Smith, David (Jeddie) 1942-

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SMITH, David (Jeddie) 1942-

(Smith Cornwell, Dave Smith)

PERSONAL: Born December 19, 1942, in Portsmouth, VA; son of Ralph Gerald (a naval engineer) and Catherine (Cornwell) Smith; married second wife, Deloras Mae Weaver, March 31, 1966; children: (second marriage) David Jeddie, Jr., Lael Cornwell, Mary Catherine. Education: University of Virginia, B.A. (with highest distinction), 1965; College of William and Mary, graduate study, 1966; Southern Illinois University, M.A., 1969; Ohio University, Ph.D., 1976.

ADDRESSES: Office—Department of English, Louisiana State University, 43 Allen Hall, Baton Rouge, LA 70803. Agent—Timothy Seldes, Russell and Volkening Inc., 50 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: High school teacher of French and English, and football coach, in Poquoson, VA, 1965-67; instructor at Night School Divisions, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA, Christopher Newport College, Newport News, VA, and Thomas Nelson Community College, Hampton, VA, all 1969-72; Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, instructor, 1973-74, assistant professor of English, Cottey College, Nevada, MO, 1974-75; University of Utah, Salt Lake City, associate professor of English and director of creative writing, 1976-80; State University of New York at Binghamton, visiting professor of English, 1980-81; creative writing summer program staff, Bennington College, VT, 1980-87; University of Florida, Gainesville, associate professor of English, 1981-82; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, professor of American Literature 1982-89; Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, professor of American Literature, 1990-96, Hopkins P. Breazle Foundation Professor of English, 1997-98; Boyd professor of English, 1998—. Editor, Sou'wester, 1967-68; editor, founder, and publisher, Back Door magazine, 1969-79; poetry editor, Rocky Mountain Review, 1978-80; poetry columnist, American Poetry Review, 1978-82; coeditor, Southern Review, 1990—. Has conducted poetry readings at colleges and universities. Military service: U.S. Air Force, 1969-72; became staff sergeant.

MEMBER: National Book Critics Circle, American Association of University Professors, Modern Language Association, Poetry Society of America, Poetry Society of Virginia, PEN, Associated Writing Programs (vice-president, 1982), Writers in Virginia, Academy of American Poets, Fellowship of Southern Writers, Phi Delta Theta.

AWARDS, HONORS: Fiction prize, Miscellany, 1972; Breadloaf Writers' Conference scholarship, summer, 1973; poetry prize, Sou'wester, 1973; Kansas Quarterly Prize, 1975; Borestone Mountain award, 1976; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, 1976, 1981; Academy-Institute Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1979; David P. Gardner Award, 1979; Portland Review poetry prize, 1979; Prairie Schooner poetry prize, 1980; Guggenheim fellowship, 1981; Lyndhurst fellowship, 1987-89; Virginia Prize in Poetry, 1988; Prairie Schooner Reader's Award, 1995.

WRITINGS:

POETRY; UNDER NAME DAVE SMITH

Bull Island, Back Door Press (Poquoson, VA), 1970.

Mean Rufus Throw Down, Basilisk Press (Fredonia, NY), 1973.

The Fisherman's Whore, Ohio University Press (Athens, OH), 1974.

Drunks, Sou'wester (Edwardsville, IL), 1974. Cumberland Station (also see below), University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1976.

In Dark, Sudden with Light, Croissant & Co. (Athens, OH), 1977.

Goshawk, Antelope (also see below), University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1979.

Homage to Edgar Allan Poe, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1981.

Apparitions, Lord John (Northridge, CA), 1981.

Blue Spruce, Tamarack Editions (Syracuse, NY), 1981.

Dream Flights, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1981.

In the House of the Judge, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1983.

Gray Soldiers, Stuart Wright (Winston-Salem, NC), 1983.

The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems, Harper & Row (New York, NY), 1985.

Three Poems, Words Press, 1988.

Cuba Night, Morrow (New York, NY), 1990.

Night Pleasures: New and Selected Poems, Bloodaxe Books (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK), 1992.

Fate's Kite: Poems, 1991-1995, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1995.

Tremble, Black Warrior Review, 1996.

