Washington, DC-based poet Rod Smith seems to span generations in both directions. Not necessarily a member of any poetic school, he has been associated with plenty of them: New York School, Language Poetry and, most recently, Flarf. (Flarf is a poetic movement, often associated with generating material via Google searches that are then “sculpted.” Practitioners include K. Silem Mohammad, Nada Gordon, Jordan Davis and Gary Sullivan amongst others. Sullivan defined Flarf as a “kind of corrosive, cute, or cloying awfulness. Wrong. Un-P.C. Out of control. ‘Not okay.’”)

Smith laughed when I asked him about his journeyman reputation. “It’s more about social formations—who you’re friends with,” he said. Even the recently controversial Flarf: “They’re playing this kind of talk-show circuit where they’re saying ‘We’re writing for the people,’ but also they’re making fun of American society and its obsession with the talk show circuit. In the end, like most things that get identified as ‘schools,’ they’re still writing for each other.”

A quick glance at Smith’s personal history confirms this. “I knew Gary [Sullivan] prior to ‘Flarf’ and after reading with him in New York [City] he asked if I was interested in joining a listserv that was dedicated to this style of writing. It took a while for me to learn how to write it well. It didn’t fit with the work I was doing at that time. It was new to me.”

Smith, like many poets throughout history, though unlike the legions “professional poets” being churned out by MFA programs around the country, is relatively self-taught. “I rebelled in my early 20s about going to college. The few night classes I took had bad professors. And the post office paid pretty well at the time, so I became a mail carrier.” Learning in an environment free of a professors’ ideology allowed Smith to see connections that ran against the then current trains of thought. “All of these things are inter-related. If you read late [George] Oppen, or [Frank] O’Hara’s ‘2nd Avenue,’ there are the beginnings of concerns picked up later by Language Poetry. So I was viewing things in a context contrary to the rhetoric of the time about how different they were.”

Smith’s poems are often funny, biting, sardonic and ironic, yet to describe him only as a poet with a sense of humor is to commit a grave injustice towards Smith. Not only is he accomplished as a lyric poet (he’s perfectly at home in the form) but there is often a politics involved as well, like in “The American Evasion of Philosophy” from his 1999 book Protective Immediacy:

I’m dialing in & I don’t want

To say it, but

“your in-joke or mine”

comes to mind just as the machine’s

signal beeps—it’s

kind of custardy

…bonded and

capriciously acerbic

(we’re talking beyond any “unsired” synchronous here)

but about Pepsi

I’d just like to know

& don’t—it’s a good deal—

sincerity’s cotton belt

or Philly’s new brew

How she then rethinks me

makes me

buy more wastepaper, american

waste paper, genuine

american

wastepaper

only as a symbolizing aesthetic gesture

but still

wastepaper

like a sunbeam

Currently Smith is a busy man, editing The Collected Letters of Robert Creeley with Kaplan Page Harris and Peter Baker, which is due out from the University of California Press. On his own imprint, Aerial/Edge Books, he just released a new collection of Tom Raworth poems and soon will have a new collection of his own work, Deed, from the University of Iowa Press.

As a reader of his own work, he is, in the words of poet/critic Ron Silliman, “the perfect poet…as he has the most active ear of any writer of his generation & he’s a great—if decidedly deadpan—reader of his own work.” Come out to Rust Belt and decide for yourself. Either way, you are sure to hear a poet unlike anyone you’ve heard before.