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The Insurance Agent and the Real Estate Broker:
Introducing Edward Smith (1941-2003)
by Charles Potts
I met Edward Smith on the floor of the Magic
Mountain, a house of philosophy named for Thomas Mann’s novel, and
the first home of the Free University of Seattle. Edward enrolled in
a class I taught called “Poetry-Language-Now” in 1966. We’d been
friends for thirty-eight years when he died of complications from
the flu the day after Christmas in 2003.
Most of those nearly forty years we were on our
separate ways. The last three years were especially precious as we
revived our acquaintance. He put it this way: “God in the form of a
friend, gave me my art back.” We talked whenever we weren’t busy
over his 800 number at Shelter Insurance, about matters at the utter
heart of poetry, often about Du Fu and Su Tung Pö, Stevens,
Wordsworth, Coleridge, Dante, King Lear. When Edward came to Walla
Walla to be one of the featured poets at the poetry party, he was
carrying a computer printout of Two Noble Kinsmen, written half by
Shakespeare, and fingered by Charles Olson in his essay on Quantity.
We hadn’t seen each other for twenty-eight years.
I don’t know any poets who know more language
than Edward did. He was trained to fluency in Vietnamese by the Army
Language School in Monterey; he had a degree in Chinese from the
University of Washington; he studied Japanese; he had dictionary
knowledge of French and Latin; he knew the classical and country
music canons; and he knew prosody and poetry in these languages.
So why shouldn’t I listen to a poet born in
China who was also a Christian minister for fifteen years, a man who
rescued me and saved my life thirty-five years ago from a funny
farm. We used to josh one another about the ordinary circumstances
by which we made our various livings. Far from the academy, the
market value of the revolution of the 60s had dropped precipitously;
Edward wound up selling insurance while I became a real estate
broker. In the old days he would drag me stoned to the U of
Washington library and read me Mencius in Chinese.
I published two books by Edward Smith through
Litmus Inc. in the 70s; The Flutes of Gama (still in print)
and Going. You can find new poems of Edward’s on-line at www.thetimegarden.com and
www.thetemplebookstore.com
under the
poetry party banner. Not famous yet but durable and deserving to be.
Edward also wrote a novel and incredibly credible criticism of
Theodore Roethke, Sharon Doubiago, Michael Palmer, Billy Collins. We
have video/audio of Edward reading at the WWPP03 and a CD of this
reading plus one he gave at the Zig Zag Gallery and Pot Shop in
Seattle in 1967. “For Ho Xuan Huong (1768-1839)” is his last poem.
For Ho Xuan Huong (1768-1839)
this long breath for you if you were alive
& sitting right in my living room, your
words on fire, your tight language leaping
the gap between your sexual nature &
another time, nation, mountains, trails
across the mist, kiss me, across
your female, dark-lipped, longing, the trail
is one pass after another, one people
expanding southward, think of
the tunnels they dug and ran in
when the aggressor threatened
& you hold now my other nature, my
patriotic being, sauntering between temples
built in Hue during the reign of the
Gia-long emperor, I weave through
your magnificent words, your sorrows
drift across my head, clouds, rain
breaking down all the barriers imposed
by philosophy, by words themselves
& I embrace the wind itself in your smile
& there is no barrier not crushed by
our dual music
O’Fallon
Dec. 16, 2003
Read a letter about Charles Potts and Edward
Smith from Denis Mair to Suzanne Lummis
Charles Potts operates The Temple Bookstore and Poetry School, which
produces poetry readings such as the Walla Walla Poetry Party. New publishing projects include selected early poems from Blue Begonia Press
in Yakima, Washington, and a critical edition of the long poem
"Compostrella/Starfield" from Time Barn Books in Nashville, Tennessee, with
an essay on the poem by Klyd Watkins.
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