Floating on Solitude: Three Volumes of Poetry (contains Cumberland Station, Goshawk, Antelope, and Dream Flights), University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1996.

The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000, Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 2000.

EDITOR; UNDER NAME DAVE SMITH

The Pure Clear Word: Essays on the Poetry of James Wright, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1982.

(With David Bottoms) The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, Morrow (New York, NY), 1985.

(And author of introduction) The Essential Poe, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1990.

New Virginia Review, New Virginia Review, Inc., 1986.

New Virginia Review Anthology Four, New Virginia Review, Inc., 1986.

(And author of introduction) The Essential Poe, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 1991.

OTHER; UNDER NAME DAVE SMITH

Onliness (novel), Louisiana State University Press (Baton Rouge, LA), 1981.

Southern Delights: Poems and Stories, Croissant & Co. (Athens, OH), 1984.

Local Assays: On Contemporary American Poetry, University of Illinois Press (Urbana, IL), 1985.

Poems represented in many anthologies, including I Love You All Day: It Is That Simple, edited by Philip Dacey and Gerald Knoll, Abbey Press, 1970; Heartland II, edited by Lucien Stryk, Northern Illinois University Press (DeKalb, IL), 1975; and American Poets in 1976, edited by William Heyen, Bobbs-Merrill (New York, NY), 1976. The Colors of Our Age was released as a sound recording, Watershed, 1988. Contributor, sometimes under pseudonym Smith Cornwell, of short stories, poems, articles, and reviews to numerous popular and poetry magazines, including American Poetry Review, Anteus, Nation, Southern Review, Shenandoah, New Yorker, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, and Kenyon Review. Poetry editor, University of Utah Press, 1977-87.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Against Oblivion: Essays on James Dickey's Poetry, for University of South Carolina Press; The Crab's Pincer: New and Selected Essays on Poetry; Southern Poetry: An Anthology with Historical Introduction; and Below the Line: Essays on Southern Poetry, all for Louisiana State University Press.

SIDELIGHTS: David Smith is "the legitimate heir to the Romantic tradition in America," according to Smith's friend and fellow poet Robert DeMott in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Smith told H. A. Maxon in the Sam Houston Literary Review that, like the great Transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he sees writing poetry as a redemptive act: "In my life, poetry was very near a conversion. It was like a religious conviction had come into my life." As in the work of Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey, and other Southern poets, Smith's poems tend to explore the Southern narrative heritage, in the vein of Robert Penn Warren and James Dickey. His work includes the occasional grotesque image, and expresses a distinct regional sense of place, such as the Virginia tidewater region in which many of his early poems are set; Maryland in Cumberland Station; and Wyoming and Utah in Goshawk, Antelope. The books of poems that Smith has published range from full-length collections by major publishers to limited edition chapbooks by small presses, an indication of the kind of broad-range appeal he possesses.

Smith's first book, Bull Island, was a limited edition chapbook published by his own Back Door Press. It is structured around a journey back to the tidewater Virginia of his childhood, searching for a father figure. Mean Rufus Throw Down, his second small press book, shows the poet beginning to explore domestic subjects as well as regional ones, alternating narrative poems with short imagist poems. The Fisherman's Whore heralds both Smith's publication by a larger press and his notice by critics. Michael Heffernan, writing in Commonweal, praised its "fusion of poetry and prose," and Helen Vendler, in Parnassus, called Smith "a poet already capable of great control."

Cumberland Station was the book that brought Smith substantial critical notice. It is a circular quest in three movements: the first part, starting on the Virginia coast, concerns family origin and the historical past as he travels to the Cumberland, Maryland, railroad station where his grandfather was a ticket-seller; the second part has the poet in exile, encountering Midwest states, working hard to decode the parables they teach; and the final part brings the poet home to the coast, where, as Robert DeMott wrote, "the linked patterns of flowing images—boats, water, fish, rivers, music—capture the processional quality of Smith's vision." Dana Wier, in Hollins Critic, praised the book as "a celebration" and "a rich presentation of America's people, culture and landscape."

