Poet, Tree, Gift From Chicago
the chaotic slate of starlight,
regretless love, while the lake curls away and
It is called Chicago.
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“My intention was to come up with a unique angle,” Smith had replied. Spoken like a journalist, if not like Yeats. Her tree would have feelings. Her tree, at whatever risk of echoing Kilmer, would be almost sort of human. Her tree would also be her tree, rooted in the bedrock of her memory.
“When I was a kid I was haunted by the trees silhouetted along the lakefront,” Smith had said. “As I was writing it, I was feeling this was a poem that couldn’t have taken place anywhere else.”
“Usually the last line will come to me and then nothing else and I just leave it alone,” Smith told us. “I drop the line down, and at three o’clock in the morning I’ll get another line, and the rest of the poem will come spurting out. I don’t revise a poem once I’ve done it. I think it came out that way for a reason.”
