Maggie Smith: ...that the best poems come from ordinary moments

Nobody Told Me!

Business, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2021

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’re delighted to welcome our guest on this episode, bestselling poet and author Maggie Smith. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Washington Post and the Guardian, in addition to many other publications.

In 2016, Maggie’s poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been shared countless times since by those of us who struggle to keep the realities of life’s ugliness from children. Last year, her book, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, became a breakout bestseller in the midst of the pandemic.

Her latest book of poetry is called 'Goldenrod' and you can check out her website at maggiesmithpoet.com.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Nobody Told Me. I'm Laura Owens. And I'm Jan Black. And we are delighted to welcome our guest on this episode, bestselling poet and author Maggie Smith. Her poems and
0:22.8	essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Washington Post,
0:27.9	and The Guardian in addition to many other publications. Back in 2016, Maggie's poem, Good Bones,
0:34.6	went viral internationally and has been shared countless times since by those of us
0:39.5	who struggled to keep the realities of life's ugliness from children.
0:43.7	Last year, her book, Keep Moving, Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change became a breakout
0:49.8	bestseller in the midst of the pandemic.
0:52.5	Maggie, we thank you so much for joining us.
0:54.7	Oh, thanks for having me.
0:56.1	And we want to congratulate you on your latest book of poems called Golden Rod.
1:00.8	Tell us about it.
1:02.0	Thank you.
1:03.0	Yeah.
1:03.4	So Golden Rod is the culmination of several years of work.
1:08.5	I started these poems right after I finished my last book of
1:12.6	Poems Good Bones, so back in 2015, and then the newest poems in this new book are from,
1:20.1	they're from the pandemic, they're from 2020. So it's, you know, five or six years of
1:25.0	writing one poem at a time.
1:31.8	And then at the end, you kind of pull them all together and print them out and see what you've been doing all those years that maybe you didn't know you were doing.
1:36.7	So I've been joking that the sort of secret invisible ink title of this book is really
1:44.0	Be Still, which is the opposite of my last
1:47.2	book, Keep Moving.
	...

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