Ali Smith’s Poetic Attentions

We call a poet a "poet's poet" when they're read mostly by other poets. By implication, a poet's poet is difficult or obscure or both. When I call certain novelists "poet's novelists," though, I mean something entirely different. I think of writers like Vladimir Nabokov, savoring the mouth-feel of "Lo-li-ta" along with his character.1 I think of William Faulkner, whose metrical experimentations I like as much or more than his narratological ones and whose novels often contain perfect iambs buried in the depths of their sentences. (I can never forget a majestic moment in the story "Delta Autumn": "No wonder the ruined woods I used to know dont cry for retribution, he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge."2) And I think, most of all lately, of Ali Smith, who is a poet's novelist par excellence because of the way she attends to the sonic and rhythmic properties of words in prose. 

Critics have tended to frame this kind of linguistic attention in Smith's work as "wordplay," favoring the twinned adjectives "playful" and "political" for Smith's writing rather than terms such as "lyrical" or "poetic" that often characterize prose writers who draw heavily on language's material properties. (See Charlotte Terrell's discussion of Smith's "wordiness," her "letterplay and wordcraft" and their transformative powers.) James Joyce is a common point of comparison for Smith, I suppose for the mimetic and onomatopoetic flexibility of his language. Writing in the New Yorker, James Wood refers to Smith as "pun-besotted": "much of the comedy and the fundamental cheerfulness in Smith's work," Wood writes, "has to do with the figurative consolations the pun embodies: that life is generative, and that, even as things split apart, they can be brought together. For the pun is essentially a rhyme, and rhyme unites."3 

By linking "pun" to "rhyme," Wood tips over from the language of prose and narrative, comedy and tragedy, to the language of poetry—another way of thinking about the poetry of Smith's prose. And I take Wood's point about puns and rhyme: it's true that rhyme often unites two things in both sonic and semantic similarity. Yet rhyme is as likely to disconnect as to connect; its essential quality has to do not with meaning but with sound. Unlike a pun, a rhyme can shudder free of meaning; it can exist for the ear and perhaps the ear alone. If punning stems from the intellect, from cleverness — "clever" is another word often applied to Smith's prose — rhyme is inseparable from the body, from the ear, and from the senses. As poet Charles Olson writes, in his zany 1950 manifesto for poets, "Projective Verse," "The HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE."4 Olson pairs this way of making meaning with a poetic mode that progresses from "heart" to "breath" to "line," but in both cases elements of the body — the breath or the ear — are crucial to the way poems happen.

Olson, a maximalist and rather arcane Modernist U.S. poet, seems a far cry from Smith, a contemporary Scottish novelist who is both worldly and approachable. And yet there is a common ground: the syllable. Here is Smith in a 2017 Paris Review "Art of Fiction" interview, in a sentence cut from the interview and then (thank goodness!) stealthily put back into the introduction by Adam Begley: "[t]he rhythmical unit of the syllable is at the back of all of it — the word, the phrase, the sentence, the syntax, the paragraph, and the way the heart moves when you read it."5 I love this especially as a necessary expansion of Olson's dogmatic schema: to the SYLLABLE to the ALL OF IT to the HEART. Like any poet, Smith knows that the most basic unit of physical language stands behind all writing, and that the engagement of the ear — or the senses, more generally — is inseparable from writing's meaning-making.

Perhaps there is nothing terribly remarkable in this observation. After all, Smith began writing as a poet, and she often seems to have the whole of Anglophone literary history at her fingertips. Smith's first novel, Like (1997), features the formerly intensely literary protagonist, Amy Shone, studying for her exams at Cambridge. Her more recent seasonal quartet re-writes Shakespeare's late romances; the first of them, Autumn, begins with a set of five epigraphs, three by poets (Shakespeare, Keats, and WS Graham). It's not uncommon to find lineated bits throughout the novels. Spring begins with a double prose-poem-ish invocation, the first from a querulous human "we" and the second from an imperious inhuman force that might be spring itself: "The truth is a kind of regardless / The winter's a nothing to me. / Do you think I don't know about power? You think I was born green? / I was."6 This invocation harnesses powers stereotypically reserved for poetry: the ability to speak for a general collectivity, the ability to throw a voice into the personification of an abstract entity. In Summer, a character thinks about the kind of escape from normative sentence structure that's brought on by the experience of that season: "Her inner grammar comes apart. Sentences don't have to comply. It's nice."7

But poetry is more than the stuff of (ample) allusion for Smith, and more than a deviation from the prose narratives and structures that constitute the novel form. Instead, Smith is almost constantly moving through a medium that is metrical — that is, by virtue of its being grounded in the syllable, material and sensual. So many of Smith's sentences come trailing clouds of metered glory: reading spring's lines, above, you can catch some kind of amphibrachic triple meter bumping along, vigorous as the season itself: 

Even Smith's phrase about the syllable triggers the echo of a rhythm I love, from W.B. Yeats's "Easter, 1916": "the stone's in the midst of all" resonates in "the syllable is at the back of all of it."8

In my favorite moment of Smith's poetry, in Summer, the character Sacha Greenlaw is 16 and writing a letter during lockdown to a refugee detained in a British detention center. Sacha's letters serve to introduce her as a character, and the epistolary situation is a pointed and effective critique of fortress Europe's deadly policies. But this letter concludes with an extensive definition of swifts, the birds whose arrival marks the beginning of the summer in Britain. "In case you don't know," writes Sacha to Hero, "they're birds that look like black arrows high in the sky. They are in fact a kind of grey colour, with a bit of white under their chin, and tiny heads shaped like crash helmets, wise eyes like black beads."9 This passage continues for a full page and a half, covering the birds' Latin names as well as their flying and eating and drinking habits, and situating the birds (Amy Elkins and Deidre Lynch call them "non-human migrants"), like the novel's human characters, in the violent precarity of migration:

This is a gorgeous passage, gorgeous for its evocation of the birds in such delicate detail and for the moving and timely narrative situation it sets up. What catches my ear, though, is the music of this last line, in which Smith somehow sounds a little like an unlikely combination of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Emily Dickinson in both syllable and sound (to use Dickinsonian terms for the magical intermingling of poetry and prose). In this line, not only do we get the internal rhyme of "sky" and "eye" to propel us soaring through the sentence, but also again the momentum of a triple meter: "than the EYE / or the BRAIN / or the SHAPE / in the SKY / of a BIRD (like that)". Working ingeniously through monosyllables, Smith uses these subtle anapests to set us flying. 

More, though: this music emphasizes the things of the world (eye, brain, shape, sky, bird), pairing the human facilities for perception (eye and brain) with the things they perceive (shape, sky, bird). This is, in miniature, the way poetry works. The syllable, Smith knows, is a shape like any other, a perceivable thing whose presence makes music and meaning. Sacha's letters bring the world of the bird in the sky to Hero; Smith's syllables bring it to us. This is important: a world without swifts is a world without summers; a world without syllables is a world without sound. Wallace Stevens writes in the poem "Esthétique du Mal" that "the greatest poverty is not to live / in a physical world."11 If our swifts are disappearing, our seasons shifting, and our innovations producing literally nonsensical places like the non-physical "metaverse," it seems all the more important that writers like Smith return us to the syllables, sounds, and senses of the real world in which we live. 

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Lindsay Turner (@tindsaylurner) is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She is the author of the poetry collection Songs & Ballads (Prelude Books, 2018) and the translator of several volumes of contemporary Francophone poetry and philosophy.

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