Simon Smith

Free Verse Editions
Edited by Jon Thompson

Information and Pricing
978-1-60235-396-1 (paperback, $15.99); 978-1-60235-407-4 (PDF, $9.99). © 2018 by Parlor Press. 162 pages.

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Reviews

Ian Brinton. Review. Tears in the Fence. https://tearsinthefence.com/2018/04/09/day-in-day-out-by-simon-smith-parlor-press-usa/ (April, 2018).

"Many of Simon Smith’s poems are anchored firmly in the concrete but it is the spaces between the pictures, the cadences, the quiet and unjudging adjacency of people and objects that make their reality moving."

What People Are Saying

Simon Smith's series of poetry journals is a plate of spinning, stunning experience. With his renowned poetic skill, Smith quietly and carefully shifts from the panoramic into the still frame of the inner life with its familiar daily worries. . . . Day In, Day Out is washed in the meals of new potatoes, sautèd cabbage leaves, the wine of Château Moulin de Honternieux Médoc (2012), Dogfish Head IPA, pizza salad with sparkling wine. It's a delicious journey. —Elaine Randell

There's a history of English language poets transplanted to places ostensibly sharing the same tongue (Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams, Kenneth Rexroth in the UK; Charles Tomlinson, Thom Gunn in the USA). For these writers, the ordinary becomes the exotic. Their responses might be like those of a Martial transported from Spain to the Roman capital, with an outsider's ability to detect the fine (or gross) echoes of Empire amid the detritus. Simon Smith joins these ranks. He is a Paul Blackburn for the information age. —Laurie Duggan

Simon Smith's work continues to be an essential reminder of the possibilities of poetry in the present moment. Day In, Day Out serves up quickly paced journal poems bursting with the details of the everyday life of travel, transience, and self-imposed displacement. Ghosted by his recently deceased father and Paul Blackburn's own journal poetry, Smith generously tells "everything I know" about time, impermanence, and the ordinary scintilla of the moment grasped as at once fleeting and overwhelmingly real. The devil—and the divine—is in the details. —Stephen Collis

Description

Day In, Day Out is a book of journal poems mapping the time period between 11 April 2012 and 27 June 2014—on the track of American poet/translator Paul Blackburn – between San Diego and Brooklyn, with stop offs in New York City, London, Vancouver, L.A., and Glasgow.  Each poem is in the moment of its detail and the materiality of its experience, which only these foreign eyes passing through and about and around those distant places can realise.  Its pacing is breakneck and nonchalant, hysterical and insouciant, blurred, with a pin-sharp focus. This is poetry fully alive to its particular time and place, steeped in the precision of its perceptions and the act of perceiving.  This is a book that telescopes the long-distance of the past into the talismanic immediate, articulating and attending to particularity over generality in the process. It is a book that explores and interrogates the world by plane rather than road, tips straight ahead, attuned to attention itself.

About the Author

Simon Smith has published five collections of poetry. His third collection, Mercury (Salt Publications), was long-listed for the Costa Prize in 2007. A selected poems, More Flowers Than You Could Possibly Carry, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2016, and his latest pamphlet is Salon Noir (Equipage, 2016). He holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow.

Contents

CONTENTS: Acknowledgments, ZEROFOURZEROFIVEZEROSIXTWENTYTWELVE, Airlane Avenue, 12/4/12, Friday, Thirteenth, 4/14/12, Venice Beach, 11781 W. Sunset Blvd. (reprise), 04/17/12, 'and close your eyes with holy dread', 4/19/12, Poem with a Line Altered from a Translation by Paul Blackburn, International Date Line, Two Days Old, Twenty-Three-Oh-Four-Twelve, 24/4/12, NFT, Canterbury Tales, Rehearsal, Letter, Yesterday's: with a Poem Attached by Paul Blackburn, & my Entry for the Day Before Yesterday , Rain, Miles, Ode in the Shape of a Lament, May Day, Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, Monday's Blues , Greenwich Meridian, 'Fullset £10', Jubilee, Begin Again, The Queen's Speech, The Music of Sauchiehall Street, Feedback, Song Thrush, Days , Stan's Day, Heritage Hotel , Monday's Blues (Part II) , Leaving , Last Leg, Due North , Allen Fisher / PLACE, Travelodge, At Table Eight, ZEROSEVEN, I, II, III, 26 POEMS: CALIFORNIALAND IN WINTER, Solo – in Memory of His Father, Amsterdam, Arrival/New World, First Day in a New World, 12th February 2014, Out Walking, Sunday, Big Pink, 100% Happy, Pool, Flâneur, La Jolla Inventory, Temescal Canyon, The Canyons, Attention, California, Human Scale, Superba, Vancouver, Sunset, The Order of Things, 11781 W. Sunset Blvd. Reprise Reprised, Towards, Californialand in Winter, Poem Beginning and Ending with Today, Goodbye, La Jolla, THE F TRAIN, Delancey Street, May Twenty-First Twenty Fourteen, Storm, Hang a Left, Memorial Day, Twenty Fourteen, The 'F' Train, Lunch Poems, Church Avenue, Riding the F Train, Transcontinental, Morning, Flatbush, Corner of E. 10th and Church Avenue, Hudson, Lunch Follows Dinner, Philadelphia, Downtown/Uptown, Midtown, a Friday, Chelsea, Sunday, Sunday, The Blue Note, Seen from the 'Q' Train, Free Verse Editions, About the Author