As an ekphrastic poem, Smith writes through a filter: relating to and defining elements of the film to illuminate the subject of her verse more visibly for the reader. Through such a device, Smith does not avoid confronting the subject head-on; rather, she challenges the implications of form and content: “Bedroom Community” insists its ekphrasis be revealed almost incidentally. By this I mean that form is not exactly counter to content, but that form should not supersede content, and that content can exist discretely from form while serving as the basis for it.

…Smith is a bold poet who risks obscurity and the seemingly arbitrary to achieve luminance and the shades inherent in it.

This creates what I call a palindromic effect: while the poem may not be read the same forward and backward, the reader, nevertheless, is compelled to read (forward) and re-read (backward) in order to de-mystify former confusions and, more importantly, one’s experience is rewarded with an enriched knowledge of the poem’s meaning and intentions.

“Bedroom Community” benefits greatly from this effect despite any uncertainty our understanding suffers. We are never kicked out of the poem because we trust the poet will ultimately deliver the meaning to us. And she trusts us as well — that somehow we will get it, as Smith is a bold poet who risks obscurity and the seemingly arbitrary to achieve luminance and the shades inherent in it.

The four-page poem, “Beauty,” begins the eponymous second section. It is here that Smith displays a remarkably evolved engagement with language. Where “Bedroom Community” showed us how form and content may collude to disarm us, if only momentarily, with uncertainty, the language of “Beauty” gives us music. If I were to appropriate a a particular kind of music, a score for this section, I believe Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration would serve it well, and “Beauty” would be the fourth movement, moderato — the sought-after transfiguration. Smith begins this section with an anti-apologia:

Smith is graceful, though without any illusions to her shortcomings: “Already we are off to a terrible start,” she states, not placing blame on any one person, but including herself as a participant, because what readers will have witnessed to this point is a series of poems — “Why I Am Not Famous,” “Un Peu,” “Discourse Against a Reluctant Lover,” “Manifest Destinyland,” et al. — that shows us Smith’s continual battle between joy and despair. “I can hardly bear to tell you more, / my knowledge being so silly / and similar to your own,” she warns us with charming self-deprecation, but also in commiseration, because “everything composed / by dull symmetries” seems to evoke a universal language, according to Smith. And “composed” is such an apt word here given what deepens this poem — ergo, the section — is the composition of music inherent in her lines: “the one we all know / with the cathedrals and the night- / blooming flowers…” (p. 31).