new work, 6 poems, ‘Poetry at Sangam’
Huge thanks to all at Poetry at Sangam and especially to guest editor Sophia Naz for selecting six poems of mine for Volume VIII / Issue 5 (December 2020)
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Sophia Naz:
Barton Smock is the poet about whom Kazim Ali said that “All the advanced degrees and publishing credentials in the world can’t get you the unspeakable duende that Smock somehow taps into, poem after poem.” Barton’s poems are diaphanous enigmas and the fact that they defy logic and can’t be neatly boxed into this or that category is precisely their beauty. God appears a lot in Smock’s poetry, but he is always a lower case god, disconcertingly intimate. The saints and Sufis of yore would recognize Barton Smock as one of their ilk.
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*The author photo is of me with my grandfather’s pipe…which means something to me for the right reasons. My last publication had a photo of me taken immediately after my grandmother’s graveside service. Such overlapping things are always from the future, it seems.
I don’t mind ending 2020 this way.
Read the poems, here
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