Kentucky Walking W. loran smith comes to Maine BY SAM PFEIFLE

I wasn’t so sure about this w. loran smith guy. The all-lower-case name paired with the advance hype about him being a populist poet wasn’t jibing for me. It felt like, as my grandma might say, he was putting on airs (or is it heirs? And what the fuck does that mean, anyway?).

But then I started reading his stuff. Imagine that, reading a poet before passing ultimate judgment on him. I must be growing up. Still wasn’t sure about him, though. Yeah, he told great stories about his ex having a stranger cum in her hand at a circus and he could sure do great impersonations of teenage girls and infants, but why wasn’t he a short-story writer? And what kind of populist writer makes frequent references (well, at least two) to a very-long-dead poet like Percy Shelley?

But then I got him on the phone, heard his killer Southern drawl and that he answered to Bill, and I was pretty much totally sold. This guy’s great, and if you get a chance to see him during his whirlwind tour through Maine this week, you should take it.

I guess I had forgotten what a horror-show of a life old Percy had lived. Fathering children with three gals, two of them sisters, he saw just about all of his kids die before they hit adolescence and his first wife Harriet drowned herself. Then he had to flee Britain — a creditors thing, maybe — and had the bright idea to live on a boat in the Mediterranean, though he couldn’t swim. He drowned in a storm at the age of 30.

That jibes a bit with the stories smith has to tell. Or, as he says in "On The Edge," from his new book Walking Upright:

"All I ever wanted

Was to be a pure as Shelley’s heart.

A moist rose among charred bones."

There really is something pure here, a voice that can smile at the mundane and tragic and just plain white-trash. Some of it is told in prose poetry like "Vega," a rushed story of drinking and driving and winding up in the backseat of some stranger’s car and arriving at your dad’s house backed by two policemen with his trashed Vega out by the sidewalk.

Other times, as in "Clean and Sober," smith is more direct, both in his second person orientation and his line breaks:

"Where is that place.

That basement room,

that under the stairs closet,

that tiny cool place I can curl up inside."

No question marks there, you’ll notice.

Really, though, why poetry? For some reason, he doesn’t like a poetry kind of guy.

"My mother and my grandmother, at least my adopted parents, were both writers," says smith, "so I kind of had that pressure, though it didn’t come to fruition till my thirties, when I took it seriously, but it was always there in my life. Maybe it’s as simple as feeling like in poetry you can just distill everything . . . I have a hard time sustaining fiction because I want to write it like poetry and I give up after laboring over 30 pages. I think poetry you can distill, sort of like a perfume, you’re taking all these emotions and experiences and distilling them into a short form. It’s just more powerful and effective for myself."

Fair enough, but what about Shelley? Does he feel a connection with the 200-year-old poet?

"He was one of the first poets that kind of profoundly affected me," says smith, "so, yeah, I guess I do feel a connection to him, that’s the short answer."

How is it that Shelley can still be relevant?

"There’s a universality about his writing that I guess touched me somehow," says smith. "The bleakness in his writing. One of the lines I remember was ‘wandering companionless through the world,’ and I guess I identified with that. That’s the mark of a true genius, just like Shakespeare, when someone can affect generation after generation, at least for me. I don’t know if he affects anybody anymore.

"I use him as a reference point, although to be honest I don’t sit around reading Shelley anymore. I remember that feeling that he affected me. And I try to share that with other people."

Does he think that anyone sits around reading Shelley anymore?

"I don’t think so, no," he says, "unless they’re required to. I don’t know how many English classes require the classics anymore . . . I would think most students don’t read Shelley. I’m sure there are some academics that do.

"But I think that he was trying to reach out to the everyman and everywoman. And that’s what I’m trying to do. I want my poems to be understood. I want to be able to go out and read a poem and have people understand my poetry, not be too obscure or rarified. Which works, I think, most of the time."

In the end, it works for me.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com

W. loran Smith reads at Books Etc., in Portland, on Thursday, April 14 (call (207) 774-0626), and at Bookland, in Brunswick, on Friday, April 15 (call (207) 725-2313), before heading farther north.