Tent brings poetic circus to Book Culture

It started with a journey. Columbia Ph.D student Lytton Smith was driving from Tennessee to Virginia when the idea for the arrangement his first book of poems, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, came to him.

“I wanted it to be in sections. I wanted a sense of settling into and then being unsettled and then moving on,” Smith said. Like the road trip he was on, The All-Purpose Magical Tent explores the acts of arriving and departing. It also examines what it means to read a book from cover to cover—Magical Tent has a hidden poem after the index in order to complicate the idea of the book as a fixed object.

The All-Purpose Magical Tent was published this month by Nightboat Books and is the winner of the 2007 Nightboat Poetry Prize. In his introduction to the book, poet Terrance Hayes glorifies Smith’s work: “Some poets labor for years—or record the music of aviaries and asylums—in search of a syntax this particular, this peculiar.”

Smith, who obtained his MFA in poetry from Columbia, is currently a Ph.D. graduate student in the English department and the teacher’s assistant for the course “Race, Gender, and Poetic Form.” He said he is excited to get the book into people’s hands, but he believes that its publication is a beginning rather than an end. He hopes that it will spark conversation, and does not want to write another book until these conversations have played out.

Reading through Smith’s surreal and edgy poems provokes contemplation about the limits of written language. Whether through an unfamiliar use of a word, provocative juxtapositions, or ellipses between sections, it seems as if Smith’s poems perpetually break new ground.

Smith’s training in Anglo-Saxon and admiration for poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins helped him become adept at creating compound words and odd word combinations. As he remarked, “Anglo-Saxon is an interesting language to work with since it’s at once completely recognizable for one who grew up speaking English, but also very strange.”

Smith’s body of work seems to play with this idea within the English language itself. The reader consistently wonders if something has been left out or missed. Where does the poem end? Where does a word begin? The reader becomes lost in the language, but for some reason is captivated by it.

This is exactly what Smith is trying to achieve. Heavily influenced by William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All as well as his peers in the MFA writing program at Columbia, Smith knew that “things needed to be said differently.” The All-Purpose Magical Tent certainly accomplishes his task. His sonic associations and keen attention to the multiple interpretations of a single word are reminiscent of Gertrude Stein’s attempts to rid words of common connotations and clichés.

Beginning the book is like stepping into a circus—the familiar becomes strange, and the strange familiar. Smith loves this kind of uncertainty. “How red is this red? How dusky is this dusk? I’m skeptical about poetry that seems to be certain of how language functions.”

On Thursday, April 2 at 7 p.m., Smith and two other Columbia writers and professors, Stephen Massimilla and Idra Novey, will be reading from their first collections of poems at Book Culture. This event will kick off National Poetry Month. “After five years of living here [in Morningside Heights], I’ve seen a number of readings there and bought way too many books,” Smith said. “So it will be surreal to see my book on the shelf.”