A Spectator to the Wild: In Conversation with Carolyn Smart

Carolyn Smart introducing the Bronwen Wallace Award in Toronto, May 2014 A garden, a shade tree, a summer afternoon, a great bookshop , food and wine, music and poetry ... that's Tamworth, where I recently met up with Carolyn Smart as she read from her forthcoming book Careen. SUSAN GILLIS: What brought you to poetry? CAROLYN SMART: I grew up in a highly competitive literary family: my father was a Commonwealth Scholar who studied with Robert Frost at Harvard; my mother’s tutor for her “Reading and Writing” program at Sarah Lawrence College was Joseph Campbell. She read ee cummings aloud to me when I was a young girl and I fell in love with the power of language very early on. I found myself writing Harlequin Romance-type short stories while in a freezing cold boarding school on the Sussex coast of England. It wasn’t until I discovered the poetry of Leonard Cohen when I was 16 that I turned my hand to poetry, and have rarely looked back. I owe so much to a superb hig