Maggie Smith:

Attending to Awe & Ash

When I first began re-awakening to poetry, Maggie Smith was one of the first poets to snag my attention. Her poems attend so tenderly to all the awe & ash of this, our momentary, Life. I say snag, because I felt plucked out of the wind & caught aloft by her words. A kite broken loose, lodged high in a tree. Newly captured with views of the whole horizon. She snagged me at a time when I was badly buffeted & really needed upholding.

For years, I carried her Good Bones collection to clinics & hospitals, reading her over & over. Her poem, “Let’s Not Begin,” caught my breath. It still feels especially powerful.

My capacity to feel joy & awe was flattened for decades as a side effect of trauma survival strategies. Awakening to poetry has become a spiritual practice of deep attention. I am learning how: to attune my heart to the inner dialogues between poems, my soul-self & the Spirit, to begin feeling at all, to feel my way deeper into both the shadows & light, to honor both the ashes & the awe, to limp toward healing.

Talking-back-to-poems (through poems) became a generative practice of speaking my story onto the page. First, this showed up as marginalia (see above.) Then, journaling. Then, my dialoguing leapt into “after” poems, using a specific poem as scaffolding for my reply. Maggie’s poem “Let’s Not Begin” was the first I ever “after”-ed.

Now, more than a decade after my first “after” poem, I’ve found my way into inhabiting new forms & a voice all my own. The journey into body/mind/soul healing will carry me through all my days, treading shadow & seeking light. An archeologist of self, I dig & brush gently among ash, looking for shards of my broken & slivers of awe. Lucent Splinter is the next iteration of my practice, page-rendered.

I’m so grateful for Maggie’s accompaniment in poems—to have been brought to her words at kairós, just the right time. I’m also ever grateful, to have had the privilege of learning from Maggie & becoming her friend.

To my beautiful, (much) younger, pixie-sister, used-to-be, sorta-kinda, Doppelgänger, Maggie Smith, XOXOX!

• Maggie’s new book Dear Writer is on the way April 1, 2025: Pre-order it and find ALL her books HERE!!!

• Subscribe to Maggie’s For Dear Life: Substack

• (BTW: I receive no payment for promotions on Lucent Splinter.)