"It was not until his fourth collection, Goshawk, Antelope," wrote Robert Phillips in Hudson Review, "that Dave Smith began to receive the wide critical attention his work deserves." The book, divided into four sections of about a dozen poems each, presents a number of poems that take on the starkness of the western landscape of Utah where Smith was teaching during this period. This collection, noted Michael McFee in Parnassus, shows "the mature Dave Smith," whose poems offer the "ambitious wordage" of "a poet of community and continuity" and "the complexity of shared experience."

In 1981, Smith published two new books. Homage to Edgar Allan Poe is a collection of brief poems, many less than a page, re-exploring family and sense of place, and the title sequence, in six sections, wrote Phillips, "entwines Poe's personal history with Smith's." Dream Flights presents seventeen poems that, as Thomas Swiss pointed out in Sewanee Review, "work through association, a complex linking that succeeds because of Smith's gift for creating a rich texture and backdrop for the action." In The House of the Judge received mixed reviews. Fred Chappell, in Western Humanities Review, criticized Smith's "heavy veneer of false elegance," and charged that "many of the lines are burdened with pronouns having unclear antecedents." Swiss, however, noted that "Smith is engaged with the literal and symbolic geographies of place," offering "less violence" and "less physical drama," so that this book has "a gentler touch." Following publication of The Roundhouse Voices: Selected and New Poems, a volume which Helen Vendler in the New Yorker called "a book too austerely thinned to give an adequate overview of his twenty years of poetic production," Smith published Cuba Night. Vendler singled out the book for its "Southern-gothic themes—family, memory, fear, fate, sex, violence," and indicated that, although Smith "walks a difficult line between the indignant and the overripe, . . . he manages a balance between the natural wrongness of life and the genuine rightness of art." Kathleen Norris, writing in Library Journal, called it "a deeply reflective, elegiac work full of . . . pleasurable music." Night Pleasures: New and Selected Poems, published in 1993, was Smith's first collection to appear in Britain.

The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000, Smith's seventeenth collection, was published in 2001 and included more than one hundred poems. According to New York Review of Books critic Helen Vendler, the classic elements of Southern poetry are all present in The Wick of Memory, including images of rural life, a religious backdrop, echoes of the Civil War, and interracial relations. The collection is presented chronologically, and a Publishers Weekly reviewer noticed that the earlier work represented has "a formal elegance and a maritime musical panache akin to early [Robert] Lowell." The later work is less vital, according to that critic, especially when the poet takes on a "more confessional tone" and gives way to "prosaic speech." With other poems, "the wick catches anew," and the language takes on new energy.

Smith once told CA: "Whatever I write in the future will have to conform to two principles: I want poetry whose clarity is pronounced and resonant and I want poetry whose validity will be proved to the extent the poems embody the true, durable, and felt experience of emotional life." He named medievalist Robert Kellogg, jazz musician Dan Havens, novelist Jack Matthews, and singer Little Richard as artists most influential to him.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 7, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1988.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 22, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982, Volume 42, 1987.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 5: American Poets since World War II, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1980.

Evans, David Allan, editor, New Voices in American Poetry, Winthrop (Boston, MA), 1973.

Hales, Corrine, editor, Contemporary Poets, Dramatists, Essayists, and Novelists of the South, Greenwood Press, 1994.

Harris, Alex, editor, A World Unsuspected, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1987.

Turner, Alberta, editor, Poets Teaching, Longman (New York, NY), 1980.

Vendler, Helen, Part of Nature, Part of Us, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1980, pp. 289-302.

Weigl, Bruce, editor, The Giver of Morning: On the Poetry of Dave Smith, Thunder City Press (Birmingham, AL), 1982.

PERIODICALS

America, July 10, 1982, p. 36; December 15, 1990, p. 490.

American Book Review, May, 1982, p. 7.

American Literature, December, 1982, p. 632; October, 1986, p. 481.

American Poetry Review, November, 1977, p. 46; January/February, 1978, pp. 15-19; January/February, 1982, p. 32-35.

Antioch Review, spring, 1982, p. 225.

Booklist, September 15, 1979, p. 89; June 15, 1981, p. 1330; November 15, 1981, p. 427; September 15, 1981, p. 88; December 15, 1982, p. 550; January 15, 1986, p. 728.

Chicago Review, autumn, 1977, pp. 123-126.

