‘Medicine Year’: Poet Thomas R. Smith writes about surviving pandemic’s crises with his wife

Mary Ann Grossmann, Pioneer Press
·11 min read
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“Ever since learning of ‘The Year of My Life’ by the classical Japanese haiku poet Issa, I’ve entertained the idea of doing such a collection myself, and 2020 was my year for it if ever there was one.” — Thomas R. Smith in “Medicine Year”

It was the day before Christmas Eve, 2019, when Thomas R. Smith was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Emotionally shocked, he began to nod off after dinner and his wife, Krista Spieler, drove him to the emergency room from their home in River Falls, Wis. The next morning, Smith realized there was something wrong with his lethargic wife.

“Struggling her into coat and boots, an awkwardly new catheter night-bag hooked to my belt under my long winter coat, I drove us back to the ER where after hours of waiting and testing on the busy holiday it was determined that Krista had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke in her right frontal lobe,” Smith writes in his new book of poems, “Medicine Year” (Paris Morning Publishing ($15).

After Smith had surgery and Krista came home from 44 days in the hospital, COVID locked down the country through 2020.

“I was writing like crazy,” Smith recalls of the pandemic year. “I wrote 260 rough poems, which is probably twice my normal output in a year. I kept writing and hoping quality was consistent. I decided some weren’t bad. By the fall I realized I had a book.”

“Medicine Year,” which Smith describes as “our dual crises,” tells the story of those 12 months in the couple’s lives, but it is not really about medicine; these are love poems, written by a man who will do anything for his wife.

In “You Don’t Know What Love is,” Smith watches tenderly as his wife carefully eats mashed potatoes while learning to recover basic motor skills:

“Those eyes send you back

to all that wishful talk in your teens

and twenties about ‘love,’ to which your pretended

knowledge…”

Smith’s publisher, Julie Pfitzinger, saw “Medicine Year’ as love poetry as soon as she read the manuscript.

“When we think of a love story in a book or poetry we think of young people,” Pfitzinger says. “Thomas tells a story lots of couples go through when they get older and face challenges like uncertainty, loneliness. He and Krista lifted one another up and came out relatively unscathed. The way Thomas tells the story is hopeful without sugar-coating. He’s a beautiful writer. He’s talking about how when people are young and in love it’s golden, but you don’t know what love is until you are here in this space, watching your wife eating mashed potatoes.”

“Medicine Year” was brought to Pfitzinger’s attention by award-winning St. Paul baker/poet Danny Klecko, whom she also publishes. Klecko used one of Smith’s poems in his collection “Lincolnland,” but the poem has nothing to do with Old Abe. It’s about the Beatles, one of Smith’s passions along with the Beat poets – Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso, and Ferlinghetti.

“So many poets write from ego. Thomas writes from beauty,” Klecko says. “I believe his work is more honest than that of those Beats he admires. Words can’t express the benefit I’ve received from his kindness and willingness to take me under his wing.”

For love of nature

Living away from the Twin Cities literary community means Smith, an admitted introvert who likes to work quietly, is not as well known as he should be. Too often he’s recognized as Robert Bly’s secretary for almost 30 years.

Even poetry-lovers may not know that Smith, who is 74, is an internationally published poet, essayist and editor, currently teaching at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.

He’s the author of nine previous books of poems including “Windy Day at Kabekona: New and Selected Poems,” and “Storm Island.” Both shine with his love of the inhabitants of the environment, fed by daily walks along the Kinnickinnic River alive with wildlife and birds – cormorants, herons, and eagles.

Smith explores the relationship of the poet to nature in his other new book, “Poetry on the Side of Nature,” which incorporates parts of his lectures at the Loft. Subtitled “Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival,” (Red Dragonfly Press, $18), he calls the book “a long essay about the Western nature poem as environmental protest.”

For instance, how many of you have heard of French poet Francis Ponge’s `The Oyster?” Smith tells you about Ponge, among others, and why his poem is important in nature writing.

Making his case for the importance of the poet and nature, Smith writes:

“The Swedish poet Harry Martinson … wrote that if we ‘view nature as omnipresent, central and universal … Nature writing can then become the most central of all literary genres.’ By revisioning the nature poem as more versatile in its style and approach than we have generally granted it, I hope to support that central position Martinson claimed for it.”

A long and winding path

“My serious time as a poet began when I was 30,” Smith recalls. “That’s practically what’s known as a late bloomer. So I had to make up for lost time. My first collection, ‘Keeping the Star’ (New Rivers Press) came out in 1988 when I was 40. I thought it would change my life, and it did in certain ways. It didn’t turn into a big seller, but it did all right. It was special to me because it was my first and I learned the process leading up to publication – fraught, trial and error. It’s easier now.”

Smith grew up near Chippewa Falls, Wis., a few miles from beautiful Brune Island State Park, another place that fed his love of nature. His parents, too, appreciated the outdoors.

“My origins are strongly working class,” he says. “For much of my childhood, my father Pete owned and operated the town’s bowling alley.” His mother, Myra, was a housewife and later worked as a secretary.

Writing was an important part of Smith’s youth. When he was 13, he wrote fan letters to a couple of professional writers he admired, Wisconsin-based August Derleth, author of more than 100 books in many genres, including a series set in the fictional town of Sac Prairie, Wis., and Robert Bloch, who wrote “Psycho” among others.

“I was young and foolish and uninhibited,” Smith says with amusement of writing to Big Name authors. “They wrote back and both kept our correspondence going for a few years. This was important to me. They seemed to like my writing efforts and that gave me confidence to project myself toward a life of writing. I couldn’t have done it without these long-distance mentors.”

