In 2021, Howard County Poetry and Literature Society launched the Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize in honor of its founding member, Ellen Conroy Kennedy. Now in its forth year, contest judges evaluated many submissions for mechanics and technique, clarity, style/music for our contemporary age, imagery/sensory power, and emotional resonance. Congratulations to honorable mention winner, Jared Smith, and the poem “Reaching Into Rivers”. Read on to learn a little about the winning poet and to hear the poem recited.
Tell us about your poem “Reaching Into Rivers”. How did it come about? What sparked or inspired it
“Reaching Into the Rivers” was written after spending a day at the Conowingo Dam and witnessing the incredible power of the waters behind it, how the waters have been held back in the name of progress. I meditated about the miles of watershed above that dam, and the miles ahead before it enters into the Chesapeake. My musings about that combined with my readings in The New York Times and The Washington Post about the volume of water and pollutants that were carried in an average thundercloud as it moves across America, the volume of dust and pollution and industrial waste that sustains our society contained within that average thundercloud, the source of all our waters. I thought of how many rivers have been covered over in our search for progress by urban highways and other infrastructure as they move toward Chesapeake Bay and the oceans in general. Those rivers, I came to visualize, carry the pollution and hopes and rags of infrastructure development from all across our nation deep into the earth beneath Baltimore and our other cities as they move to the ocean. They carry our dreams, our efforts, and our history deep beneath the roads and buildings we move among and are aware of in our day-to-day lives, and without them our cities and our way of life would not exist. It is necessary to understand all that they carry within their life-giving waters in order to understand who and what we are. And this is doubly true because their presence is hidden from us. We do not see what they carve away from our foundations, nor what they add. Poetry is like this too, I think, in that it moves with tremendous force beneath the fabric of society and shapes the society, yet for many is largely hidden.
What was an early experience where you learned that language had power?
I first began to learn about the power of language when I was eight years old and attended a reading by Galway Kinnell from his first book, What A Kingdom It Was. That hooked me on poetry. I later developed a love for the epic poetry of Homer, and the lyric poetry of A.E. Housman and Robert Frost, followed by the formal intellectual poetry of Auden and the imagistic poetry of the young T. S. Eliot. The poetry and essays of Robert Bly then captivated me with the power and insights he illumined in nonlinear contemporary poetry. Ginsberg, Levertov, Sexton, Merwin, and their contemporaries set me free, with their devotion to the struggles and concerns of the common citizen. All of these poets have helped shape the culture of their time and ours through the power of their words and visions. I think of them as engaging in an eternal discussion across time contributing to an understanding of our place in the cosmos, and the dignity of the common man.
As a writer, what would you choose as your mascot/avatar/spirit animal?
My spirit animal is a wolf…a spirit that roams across the width of the American wilderness, demanding respect but making do with what it can.
Tell us about a writer or a book that you return to over and over for inspiration.
Poetic sources I reach back into most frequently include Walt Whitman, Bob Dylan, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Germanic epic The Neibelungenlied. These are diverse sources to bring to bear upon current contemporary poetry, but I think that the masters of the past give enhanced perspective to the works of our current poets and visionaries.
What are you working on next and where can we find you?
My vision and writing is generally driven by natural landscapes, though I have lived in both urban and rural settings. Although I started out as a poet in Greenwich Village, every book I have written draws on wilderness imagery and insights from a remote and primitive cabin I maintain in Colorado’s Roosevelt National Forest. My current home in Ellicott City, MD, backs onto a stretch of woodland populated by deer and foxes, and with a pond that is filled with frogs and all other manner of aquatic life. I walk the rivers and the seashore and the mountains. Through studying nature and meditating on it, I am better able in my writing to reach a better understanding of mankind, how we shape nature to our institutions, our struggle for simple human dignity, and our place in the cosmos. I will continue writing as long as it expands my knowledge. My website is at www.jaredsmith.info.
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