Q1) You were one of my favorite ARGS Literary Arts event guests, and your work has inspired me extensively. So, I’m curious–do you remember meeting me?

I do remember meeting you, Blue. Send me a photo to further jog my memory?

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Q2) The cover of That Beauty in The Trees is particularly gorgeous. How are you a part of the cover design process? As a poet and visual artist, I’m curious how the mediums intersect.

At the time my book was nearing publication, I remembered a painting by my next door neighbor, Emma Knight. I asked Emma if L.S.U. Press could use one of her paintings of Maymont’s Japanese gardens and she was absolutely delighted. (A year before, when the book had a different title and organization, we were ready to use a different Emma Knight painting.)

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I wanted a cover that not only fit the title poem of the book, but which was much different from my other books’ covers—brighter, a bit playful.

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Q3) What's your process of coming up with poems or essays? Does divine inspiration strike you with an Italian lightning bolt? Or is it a laborious process of searching your psyche for a concept to explore? A combination of both?

Sometimes I get hit by lightning and the poem comes all at once, requiring only a few small revisions over the next few days or (more likely) weeks. Usually, though, I have a draft I keep coming back to over months, years, sometimes decades. I wish I had a formula—but every damn poem seems to have its own way of behaving, each poem to demand a new set of procedures.

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Q4) Your time in Italy seems to have influenced your work a great deal. Reading Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, the work is more autobiographical and local where That Beauty in The Trees and Its Ghostly Workshop explore farther, literally and poetically. Is this change correlated with your time in Italy? Do you find that some places are more fertile with ideas? What do you think creates that possibility?

My early work (in Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery and much of Moon Road) was highly praised for “accessibility” as well as power. I liked that—until one day I realized maybe all the “accessibility” praise could also be pointing to a failure on my part. I came to realize I could use ALL of my life in the poems—which is to say, I could also use my life in books, in reading. That and the growing easy availability of search engines allowed me to be less accessible on the surface—because people could Google right away, say, Catullus or Edward Teller or “Curse Tablet” and then go on reading the poem with only a short break.

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My travels in Italy taught me that I need the right combination of familiarity and unfamiliarity with my subject matter. I’ve come to believe that if something is totally unfamiliar I cannot write effectively about it. The surprise was discovering that if I were completely familiar with a subject, THAT TOO caused problems in the writing. Familiarity breeds contempt, they say. It also breeds blindness. Italy was too magical and exotic to me at first. I loved every minute of my time there, but I couldn’t make art out of it. My hundreds of notebook pages were good only for a kind of travelogue. Apparently, I had to get to know better the sights, sounds, smells, customs that were enchanting but overwhelming me. I had to become at least partly an Italian native (while of course keeping my wide-eyed American Abroad perspective).

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Q5) Your work naturally travels between Richmond and Italy all while navigating different perspectives and moments in each. You generally maintain an informed, almost mysterious tone as you describe everything from the South to Cuba. Even your humor sounds smart. Did you specifically decide to voice your work like this? Or is it just the tone you naturally gravitate towards as a writer?

How do I want to sound? Above all, natural. Sounding like yourself is a lot harder than it seems. Too often writers put on their “I’m an important poet” clothes and strut around ridiculously. Writing about my reading as well as my everyday life outside of books was one way of being myself. Humor? I like wit and humor, even in serious poems, sometimes even in grimly serious poems. It makes the poem more human, I think. Smart? Hm. One thing I don’t want to do is communicate to a reader that I think I am smart. Some writers strike me as showing off their knowledge, and that can kill the work for me.

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Maybe the crucial moment that expanded the reach of my work was the moment I realized how important my reading was to everything else in my life. In the mid-80s, I heard the very professional Francine Prose (her real name) say that if she were forced to give up either reading or writing, she would have to give up writing. She might be able to live without writing, she said, but would never be able to live without reading. The terror of that choice still visits me sometimes.

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Q6) I find your work accessible in language while also necessitating some additional research to fully understand each allusion and reference. Whom do you envision as your audience? When you write a poem, do you envision a young untraveled poet like myself to be consuming your work?

I suspect you are one of my best readers. I am grateful for that. Most of the time that’s who I’m writing for: A smart, open-minded person who loves words and the world and is willing to listen closely. Key: openness to human experience and to language. I love that you find my work both accessible and requiring a little research. Isn’t that what the world outside of literature requires from us?

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Q7) Your poetry collections tend to introduce a lot of different characters and you familiarize us with each one, whether it be Poe, Pound, your family, or a high school teacher you once had. Throughout the books, you take us across time and space, and we visit each person and place, particularly Italy, like an old friend. I find myself thinking about the Via Appia as if I was the one there. Is this a conscious strategy? If so, what would you tell someone trying to emulate it?

Absolutely a conscious strategy, yes. What I would tell any writer is: Put your reader in the speaker’s skin and in the speaker’s place and time. Make the reader live vividly in the poem’s present. (Sometimes, to do this, I have to go back to notebook entries written in the heat of an experience and to photos.)

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Q8) As a followup to my last question: Your work, such as your series about Poe in The Stinkdark in Its Ghostly Workshop, breathes life and voice both into various characters from your travels as well as historical figures and writers. I find that you inhabit them all spectacularly, balancing your tone and character with theirs. How do you summon these people into the poem while not letting their voice take over the piece?

Sometimes a character’s voice does take over the piece—and that’s almost always good thing.

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Q9) What do you want your writing legacy to be? Secondarily: What piece do you think is “quintessentially Ron Smith” ?

I cannot answer the “quintessential” question because, as Whitman said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” There are multiple sides to every human being. When I stop surprising myself, I begin to bore myself. I love finding out that I have likes or dislikes that I did not know I had. Adventure. Writing has to be an adventure. (Life itself has to feel like an adventure, I would say.) OK, I’ll try: I want readers who feel that the poems have told them the truth about what it means to be a human being in a particular place at a specific time—and that being there has an element of adventure.

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Legacy? I want people to read my poems and feel more human for doing so. I want them to feel the poems offer excitement and adventure and that they understand their own lives better after reading them.

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Q10) What are you currently working on?

Sometimes it’s bad luck to talk about the current project—but I can tell you that I hope my New & Selected Poems will be published next year, with selections from all the previous books, plus twenty or so new poems.