Dale Martin Smith is a poet, editor, literary scholar, and professor at Toronto Metropolitan University. He is the author of the poetry collections The Size of Paradise, Flying Red Horse, Slow Poetry in America, Black Stone, American Rambler, as well as the Knife Fork Book chapbooks, Sons, and Blur. Born in Dallas, he earned a BA and PhD in English from the University of Texas, and an MA in Poetics from New College of California. Smith’s scholarly contributions include Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent after 1960 and two edited editions, An Open Map: The Correspondence of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson and Imagining Persons: Robert Duncan’s Lectures on Charles Olson. His essays and poetry have appeared in Poetry, The Walrus, LA Review of Books, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary. With Hoa Nguyen, he edited Skanky Possum, a literary zine and book imprint, from 1998 to 2004. His essay collection, That Tongue Be Time: Norma Cole and a Continuous Making, is forthcoming from University of New Mexico Press.
Selected poems
by Dale Martin Smith
Self-surveillance delivers the new “me”
in corporeal entrapment. I present
myself to the sky. What I had wanted
was not to forget, like when I was a child
and desired to remember what or where
I had been before I was born. Or
tried to recall all that comes after me
in a future I cannot witness, flooded
footprints reduced to mud. Not me but what
“me” contains, transmits, sentences to
particular instances of movement.
Windows open patio by evening
traffic’s flatness. Spilled purchases, gas grill.
There is a wound the size of paradise.
Copyright © 2024 by Dale Martin Smith, The Size of Paradise, Knife / Fork / Book