Where Images Become Imbued With Time

From the Inside Flap Praise for Jared Smith’s Work There is a gentle kind of certainty that seems to characterize Jared Smith's best work, an understanding about place and the flow of spirit that makes you think of Thoreau along with a commitment as fierce as that of Pablo Neruda. Joseph Bruchac - poet, novelist, editor, Greenfield Review Press He is a master of interplay between sensuous detail and the universal, illuminating the facts of our electric civilization and evoking the earth from which it rose. Esthetically, discerning readers will see his spiritual kinship to C.K Williams and compare his work favorably. Harry Smith - poet, essayist, editor, The Smith Press Again and again, Jared Smith takes us into a world that we feel is strange and impossible, only to make us see, suddenly, that this IS our life, our condition, and until now we have been shying away from reality. Years ago, on my author-interview show on NPR, I hailed Jared as "the most important new voice in American poetry since Walt Whitman." Walter James Miller - poet (Love's Mainland) and verse dramatist (Joseph in the Pit) There’s a lovely muscularity pervading Jared Smith’s work that’s reminiscent of the more obvious long-lined poets’ efforts, Whitman’s and C.K. Williams’, for example. But Smith’s poetry is unique in that he seems, unlike these other two writers, not to think in terms of an “overflowing line” but to peer, consistently, beyond it. What this means is that while Whitman’s long lines are incantatory and Williams’ are loquacious in a relaxed, double-hexameter sort of way, Smith’s work, much like an Action Painter’s, serves the ambition of the gesture and thus, of necessity, stretches beyond the canvas. Terri Brown-Davidson - reviewer For Smith, there is a kind of pathos in human attempts to replicate the unfathomable beauty of a mountain or a star-filled sky a pathos which is worthy of regret, even mocking, but never rage, scorn, or absolute despair. Though his tone could not be called gentle, it is sympathetic to the human condition and the futility, frustration, sorrow, and bewilderment that accompany it. This sympathy elevates his poetry to the levels of the masters who have influenced him. JoSelle Vanderhooft from The Pedestal About the Author Jared Smith's poetry, essays, and literary commentary have appeared hundreds of times in literary magazines and e-zines in this country and abroad over the past 30 years. His five previous books of poetry include: Lake Michigan And Other Poems (Puddin head Press, Chicago, 2005); Walking The Perimeters Of The Plate Glass Window Factory (Birch Brook Press, NY, 2001); Keeping The Outlaw Alive (Erie Street Press, Chicago, 1988); Dark Wing (Charred Norton Publishing, NY, 1984); and Song Of The Blood: An Epic (The Smith Press, NY, 1983). His CD Seven Minutes Before The Bombs Drop (2006), is available from ArtVilla Records and can be downloaded via any digital download service. His work has been adapted to stage at New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and in the Chicago suburbs. Jared has served as a screener, board member, and advisory board member of The New York Quarterly; coordinator for readings at several venues in New York's Greenwich Village during the 70s and 80s; poetry editor of Trail & Timberline; guest poetry editor of The Pedestal, and president of Chicago's Poets & Patrons. He is a member of The Academy of American Poets, Chicago Poets Club, and Illinois State Poetry Society. He is a former associate director of one of the country's largest private technical research laboratories, and has served in an advisory capacity to several White House Commissions under President Clinton, as well as being named a Special Appointee to Argonne National Laboratory. He has written and edited a number of technical papers and books in those capacities.