About

Marcus Smith was born in Oxford, England and lived in Buxton until he moved with his family to America.  After attending Williams College, Marcus received an MA at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a teaching fellow.  He taught poetry and fiction while completing the Great Books Program at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland and Santa Fe, New Mexico.  After serving as a staff writer for several local newspapers and as a stringer for New Musical Express in London, he was selected as a Merit Fellow in Vermont College’s MFA program

Marcus’ most recent book, SEZ(Everything Speaks) is published by Live Canon. He has been a finalist for The Cinnamon Press Book Award and his work has appeared in Ambit,Acumen, Envoi, Orbis, Popshot, Stand, and The North. In the US Able Muse,Barrow Street, The Classical Outlet,Confrontation, Salmagundi and The Wallace
Stevens Review have published his work.  His work has also appeared in a variety of anthologies and he has published in Austria, France, Ireland, Italy and Japan.  He reviews for Envoi, Prairie Schooner, PN Review, Dark Horse, Staple, Rattle and Pleiades.                         

In his work Marcus says he “likes to play off [his] transatlantic background and experiences against one another while acknowledging that poetry should be accessible to all cultures.” He works in a variety of styles ­– lyric, formal, dramatic, epigrammatic and, more recently, a spontaneous process of poetry initially sent as texts and heard as songs on the street. Micro-reportage, verbal video clips, staccato lyrics, haiku and a hybrid of something quite new and direct come to mind. These works appear in SEZ, portions and selections of which have appeared in The Rialto, Orbis, Staple, The Text and Recours au Poemes and been shortlisted for The Bridgport Prize.

Of his manuscript Visiting My Country poet and critic David Wojahn has written: “Marcus Smith is a poet of the first order, and Visiting My Country is a collection that should in the very near future be well-published.  Marcus Smith has both the prosodic chops and the imaginative drive that are key to the formation of a substantial career.  While the poems remain firmly rooted in the worlds of the senses and domestic life, they also possess a narrative inventiveness, a kind of mythic realism, that makes the familiar consummately strange. M.Smith’s poems already possess the verve, resonance, and authority that we more typically expect from a writer much farther along in a career.”

His manuscript The Great-Great Grandchildren of Edward Darley Boit takes its name from John Singer Sargent’s most unconventional portrait, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit. (The daughters never had children.)  Poems here have appeared in Orbis, Envoi, HQ, Dark Horse, The Text, The Journal, Ambit, Weyfarers, Poetry Salzburg Review, Able Muse and Slant and received Plough and Poetry on the Lake prizes.