Biography

Among Dave Smith's books are Goshawk, Antelope: Poems; Onliness: A Novel; The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000; Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry; and Hawks on Wires: Poems, 2005-2010. Smith retired as Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry from Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Schedule

2:00 pm to 3:00 pm
State Library, Fifth Floor, Capitol View Room
The Louisiana Poet Laureate Presents Louisiana Poets, Part 2
with Jack B. Bedell, Randy Gonzales, Biljana Obradović, Karisma Price, Dave Smith, and Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin

3:15 pm to 4:00 pm
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Looking Up: Poems, 2010-2022

Looking Up collects more than a decade of new poems by Dave Smith. These include reflections upon events, animals, and people who prove to have a salutary significance to this poet, now approaching his eightieth year. He ponders the substantial changes wrought by retirement, which brings no expectations, no obligations, no role beyond what one has left, which prompts the question, What will you do now? Both the question and its answers are the subject of Looking Up, as Smith gives us poems as acts of attention, raptures, comedies, sardonic narratives, vignettes of grief and joy whose testimony shows that love is surely our core reality.