Former Kentucky poet laureate Frederick Smock dies at 68

Frederick Smock, former poet laureate of Kentucky and longtime English professor at Bellarmine University, died Sunday of cardiac-related issues.

He was 68.

Smock was familiar to readers of The Courier Journal, where his book reviews regularly appeared for more than 35 years. Bellarmine announced his death Monday.

When Smock was named poet laureate in 2017, he declared that his goal was to bring poetry to the people of Kentucky.

In an interview in Bellarmine Magazine, he said, “I’m going to go around to people and just read poetry, (asking them simply to) sit with it and take it in, because people are not reading poetry much anymore. And being an educator, I want to talk about the joy we had as children and try to recapture some of that.”

In the scores of reviews that Smock wrote for this newspaper, he continuously shared his love not only of poetry, but also of some of the best prose of the latter part of the 20th century. Most of all, Smock delighted in the discovery of authors whose names weren’t household words, but who wrote as if they should be.

Smock grew up in Fern Creek, where his father, a radiologist who moved to Louisville from Owensboro, settled his family in the early 1950s. In those days, like much of suburban Jefferson County, the land was undeveloped, and young Fred’s imagination flourished.

It matured at Seneca High School, then at Georgetown College, and finally at the University of Louisville, where he studied under Sena Jeter Naslund, who was to become among Kentucky’s most beloved writers and author of “Ahab’s Wife” and “Four Spirits.”

“Fred was one of the first graduate students whose M.A. theses, a collection of original poems, I directed at U of L in the mid-1970s,” recalls Naslund. “We’ve been friends ever since.”

Around that time, young Fred went to work in 1978 as the first employee of a new, independent bookstore — Carmichael’s — on Bardstown Road at Bonnycastle Avenue.

Co-founder Michael Boggs remembered, “For the next 40 years he was a regular visitor, always taking time to chat with the staff, rave over a new author or poet or book he had discovered. In turn, he would quiz us about our own current enthusiasms.

“Fred was the very definition of a ‘book person,’ sustained by the writing he relished as well as produced,” Boggs observed. His spouse and co-founder, Carol Besse, said that Smock was just in the Longest Avenue store a few days ago to pick up his daily newspaper.

Naslund, who founded the Master of Fine Arts in Writing program at Spalding University, explained Smock’s broad appeal: “His poems and many beautiful books, often published by Larkspur Press, are gems with the vitality of flowers. Each of them exhibits something of his own kind and gentle manner, informed by a unique way of experiencing and reshaping what we thought was the world.”

Smock was a quiet man of letters with an adventurous spirit. Several weeks ago, he recalled a canoe trip with friends and family along the Green River in Western Kentucky with the Nature Conservancy more than 20 years ago. They laughed at the locals who were racing their big-wheeled jeeps in mud along the riverbanks like characters out of the movie “Deliverance.”

Smock was the antithesis of such folks, representing the gentler side of Kentucky that has been in earlier days represented by Robert Penn Warren, Alice Hegan Rice or Jesse Stuart, and more recently by Bobbie Ann Mason, Wendell Berry, Silas House and Naslund.

And he was able to defy stereotypes. When redoubtable feminist Sallie Bingham, a nationally respected writer in her own right, inherited a portion of the Courier Journal fortune in the 1980s, she hired Fred to edit the Kentucky Foundation for Women’s quarterly publication, American Voice. (Smock had a familial connection with the newspapers, being related to the longtime Courier Journal sports editor Earl Ruby.)

In the 1990s, he joined the faculty at Bellarmine. There he came to run the creative writing program, guiding a generation of students toward lives of letters.

In an interview, the current co-owner of Carmichael’s, Miranda Blankenship, said the stores continue to stock and sell Smock’s books and will probably have additional titles soon.

According to Bellarmine’s online tribute, Smock wrote five collections of poetry: “Gardencourt” (1997), “The Good Life” (2000), “Guest House” (2003), “The Blue Hour” (2010) and “The Bounteous World” (2013). His books of prose include “Poetry & Compassion: Essays on Art & Craft” (2006), “Pax Intrantibus: A Meditation on the Poetry of Thomas Merton” (2007) and “Craft-talk: On Writing Poetry” (2008).

Garrison Keillor read some of his poems on “A Prairie Home Companion” (heard locally on WFPL-FM). Smock received many awards including the Jim Wayne Miller Prize for Poetry from Western Kentucky University, the Wilson W. Wyatt Sr. Award from Bellarmine, and the Al Smith Fellowship in Poetry from the Kentucky Arts Council.

In 1996, the late Joy Bale Boone — founding editor of Kentucky Poetry Review — hailed Smock’s “This Meadow of Time: A Provence Journal” in a Courier Journal review: “It’s pleasant in every way to hold this small bright-jacketed book that falls naturally among those select literary finds that are described as gems.”

His life will be celebrated this fall at Bellarmine University, after students return to classes.

Keith L. Runyon retired as editorial page editor of The Courier-Journal in 2012. He was this newspaper’s book editor from 1989-2012.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Former Kentucky poet laureate Frederick Smock dies at 68