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Marcus Smith biography
last update:
27 Oct 12
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Ambit
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Poetry Salzburg
Recours au Poème
The Word Hoard
British-American poet Marcus Smith was born in Oxford and later his family moved from Buxton to America. He has published in many journals and anthologies in the US and UK, and his work has also appeared in Austria, France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland, Wales and Japan. He currently lives in London with his wife and three children.
Marcus has been a finalist for The Cinnamon Press Book Competition and has appeared in Ambit, Acumen, Envoi, Orbis, Stand and THE SHOp. In the US Able Muse, Atlanta Review, The Classical Outlook, Salmagundi, Slant and The South Carolina Review have published his work. He reviews for Envoi, Prairie Schooner, PN Review, Dark Horse, Staple, Rattle and
In his work Marcus says he “likes to play off his transatlantic background and experiences against one another while acknowledging that poetry should be accessible to all cultures.” He works in a variety of styles – lyric, formal, dramatic, epigrammatic and, more recently, a spontaneous process of poetry initially sent as texts and heard as songs on the street. Micro-reportage, verbal video clips, staccato lyrics, haiku and a hybrid of something quite new and direct come to mind. These works appear in his manuscript SEZ/suddenly everything speaks, portions and selections of which have appeared in The Rialto, Orbis, Staple, The Text and Recours au Poèmes and been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize.
Of his manuscript Visiting My Country the American poet and critic and Pulitzer-finalist David Wojahn has written: “Marcus Smith is a poet of the first order, and Visiting My Country is a debut collection that should in the very near future be well-published. Marcus Smith has both the prosodic chops and the imaginative drive that are key to the formation of a substantial career. Although the poems remain firmly rooted in the worlds of the senses and daily and domestic life, they also possess a narrative inventiveness, a kind of mythic realism, that makes the familiar consummately strange. M.Smith’s poems already possess the verve, resonance, and authority that we more typically expect from a writer much farther along in a career.”
His five poems on poetry p f are from The Great-Great Grandchildren of Edward Darley Boit, a manuscript that takes its name from perhaps John Singer Sargent’s most unconventional portrait, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. (The daughters never had children.)