and Charing Cross shapes and informs the expression of the poems; in the latter, the poems are addressed to specific individuals, addressing associated issues of alienation around the city (London) and politics as filtered through the media at the time of first Arab Spring uprisings. The writing is, therefore, grounded in practical and theoretical research. The physical ‘site’ of the poetry in Gravesend takes its orientation from specific commuting up and down the railway line, note taking, and using the ‘poetic eye’ as a kind of camera, so the poems are sited somewhere between reportage and registering the impact of sensory data on the speaking subject. In Odes, poems addressed to specific individuals use that moment of utterance as occasion to apprehend the same process. The theoretical research has taken the form of extensive reading in philosophical and psychoanalytical approaches regarding the relation of the state to industrialization and the media to fractured subjectivity, and the works of Walter Benjamin on Baudelaire and Jacques Lacan on subjectivity are ever present. Benjamin’s Illuminations even peeks from a knapsack in the poem ‘Lewisham’. For Jeremy Noel-Tod (poetry reviewer for The Telegraph), noting the international impact of Gravesend, ‘Smith is one of the most exciting poets writing in England: if it weren’t for the sweet Thames and the Little Chefs, he might pass for an American.’;