First, read this New York Times profile of Brooklyn’s new Poet Laureate.
Now, read the following, my profile of Hyde Park’s new Poet Laureate:
A Poet Who Doesn’t Do Yoga: S.E. Smith, Poet Laureate of Hyde Park
After S.E. Smith puts her battered espresso pot on the stove, she pads nearly barefoot, still wearing last night’s tights, about four feet over to her office, where a desk cohabits with three full ashtrays and dirty coffee cups. She takes in the sights and sounds of her neighborhood, Hyde Park in Austin: yuppies chastising their unfortunately-named children for sitting in the dirt, day laborers fixing the roof next door, self-satisfied bourgeois hippies opening bottles of kombucha. She opens her laptop and stares at a blank new document for a few hours. One day she started with the title GIRLS CHOIR WITH EXTRA AIR but it didn’t work, another day, with the title ARCTIC LONER ROCK, which also didn’t work.
“Then something takes over,” Smith says, “usually after two hours of catatonic silence and a few pots of espresso.” Over days like this, her usually bizarre inside jokes with herself turn into poems, none of which are about childbirth, such as “Trace Means Trail in Western America:”
Dummy, where are you?
All around us the future
prepares us for each other.
I am sick of everything,
even the things I haven’t
done yet.
Ms. Smith is no ordinary scribbler: she is an editor, published author, and Hyde Park’s new poet laureate, the first person and first woman to fill the austere, if self-bestowed post. But don’t be intimidated. One of her chief goals is to “fuck it up 2010.”
“People use the words, ‘okay, whatever’ a lot when they think of a poet,” she said between bites of a fried egg sandwich made by her imaginary boyfriend Renaldo, who quit his job as a Disney Imagineer to become Smith’s full time house husband. “But being a poet is anything but okay whatever.”
S.E. Smith, the Hyde Park Poetry Commission president, who, with the help of a selection committee, chose Ms. Smith from two applicants, said she was taken by her own unwavering enthusiasm for poetry in spite of massive apathy and her embodiment of Hyde Park’s principle demographic: over-educated people under the age of thirty who can’t get jobs and enjoy New Wave German cinema. It did not hurt that she was unfazed by the lack of salary, stipend, office or budget. “It’s like I gave her a fried egg sandwich, she was so happy,” Smith said of herself.
Hyde Park was the first of Austin’s neighborhoods to appoint an official bard, in 2010. The rest have not followed suit.
With enormously frizzy dishwater blond hair and a remarkable ability to pull off miniskirts and unwashed black tights, Ms. Smith is a particularly glamorous ambassador of an art form most often publicly celebrated only in modelesque mainstream body types with form-fitting leather pants in their closets. She speaks loudly, having grown up, she said, as an only child with a lot of gregarious imaginary friends. And the tights, she notes, are cheap chic, from Target.
Ms. Smith would love to see poems carved into Civil War statues and chiseled into Darque Tan billboards throughout Airport Boulevard; mindful of money woes, she might settle for Frederick Seidel poems muttered on the bus, “only to be washed away in a replica of people’s constant cycle of talking shit and talking more shit,” as she wrote in her winning application. She hopes to create a website to spotlight other Hyde Park poets if she can find any who aren’t afraid of the internet, and she yearns to bring them into the neighborhood’s coffee shops full of emotionally stunted man-children.
“I love that age, when it’s sort of a middle ground between being a teenager and still trying to be a teenager even though you’re 35 and work at the video rental store,” she said. “They won’t be afraid to put themselves at the center of things because they still haven’t yet learned that they aren’t actually the center.”
Even many of Ms. Smith’s writer friends find poetry okay and whatever, she said. But this is not about them.