When Rod Smith last appeared at Small Press Traffic many years ago, he was the boy wonder of the sizzling hot Washington DC poetry scene. His gifts as an editor had long been acknowledged but his consummate mastery of post-modern poetic style was just coming to the surface. From young turk to elder statesman, look at him now. Poetry is the quickest of all the arts: you know nothing one minute and you know everything the next, and no one knows this with more feeling, more empathetic intelligence and wide-ranging experimentalism, than Rod Smith. "Let thy rod be my staff," says the Bible. "For the last shall be first." Two new books, The Good House and The Given, are forthcoming in 2001.
January 12, 2001

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