Charlie Smith has written five New York Times Notable Books and has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Nature's Nature
May/June 2017
Wilderness
the rain like drops of cold leadit’s hard in this city to keep a grip on the natural world poking its snout through the wovenwire fence on 7thor while ordering […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
Winter Mornings in Kendall
… the streets become marginal about now. Large gray tendencies just established in the dark, the aged bougainvillea pulling itself together so you know there's going to be a […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
Hollyhocks
… rosettes, or like those figs packed in a wheel: hollyhock blooms stripped back to seed cases, summerworn capsules like tires racked at a Gulf station in the dusty West […]
Poetry
Spring 2005
Jargon
I got up early, winked at the wife, went out and chopped a load of wood. I set the smoker on its pins and went to work. This was […]
Poetry
Spring 2003
I Mean Everything I Say
A boy’s first fistfight he’s crying all the way through it, sumptuously alive, and the girl raging in her room against the elite of the earth, it’s so unconventional, emotion […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
Kicking
When we broke up I removed all traces from the house. The little plastic vials, the inside out glassine bags stamped with names: CORVETTE, GRAND PRIX, LEMANS, dumped the hospital […]
Poetry
Summer 2000
Heroin
I left a message for my publisher to send copies of the contracts to my new agent, and then I read a passage about how no one talks about heroin […]
Poetry
Summer 1998
The World as Will and Representation
. . . dissatisfied egotistical state: Schopenhauer’s way of putting things, thinking about us: we are terribly agitated, he says, no hope for us in good works, or in facts. […]
Poetry
Summer 1998
Day Twenty-Four Seven
Each day arrives in pieces, it’s easy to put together, every- one does it, the functions appear, those paid to revolve rapidly begin, others gape, some welcome despair, a righteousness […]
Poetry
Summer 1990
The Dogwood Tree
Just beyond the summer house I reach above my head to pull down strings of flower mesh, vines corroded in the castor trees, ropes of reddish blooms, something mad, a […]
Poetry
Summer 1990
Stare
Sometimes you make me stand up in the bright room and take all my clothes off; you sit spectacularly on the sofa, letting the full lust-ache appear in your face […]