Stevie Smith's Voices

mong tales of sixties poetry festivals, jazz-infused events that sometimes drew crowds in the thousands, one finds the legend of a woman in sixties, small and frail, wearing schoolgirl dresses and white stockings, often sharing the stage with a much younger, denimand leather-clad male gang. Such a setting (like that of a jewel) encapsulates a dominant impression of Stevie Smith's relationship to other poets, since a striking originality, a complete separation from poetic fashion, is for many the hallmark of work. Yet the key appeal of Smith's immensely popular, show-stealing performances was not oddball appearance but rather as she spoke and sang poems in a chanting, off-key manner that could be hilarious and haunting, powerful and unsettling.1 Detached from inimitable delivery, this highly stylized manner still comes through to Smith's readers, producing many comments on the voice of poetry itself. Robert Lowell thus speaks for others when he warmly notes her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice, a quality many would identify in best-known poem: