|
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||
|
|||
|
ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT Carol Houck Smith: An Editor Remembered It’s still hard for me to register that when I first met Carol Houck Smith, more than two decades ago, she was already in her sixties. You wouldn’t have guessed it, either—she didn’t want you to guess it, and was coy with dates: when she graduated from Vassar, when she came to New York City, when she first started at W.W. Norton in a clerical job. When I met her, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, she was a Vice President at Norton and a Senior Editor, a vibrant, intelligent, other-directed woman who clearly loved writers, and writing, and being at the center of that world. At the time, Norton had published my third 3rd book, but she was not my editor; she didn’t edit poetry then. We got to know each other a little better on the Board of AWP, and when my editor fell ill, she stepped in as my shadow editor, behind the scenes; when he died, I lobbied her to take me on officially. By then, she had one poet in her stable—Stephen Dunn—but claimed she didn’t really know anything about poetry. Maybe so, I responded, but you know about making books. Eventually, she was the editor for more poets than anyone since Harry Ford—including prize-winners Rita Dove, Maxine Kumin, Stanley Kunitz, and Gerald Stern. She saw her role as a representative “lay reader.” If she didn’t “get” a particular poem, you needed to show her how to read it so she would. I don’t think she was as assertive with her poets as she was with her fiction writers—Andrea Barrett, Rick Bass, Charlie Baxter, Ron Carlson, Pam Houston, Joan Silber, Brady Udall, are some of them—but she didn’t soft-pedal her reactions to any of us, and she certainly did know how to make beautiful, beautiful books. “Sinkage,” she’d say—“the poems shouldn’t be crowded on the page.” She also knew how to coax us out of petulance, or stubbornness, or idleness. My fifth book, Kyrie, is a book-length sonnet sequence because she kept nudging me to write “a few more of those poems about the Influenza Epidemic.” She also loved—loved—the hunt, the discovery, the electrical charge of something or someone just emerging from the chrysalis. At Bread Loaf, she’d be out on one of the porches all day long, for several days in a row, talking to anyone who signed up to talk to her, to summarize for her the project they were working on (or dreamed of working on) and show her a few pages. She’d also manage to find out the basic plot-points of each one’s life story. Being with young writers was her energy source. When I saw her a few weeks before she died, she was lobbying me to read Todd Boss, who had joined Beth Ann Fennelly and A. Van Jordan on her list of young poets. Sometimes, she’d ask me what I thought about a manuscript or a poet, but she had no interest at all in what was fashionable, what was “in,” nor could she be persuaded to like or dislike some particular work: rather, she was gathering arguments for why it was good, cast in the language poets use about poems, ammunition for making her case at the editorial meetings. Carol was adored—revered even—at Norton. No one there now would remember the petite blond fresh out of Vassar, determined to be taken seriously in a seriously male-dominated sphere, but everyone there now arrived at a place lit by her passion, her attention, her devotion. She believed profoundly that literature matters; she also believed that we—her writers, yes, but all the writers she met at AWP, or Bread Loaf, or Writers-at-Work, or at readings in New York City, and those she hadn’t met yet but wanted to meet—she believed that we matter, and her faith in us was contagious. I don’t know how many like her—not that there ever were many like her—still exist in the publishing world, which is changing radically and rapidly, but she wouldn’t have tolerated that kind of complaint; she was always looking forward, eager to be part of what was just coming into focus. Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton, 2007), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her essays on writing have been collected in The Flexible Lyric (University of Georgia, 1999). She has received numerous grants and awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writing Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a James Merrill Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In Memoriam | Carol Houck Smith
|
|||
 |
|
|
