Where Images Become Imbued With Time
Where Images Become Imbued With Time
By Jared Smith
2007, 62pp; The Puddin’head Press,
PO Box 477889, Chicago, IL 60647. $15.00

The center of Where Images Become Imbued With Time is the horrified, nightmarish sense that Smith lives full-time inside a sense of total evanescence. Nothing lasts or is permanent, And the poems are especially on target because they’re decidedly not sentimental, personal whimperings, but comments on the real-time industrial/post-industrial world that surrounds us: “Plants that have been dead so long they have withered beyond dust/turn turbines that reach through night to light our books./These things that grew from the sun/and were buried in stone/are lamps/and we are the moths drawn to them.” (“Fossil,” p.24).
As always, Smith has a strong sense of pan-cultural awareness, but unlike some of his earlier work, here the sense of transience is much more personal…and intentional: “I try to make myself aware of time, rather than clocks,/but am stifled by my shadows…Perhaps/we have lived here too long even for the mountains./If I do not have the strength to leave soon,/I will stay here until the earth grows cold.” (“Full Moon Above Main Street,” p. 25).
One of the why’s behind Smith’s sense of hopelessness is what seems to be the permanent sense of doom hanging over America, security check-point gates to be set up on highways (“The Gates Are Set to Close,” p.39), disease everywhere, terrorism always everywhere in the air (“The Little Things,” p.42), a thousand things that fill our threatened everydayness. A powerful, masterfully performed volume that articulates what we feel full-time but seldom can put into such trenchant insightful words.


Where Images Become Imbued With Time
Where Images Become Imbued with Time
Jared Smith
The Puddin’head Press
ISBN Number: 9780972433969

Reviewer: JoSelle Vanderhooft



Jared Smith is a prolific poet, and this is a very good thing, indeed. Just two years after the release of his outstanding spoken word CD, Seven Minutes before the Bombs Drop, Chicago-based Puddin’head Press has published a full-length collection of his inventive and linguistically rich poetry. Considering the close proximity of Seven Minutes and Where Images—not just in publication year, but in theme and language—some comparison is unavoidable. Like Seven Minutes before it, several poems in Where Images concern themselves with landscape (that of the American Midwest in particular) and the myriad ways in which people connect and disconnect from its beauty and rhythms. Many pieces, such as "Unforgiving," "Snowball, Gregory Corso, and a Village Stoop," and "With No Return Address" focus on human isolation and the insurmountable distances between the closest of friends, family and lovers—a central theme in Seven Minutes. Indeed, Where Images even republishes "Father," the best and most memorable track from the spoken word CD (and, in the interest of full disclosure, this reviewer’s favorite of Smith’s many poems).

Lest the reader think that Where Images merely revisits roads already traveled, it must be stressed that this new collection is not a carbon copy, but an expansion of those roads. In his new book, Smith not only elaborates on themes that seemed to haunt him throughout Seven Minutes, he also refines them. His newly published poetry is more charged, more urgent, more ardently political than that preceding it. In a notable departure from Seven Minutes, several poems discuss the ramifications—mostly negative—of humanity’s increasing dependence on technology. Some even approach the speculative in the same imaginative, curious way Bruce Boston’s work frequently does. Indeed, it is Smith’s boundless imagination in language, subject matter and style that make his latest collection every bit as successful and breathtaking as the previously released CD.

For Smith (who, surprisingly, once served as associate director of a private technical research laboratory), technology is often the cause of much human hubris; at the very least, it is the cause of dissociation from the natural world, and therefore the root of human misery. In "Not Time," for example, the concept of time associated with a "lithium-spewing" wristwatch is directly related to the limits people place on loving one another. In "A Mountain in a Suitcase," the ubiquitous personal computer stunts emotional growth by storing words forever, and thereby taking them perpetually out of context. One of the collection’s most striking poems, "The Alchemist’s Stone" (here reproduced in full), subtly criticizes the modern desire to view technology as a Philosopher’s Stone, the legendary alchemical substance believed to grant eternal life.