Choice, January, 1975, p. 1635; May, 1977, p. 379; January, 1982, p. 630; November, 1982, p. 430; January, 1986, p. 745.

College Literature, spring, 1984, p. 200.

Commonweal, August 15, 1975, p. 346; January 6, 1978, p. 23; December 7, 1979, p. 701; March 11, 1983, p. 157.

Denver Quarterly, autumn, 1983, pp. 123-138.

Georgia Review, spring, 1980, pp. 202-212; fall, 1982, p. 675; winter, 1985, p. 849.

Hollins Critic, October, 1977, p. 18.

Hudson Review, winter, 1974-75, pp. 611-614; spring, 1978, p. 211; summer 1980, p. 301; autumn, 1981, p. 420; autumn, 1983, p. 589; summer, 1986, p. 345; winter, 1990, p. 598.

Journal of American Studies, August, 1983, p. 295.

Kenyon Review, spring, 1986, p. 113.

Kliatt Young Adult Paperback Book Guide, winter, 1982, p. 28.

Library Journal, February 15, 1974, p. 492; September 1, 1974, p. 2070; December 1, 1976, p. 2494; August, 1979, p. 1570; June 1, 1981, p. 1226; September 1, 1981, p. 1636; October 15, 1981, p. 2050; June 1, 1982, p. 1098; December 15, 1982, p. 2342; March 15, 1984, p. 598; August, 1985, p. 98; November 1, 1985, p. 100; February 1, 1990, p. 87; December, 1995, p. 116.

Nation, December 22, 1984, p. 687; October 5, 1985, p. 320.

New Criterion, December, 1985, p. 27-33.

New England Review, spring, 1982, p. 489; winter, 1983, p. 348; fall, 1991, p. 149.

New Leader, December 14, 1981, p. 16.

New Statesman and Society, July 30, 1993, p. 40.

New Yorker, June 30, 1980, p. 96; April 2, 1990, pp. 113-116.

New York Review of Books, November 7, 1985, p. 53; March 8, 2001, Helen Vendler, review of The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems.

New York Times Book Review, November 15, 1981, p. 14; April 18, 1982, p. 15; February 13, 1983, p. 15; January 12, 1986, p. 346.

North American Review, spring, 1977, p. 75; spring, 1980, p. 72.

Parnassus, fall-winter, 1975, pp. 195-205; spring-summer, 1977; fall-winter, 1980, p. 102; spring, 1983, p. 58; fall-winter, 1984, pp. 154-182.

Poetry, August, 1982, p. 293; February, 1984, p. 304; March, 1986, p. 346.

Poetry in Review, fall-winter, 1980, pp. 102-110. Poetry Review, January-February, 1978, pp. 15-19.

Prairie Schooner, spring, 1974, p. 92; summer, 1984, p. 100.

Publishers Weekly, November 1, 1976, p. 73; June 25, 1979, p. 121; June 12, 1981, p. 50; August 7, 1981, p. 77; August 14, 1981, p. 50; December 17, 1982, p. 73; August 9, 1985, p. 72; January 5, 1990, p. 67; October 23, 1995, p. 64; March 27, 2000, review of The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000.

Sam Houston Literary Review, November, 1977, pp. 64-74.

Saturday Review, September 16, 1978, p. 42.

Sewanee Review, summer, 1980, p. 474; fall, 1982, p. 612; summer, 1983, p. 483; fall, 1983, p. 83; winter, 1989, pp. 543-555; spring, 1992, p. 311.

Southern Humanities Review, winter, 1987, p. 94; winter, 1991, p. 99.

Southern Review, spring, 1990, p. 456.

Sou'wester, spring-summer, 1974, pp. 56-64.

Stand, summer, 1988, p. 72; winter, 1993, pp. 77-80.

Sulfur, March, 1986, p. 175.

Three Rivers Poetry Journal, spring, 1977, pp. 6-9.

Times Literary Supplement, November 27, 1981, p. 1388; May 22, 1987, p. 557; April 30, 1993, p. 23.

TriQuarterly, fall, 1985, pp. 245-258.

Village Voice, May 5, 1980, p. 36; November 25, 1981, p. 47.