CULTURE

WORDS

DISTINCT VOICE

Spokane poet Kathryn Smith. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO

Spokane poet Kathryn Smith’s new book offers sometimes scary, often stunning look at our world

BY DAN NAILEN

The poem, even the lifelong pull of actually being a poet, comes from some mysterious place.

There was no one poem that inspired Kathryn Smith and sent her on her path, at least not that she recalls. Not a particular teacher in high school, or a poet newly discovered, that gave the 43-year-old an “aha!” moment.

“I did kind of grow up interested in it when I was in high school, and started reading poetry,” Smith says. “It was just something I connected with, and that interest and fascination continued, I guess.”

That’s a bit of an understatement.

Smith’s new collection, Self-Portrait with Cephalopod, arrives Feb. 9 via Milkweed Editions, and it’s already won a Jake Adam York Prize given to an outstanding first or second collection of poetry. It’s a follow-up to her Book of Exodus and her prize-winning chapbook Chosen Companions of the Goblin.

The works in the 88-page Cephalopod veer from intense and disturbing to laugh-out-loud hilarious, as Smith addresses everything from environmental disasters and the natural world to personal loss and celebrity culture as reflected by the media. While the subject matter might sound like it sprawls, the poems collected make it obvious you’re reading a distinct voice. And an intense one at that.

INHERITANCE

BY KATHRYN SMITH

We’re both afraid of the brain deteriorating before the body

and of swimming, or drowning, which, to me, seems the same.

When I was small, I was certain that one day the padded wall

of the elementary school gymnasium would open to flood the room

with chlorinated water. What made me believe such a thing

would happen? There’s a photograph of me as an infant crawling straight

for the incoming tide. Somewhere in the few years between, fear

crept in like an insect, so light you can’t feel it until it bites.

She knows deterioration of the body already, and the brain fog that follows

like an overprotective parent. Love is knitted there, in the vessel I will wash

with a damp cloth when she is dying. Will I? I am not tender, impatient

with requests, though I’ve been known to bathe an ailing hen, to shoo ants

intent on thieving grubs from a wasp’s fallen nest. Yesterday, I reached a blind

hand to prize lettuce from its root and plunged the tip of my index finger

straight into a wasp’s stinger. Now everything I point to is pain. Last time

she called, she asked what she should do with the stack of music she found

shoved in the hall closet, blooming with mold. It was her mother’s, so she

was sad to lose it, but she didn’t know what she was going to do with it anyway.

From Self-Portrait with Cephalopod by Kathryn Smith (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2021). Copyright © 2021 by Kathryn Smith. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org

FEBRUARY 4, 2021 INLANDER 33

CULTURE | WORDS “DISTINCT VOICE,” CONTINUED...

Of course, in conversation you’ll be talking to a self-effacing self-described introvert her friends know as Kat. Asked about the first poems she ever wrote, Smith laughs and says, “I probably started in high school. We won’t be talking about those.”

After growing up in Port Angeles, Smith got an English degree from Whitworth and returned to Spokane after a few years in California to pursue poetry and earn her MFA from EWU’s creative writing program. She graduated in 2004 “and just kind of stuck around” the area.

One of the poems in Cephalopod was actually written when she was still in grad school; the most recent work is around two years old. The collection’s been pulled from a deep well of someone who’s been writing consistently for the better part of 20 years (in addition to working in visual arts like embroidery and collages, and crafting handmade journals sold under the name Paper Hermitage).

“Sometimes I don’t start with an idea necessarily,” Smith says. “I start with a line that comes to me, or I see something and I kind of have that image, and I want to find a way to enter that image. I guess I approach it in a lot of different ways.”

Smith’s voice comes through in an array of poetry styles in Cephalopod, as she writes about “fur-bound” and “exoskeletal” beasts, ponders “do ants eat worms?” and contemplates “collecting birds battered in the night by creatures bent on malice.” She wonders “what good is butter without bread,” feeds chickens and gets her hands dirty in her garden, and catches air after a jump on her childhood bicycle, “rising from the saddle as though lifted, weightless, close as I’ve been to birds when their wings are stretched in flight.”

“There are a lot of poets who have kind of a style, and it feels recognizable. It makes a collection feel cohesive in the sense of the style being consistent,” Smith says. “I am a poet who writes in a lot of different styles, so finding a way to make all those styles come together in a way that makes sense that the poems are all in the same book, it’s a bit of a challenge.

“I think there’s kind of a voice that transcends style, to some extent. Even if the styles are different, it still feels like it’s coming from the same poet.”

There’s no doubting the works in Cephalopod are distinctly Smith’s voice, whether you’re talking about the intense passages of “catastrophes that we witness or the gross stuff that we see,” or the lighter side that comes through as well. It helps to have poet friends, Smith says, to read the collection and give notes like, “You have a lot of really long, intense poems all in a row. Do you have something shorter to break it up?” Besides the challenge of collecting different styles and themes together under one cover, Smith also had to figure out how to draw on poems that come “from different parts of my life, different parts of my development. As a poet, and as a human.”

That makes Cephalopod all the more noteworthy, as its works remain engaging beginning to end, through all that “gross stuff” and sunshine, fear and hope, captured in its pages. n

MORE EVENTS

Visit Inlander.com for complete listings of local events.

Kathryn Smith Self-Portrait with Cephalopod book release, with Maya Jewell Zeller, Laura Read and Ellen Welcker • Tue, Feb. 9 at 7 pm • free • Online; preregister at auntiesbooks.com/event

LET’S TURN A RETIREMENT DREAM INTO A RETIREMENT PLAN.