Joe Naper built a smithy at the edge of town
At a widening of the road, near the brook;
He wouldn’t have far to go to carry water to cool the load.
Only cicadas matched his hammer against the steel long days.
Horses road through night on wide blank eyes.
Grain came into town on metal feet and wagon wheels,
And Joe worked the smithy block year round, turning nails
for homes,
Turning yokes for oxen, heavy-handed blades for soil,
On this one-sided block of stone
That grew upon a field of tangled root and grain.
The corn doesn’t grow here anymore
Nor the grass grow eye high in the sunset wind.

As the sun rose, you could hear the hammer fall,
Shaping the air and town around it as we walked to the fishing hole.
Lunch pails began to fill our hands as the sounds swelled out.
Whistles blew at noon and trains swept through
A wrenches, screws and scraps of steel congealed from air
And shattered among the debris of autumn leaves we
Tripped among on our way to school, barefoot boys no more,
But soldiers carrying bayonets and lightening into night.
Cars came, malls opened, bands played from the metal he made,
And though Joe Naper is residing in the dust, he is forgotten;
His anvil which rings still concentric circles into permanence
Is draped with spider webs in Mary Conlon’s antique shop
Where Mrs. Lilly hunts for gifts for home.
But the corn doesn’t grow here anymore,
Nor the grass grow eye high in the sunset wind.

This is a powerful condemnation. Yet, for all his observations on the harmful, dehumanizing aspects of an increasingly mechanical existence, Smith is hardly a Luddite. At times, he finds a strange beauty in the changes technology has visited upon its creators. In the biblically-charged "The Word That Had Many Voices," for example, Smith describes how the Word, first manifesting in simple prehistoric human usage, eventually helped to usher in a socially and psychologically complex industrialization. Instead of describing the word’s shift towards the technological as a corruption, though, Smith marvels at the strange ways in which humans have evolved beyond the traditional definition of humanity:

There were so many ululations in the word that it beat a timpani
within itself
And the timpani became another word, no longer a timid smile,
Nor an engineering term, nor political solace, nor trade-off any
longer, nor
The word in the beginning.

This brief allusion to what many writers and scholars have described as the “post-human" condition hints at the speculative turn many of Where Images’ poems take. As in much speculative fiction and poetry, these poems concern themselves with the act of speculating, often about big and ultimately unanswerable questions: the transmutations of God’s word in "The Word That Had Many Voices," the near-miraculous transformation of fossil into energy in "Fossil," even the meaning of the deaths of dust mites and a lover’s inability to forget lovers past in the humorous "Little Cowboy Geniuses" and "Dead People," respectively. For a good sense of the speculative qualities in Smith’s current work, the reader need only turn to "What Light?" (here reproduced in full), a poem which aspires to the best of science fiction poetry:

What light would be lost,
how much warmth from the ground beneath our feet,
if all the stars but our sun were to go out?
Each one insignificant ... but all of them,
I think that we would freeze.

Where Images is not, however, a collection focused solely on technological and speculative themes. Readers who admire Smith’s attention to nature and to Midwestern life will find much to love in this collection, in poems such as "Leaves and Spit," "An Arborist’s Taxonomy," "Rivers in the Ocean" and "Roadhouse Restaurant & Grill." Those who admire the political charge of poems such as "Seven Minutes Before the Bombs Drop" will likely appreciate the constructive and never overbearing tone of "Nationbuilding," "The Gates Are Set To Close" and "Storm King Mountain," which artfully discusses the similarities between the dread Americans faced in the days before the Vietnam War and the dread we face now in the War on Terror. Brimming with big, beautiful ideas and skillful, nuanced language, Where Images Become Imbued with Time is, like Seven Minutes, recommended to readers who admire Robert Frost, Pablo Neruda and the Transcendentalist poets, as well as those who enjoy the work of speculative poets such as Bruce Boston and Marge Simon.