Student Reaction to Poet Maggie Smith Reading at Ashland University (10/23/19)
By Melan White
Poems packed with grace, pain, power, and nostalgia stuck with audience members long after they were read aloud on a Wednesday afternoon. On October 23, 2019 English department students, university professors, staff, and community members gathered to hear Maggie Smith read her work. Smith’s poems carry us from the corn fields of Ohio to the depths of the blue skies, and are packed with universal truths and the thoughts of a young Midwesterner. Smith writes from her own lived experience-- she writes as a mother, as an Ohian, and tries not to write as an editor (even though she is one). Smith is well known for her poem “Good Bones,” but it is just a sampling of the breadth of her work. The final lines of Smith’s poems leave readers in awe, wonderment, and a simultaneous deep understanding and deep questioning of the world around us.
As a junior, a Creative Writing and Mathematics double major, and a student athlete, it can be hard to find time to attend events on campus like this one. I was grateful to be able to attend, I felt both honored and inspired to listen to Maggie Smith read her work. Towards the end of the reading when Smith was reading her poem “Let’s Not Begin,” I had this moment of deja vu. I focused in on Smith’s words and realized that I had heard her work before. I was a member of a writing community in my hometown and we would open our writing time with Smith’s poems. It was such a great moment to be able to put a face to the words that had moved me so many times before.