Work with a trusted Financial Advisor at BECU Investment Services on a long-term financial plan. Schedule your financial review today.

becu.org/retire

Financial Advisors are registered with, and Securities and Advisory Services offered through LPL Financial, a Registered Investment Advisor, Member FINRA/SIPC. Insurance Products offered through LPL Financial or its licensed affiliates. BECU and BECU Investment Services are not registered broker/dealers and are not affiliated with LPL Financial. Investments are:

Not NCUA/NCUSIF Insured Not Credit Union Guaranteed Not Obligations of BECU May Lose Value

$%@#*

When I worked in college radio, we learned the legal origins of the types of “naughty” words you couldn’t utter on the air. The short version is it had a lot more to do with whether a word relates to bodily functions/sex than how offensive it is. The Netflix series History of Swear Words takes a deep, enjoyable look at the changing meaning of common swear words over the centuries. From pointing out bullshit origin stories to using clips from movies and TV to highlight the cultural context, the show tries to be educational while mostly just being a great excuse for funny people to cuss repeatedly. It’s hosted by curse-friendly Nicolas Cage, but the real surprise is when you find out the actor who’s said the most curse words on screen. (SAMANTHA WOHLFEIL)

THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST

There’s noteworthy new music arriving in stores and online Feb. 5. To wit:

AARON LEE TASJAN, Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! The single “Up All Night” has serious Tom Petty with Jeff Lynne vibes. That’s a good thing.

ODETTE, Herald. This Aussie creates some cool, off-kilter pop if her single “Dwell” is any indication.

FOO FIGHTERS, Medicine At Midnight. “No Son of Mine” is a tribute to Lemmy, so the new Foos has that going for it. (DAN NAILEN)

Stealing Our Parents’ Skins

BY DANIEL WALTERS

Former Spokane City Council President Ben Stuckart was already in a bad mood. He’d been dealing with a variety of aggravating family issues.

And then he got a Facebook friend request from Larry Stuckart. There was a time when a message from his dad, a deeply empathetic champion of the poor who profoundly shaped Ben’s worldview, would have been a blessing.

But Larry Stuckart died five years ago.

Ben told Facebook long ago his dad died, but it hadn’t mattered.

“Somebody hacked in and resurrected his account,” Stuckart says. “It was actually kind of fairly disturbing.”

Countless diatribes have been written about the damage Facebook has done: sabotaging democracy, spreading lies and conspiracy theories, cannibalizing journalism, warping our psyches. It’s easy to overlook the smaller, more personal injuries that the site has inflicted: When the Facebook faces of our loved ones

are stolen, and we have little recourse to do anything about it.

“Hello,” Diana L. Walters messaged me last month on Facebook. “Hope things are going well with you and the family and also Did you receive any text or email about the National Relief Fund?”

Even setting aside the typos, a strange message for my mom to send. I didn’t have to be an Impossible Mission Force agent to know that someone else was wearing my mother’s face. It was probably a ploy to steal my money or my account.

“You’re not my real mom!” I replied.

My mom — the real one— was flooded with phone calls and emails from friends letting her know she’d been hacked. But she was helpless to do anything.

She tried to reset her password, but the hacker had changed the email on her account. Even more deviously, the hacker had apparently assigned my mom’s old email address to a phony new account, making it impossible to use the email to recover the account.

Unlike other huge corporations like Comcast or Amazon, Facebook has no call center agents, no chat support lines, no real people to contact. The only thing she could do was to start all over again — create a new account, with a new profile.

So now, there are two “Diana Walters” on Facebook. One’s a recently created account with only a handful of friends and photos and very few comments. It’s the one that looks fake.

Then there’s one that looks real, but isn’t. One with a history, dozens of photos and posts across years, one that shares 84 friends with me, the unkillable digital doppelganger who will continue roaming the internet, begging for you to be its friend. n

THE BUZZ BIN

THE SPOKANE PIPELINE

Where, oh where, would the Washington Huskies be without the coaching pipeline that traces right to Spokane? Jimmy Lake, the Huskies’ head football coach, went to North Central High School and played college ball as an Eag in Cheney. And now, with Monday’s announcement he was being promoted to defensive coordinator, Spokane native Bob Gregory will bring even more Spokane savvy to the squad. Promoted from his post as Husky inside linebackers coach, Gregory traces his roots to Gonzaga Prep and WSU, where he earned a starting job as a walkon. Eastern Washington: We get the job done! (TED S. McGREGOR JR.)

ADIEU, SWEET FEED

One of the few things I’ll miss about the Trump era is Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau’s Twitter feed delivered in the voice of the comic strip’s long-time media punching bag Roland Hedley Jr. The account @realRBHJr was a daily delight as the cartoon craven Fox News reporter contorted himself to defend every outlandish statement or action from Trump. Trudeau is retiring the account, saying that if he were to continue, “after the last four years, my heart wouldn’t be in it. We’re all exhausted.” (DAN NAILEN)

FATEFUL NIGHT The same evening he became heavyweight champion and mere hours before he publicly rechristened himself Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay hung out in a Florida motel room with Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. They were all at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement and at pivotal moments in their lives. Their time together was dramatized in Kemp Powers’ play One Night in Miami. It’s now brought to the screen by director Regina King, and it’s not only an engrossing historical drama but a showcase for a quartet of terrific performances — Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm, Aldis Hodge as Brown, Leslie Odom Jr. as Cooke and Eli Goree as Clay. It’s streaming on Amazon Prime. (NATHAN WEINBENDER)