Meet Erin Elizabeth Smith. To shake hands with this sassafras, bad-ass, Southern-fine chicken rancher/ college professor/ Sundress Academy for the Arts director/ Managing Editor of Sundress Publications and The Wardrobe AND Minerva Rising’s 2016 Poetry Chapbook Contest Judge (whew) is also to make the acquaintance of her fiery, sensual, red-headed, sometimes red-handed, place-based, lovestruck, dreaming waking bone-shaking myth-making poetry. Erin Elizabeth is one of those poets who IS her poetry. She kind of bustles about in tercets, encourages her cohorts in unformed frameworks, promises to see poetry where others might see, for example, chainsaw bears or zebra finches. You can read her official biography elsewhere on this website. To get to know her better through taking a closer look at her poetry, read on.
Erin first caught my attention when I read her poem “Mapmaking” in thrush journal. I wrote her a fan letter in which I commented, “You have encapsulated in your finely constructed lines a poem that encompasses travel, wanderlust, the deeply felt pangs for home and for keeping ground moving underfoot.” One year later I was on an airplane flying from Dulles airport to my home in Prague, Czech Republic with Erin’s book “The Naming of Strays” in my carry-on. It’s no small coinky-dink that fate brought Erin and me together to collaborate on reading for next year’s winning chapbook collection. “Mapmaking”‘s themes, among others, make us both tick.
Minerva Rising’s annual chapbook contest is titled “Dare to Be.” In our loose-goosey submission guidelines, we ask you to wow us with your interpretation of what that phrase means to you. I bet if I asked Erin what it means to her, she’d say something about being unafraid to live all-in, with her whole heart exposed and her neck out, in places as sundry as Binghamton, NY, Champaign, IL, and Hattiesburg, MS. In her poem “Cityscapes”, she paints portraits of each, stanza by 8-11 line stanza. “It’s not/nostalgia, that word that staples/homecoming to grief, ” she posits. Damn if that doesn’t cut to the quick of every place-based poem, hers, mine, yours, waiting to be written.
The book from which I pull these titles is “The Naming of Strays”, her 2011 full-length manuscript published by Gold Wake Press. The book’s 75 pages are separated into four sections, each one introduced by alternate definitions of the word “stray.” It is interesting to note that the third definition is “to wander free from control.” These poems are not free from control; they are definitely tightly reined-in, but we do see the poet as a bit of a wandering vagabond, describing her homes as she migrates. Erin seems to be a fan of the couplet and the tercet, allowing her “Myth of Independence” and her “Secret Love Song” to find freedom within their framework.
Erin writes a “Love Poem” to Stirling, Scotland. She writes about “Love in Mississippi” versus “love in New York/ where the rivers erected/ themselves in the patchwork spring/ and the windows were so small/ even I could not slip through.” In “Flammable”, she writes about the “simple promise of heat” in New Orleans, 2006. I must ask her if there are any places she has lived that she has not written about.
Absence is just as much one of her themes as presence. The only place she writes of unfavorably is London. Is it because her lover tells her he must move there without her? In Section II, the poet asks her lover not to move to London. (“On Asking My Lover Not to Move to London”) This poems falls under the “to wander from the path of rectitude, to err” definition. Also in that section, London is described thusly: “distant”, “a memory of heat”, and “fog that doesn’t rise despite how much we do not love/ that shadowy unknown.” Damn, again. Yet we get the feeling the criticism doesn’t fall because the speaker has something against said UK capital. It is because of what the place represents: her lover’s absence.
The book coheres tightly to its recurring themes (Hint, hint, Minervas: this is something we definitely look for in your chapbook manuscripts.) From Place to Absence it is then not such a far cry to Patience. We see this theme appear in the retelling of the myths of Penelope and Emer and in “Drinking Poem.”
I wonder sometimes
if patience turns us hard
like the hulled seeds of pumpkins
left to heat. Wait translated
into nothing more
than the brief pyrotechnics
of skin, the sure pop
of a button through its hole.
This poem shows us a naked vulnerability not seen as prominently elsewhere in the collection. Lines like
I closed the bar
with another man, who cupped
my knee in his white horse
of a car and sucked
the air from between
our drowned bodies.
expose an undersided vein, something like a ferality that wants to be tamed but cannot. Something like a stray.
In “Ghost Limb”, the speaker says, “I know that source/ of my restlessness but do not/ name it.” This restless then, is also like a stray. Once you have opened your door to a wild animal, invited it in and given it a name, you begin to assign certain expectations to it. “The Naming of Strays” is one of my favorite poems in the entire book. Please do yourselves the favor of ordering your copy today so you can read the whole thing. It closes like this
Maybe love is simply the naming of strays.
And any name will do. Each comes
equally from the lips to make him
gallop towards us
through the yard
and home.
“The Naming of Strays” opens with “Sweet” a cautionary tale about how love, which is at first like “the cardamom pop in the peaches, Michigan cherries bitten/ to the stem” can become over-worn, comfortable to the point of being misshapen “the shape of sweet so often/ turned, so fluffed and feathered/ that we too lose its form.” Notice how “Sweet” invites us in to the book with its first line: “Sweet is the first taste.” This book rewards its readers with taste after taste of the delicious poetry of this gorgeous young poet who has been called “the impossible love child of a young Jorie Graham and an old bottle of Jack Daniels.” (T.A. Noonan)
I hope you enjoy getting to know Erin and her poetry. Order a copy of her book to get even cozier with her beautiful, savory, provocative poems. And then dear Minervas, dare to discover what Dare to Be means to you. Submit to our third annual poetry chapbook contest, or the Novella contest if you are a fiction writer. Watch our Facebook page for tantalizing prompts from Erin Elizabeth’s work throughout the month of September. Dare to write your place, your absence, your patience, your definition of a word that moves you to name it. Name it.