In the spring of 1970 Smith dropped out of the University of Wisconsin at River Falls because he felt he was on the wrong career path.

“It was the time of Kent State (student killings), bombings of Cambodia, student strikes,” he recalled. “I already knew I was headed toward a writing life. Education, as I saw it, was heading me toward a teaching career and I didn’t want that. I was a fairly disciplined writer by then and I kept writing. I spent my hippie years in my 20s roaming. At 29, I bought a one-way ticket to Europe and spent a year rambling around various countries.”

Krista, an artist, came into Smith’s life in 1978 when he had returned to River Falls from Europe, where he’d been inspired by the young people who knew so much more about their national literature than Americans know about theirs.

Thomas and Krista met at the local food coop and married in 1985.

“We met at a time when we were still young,” he recalls. “I was 30, she was four years younger. We did lots of crazy things. After we married we quit our jobs, put our whole household in somebody’s basement and took a long honeymoon in Europe.”

When they returned, they lived in Minneapolis’ Prospect Park and decided they would try to work only part-time jobs to subsidize their artwork.

“We pretty much did that,” Smith recalls. “There were stretches when we took on full-time, ordinary jobs.” Among Smith’s was working at Natural Resources Corp., which contracted with Hennepin County suburbs in a low-income weatherization program.

He had just quit a job when Robert Bly was looking for an assistant. It was a match made in literary heaven.

A mighty influence and friend

Smith first heard of Bly from his English teachers at River Falls, one of whom was well-known Minnesota poet Jim Lenfestey. They gathered in a van in 1969 and drove to the University of Minnesota to hear Bly and a “moveable troop of poets flying around the country doing anti-Vietnam war readings,” Smith recalls. “We ended up at a party on West River Road, all sitting under a table in the living room and playing guitars and singing.”

The men met on a more personal basis five years later in River Falls and got to know one another socially in the 1980s.

In 1990 Bly’s book about the men’s movement, “Iron John,” became a bestseller.

“Suddenly, Robert was swamped with correspondence,” Smith says. “He needed a regular assistant. I was free of employment and the right person for the job.”

Smith worked with Bly until the internationally-known poet and translator, who changed American poetry with his publications “The Fifties” and “The Sixties,” died in November, 2021.

“Robert was exciting to be around,” Smith says. “He was continually inspiring, the way he was always changing, adventurous, writing a new kind of poem.”

Smith describes his mentor as being “a very big figure, with a large public persona, partly because of his energy and generosity. As a person, he was so robust, with many acts of personal generosity. He had foibles and contradictions like everyone, but that made him more human and more interesting.”

The pair sat side by side while Smith typed Bly’s poems, took care of correspondence and kept track of Bly’s work.

“Frequently Robert would ask me whether a line or an image in a poem worked,” Smith said. “That was tremendously flattering. Here I am, an apprentice poet, being asked my opinion by Robert Bly. I took this seriously as an education.”

Mike Hazard, who made a film about Bly, remembers shooting a scene with Bly and Smith:

“Robert was dictating a complicated legal letter and Thomas’ fingers were just flying over the keyboard. I never saw anyone type so fast. This was when there were no computers and he had to get it right the first time.”

Smith agrees he and Bly worked very fast, “like there was an electric current between us.”

Ruth Bly, Robert’s widow, said her husband was grateful to Smith for years of dedicated service to the family.

“Thomas has been and is a huge part of our lives,” she said. “Robert was lucky to have him. He made sure that whatever was planned for Robert was carefully and thoroughly thought out. Robert kept everything in his head so it was a relief for him to have Thomas so familiar with his work.”

Ruth recalled how, when her husband became sick, Smith was important to the process that produced Bly’s “Collected Poems” (Norton, 2018).

“Thomas brought in every version of a single poem, where it appeared and when. Robert would read aloud all the versions and decide which was best,” she said. “If Thomas hadn’t had a notion of these details, Robert could not have put the book together. After Robert died, Thomas came to visit. It was a wonderful experience, that kindness in him.”

A mature poet

When Smith is asked about how he has grown as a poet, he says he can’t be objective. But he gives a thoughtful answer:

“When most of us are starting out, we have a kind of base that we work out of, usually involving some poet who has inspired us. We don’t write poetry unless we see something in it as an opportunity for expression. Bly was my base. Eventually, as we get older and more experienced in the world, we realize our sphere of consciousness is larger than our base. There are areas of our interests and personality that hadn’t gotten into our poems. Then we expand our range. Today I say and tell things I wasn’t able to 25 years ago. The beauty of poetry is it can touch on and develop all subject matters. None is off-limits.”

Lighthouse

So much has happened to us and around

us since Christmas surgeries and viruses,

so much has changed in us and in the world,

we might easily forget if we didn’t

take special care to remember that,

fear and turmoil not withstanding, today

is the anniversary of that first

morning we woke together in the same

bed and found in our love a lighthouse

throwing its beam over the waves of our lives

to guide us home on seas placid or

stormy to this sun-lit harbor in a

summer land where hearts seek shelter and

come at last to anchor in each other.

— Thomas R. Smith’s entry for July 4, 2020, in “Medicine Year.” Used with permission; Paris Morning Publications.

If You Go

What: Thomas R. Smith hosts a free reading celebrating publication of “Medicine Year” and “Poetry on the Side of Nature.”

When/where: 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15, SubText Books, 6 W. Fifth St., St. Paul

Publisher/price: Paris Morning Publications ($15)

Information: subtextbooks.com

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