It is not enough to say that Lytton Jackson Smith is passionately in love with language—words are his heart, his soul, and his life.

Or, more specifically, poetry: “I think that’s the genre where I generally find that you can become most aware of language,” he said. “Poetry foregrounds the material properties of language—things like rhyme, things like repetition of letters—in a way that prose does not. Poetry is thinking through how language works.”

So how exactly does one understand how language works? Smith suggests two techniques, both of which are excellently suited for poetry: read slowly and read closely. Because poetry emphasizes individual words in ways that prose cannot, it undermines traditional laws of syntax and diction. According to Smith, “writing is actually about discovery before it’s about expression.” It is important to recognize how the form of a poem, or of any piece of literature, works before attempting to interpret its meaning.

Smith, who has had years of teaching experience, attempts to inculcate this awareness of the functional mechanisms of language into his students. As part of his second-year Ph.D. studies in English literature, he is currently the TA of Modern Poetry I. Smith has also taught University Writing for three years, and is an instructor of creative writing workshops and translation classes at the Columbia Summer Program for High School Students.

Apart from his academic endeavors, Smith has served as the managing editor at Persea Books and the editor-in-chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature & Art. He is also a founding member of the Blind Tiger Poetry group, an organization that advocates modern poetry. Smith’s own poetry and reviews have been published in numerous journals, including American Letters & Commentary, The Atlantic, Bateau, The Believer, and Colorado Review. Monster Theory, his chapbook, was published earlier this year by the Poetry Society of America.

More importantly, Smith’s first collection of poetry will be published by Nightboat Books in March 2009. Its eccentric title, The All-Purpose Magical Tent, well suits its unconventional style. The poems are written in a gamut of invented or re-invented forms, ranging from fractured sonnets to sestinas, and explore a variety of peculiar subjects, ranging from circuses traveling through America to monks in a medieval monastery.

The All-Purpose Magical Tent also illuminates the tenets of Smith’s own approach to literature, especially his desire to recognize how something is written. “It’s really a book that’s trying to think about how form relates to content and what form might work best at describing a particular moment,” he said. “I’m definitely trying to make myself aware and anybody reading it aware of the way we say things as much as what we say. It’s a book that’s interested in slowing down language.” In order to accomplish this, Smith had to think about what was “grammatically or semantically expected,” understand why that was the case, and figure out “how it might be different.”

As the famous French critic and poet Paul Valéry once said, a poem is never finished, only abandoned. Smith is in accordance with this belief—the poems in The All-Purpose Magical Tent are only “as finished as they can be,” he said. He is satisfied with the way they are for the moment, but he hopes that in 20 years his thoughts about poetry and language will have changed, and then maybe he will rewrite his poems. According to Smith, writers must constantly question their own techniques, and maintain a “dynamic process” of why they are “doing certain things.”

Yet this process is only natural because, according to Smith, “the way you write something has a lot to do with the moment at which you’re writing it.” New poems come about through a realization of how earlier ones could have been written differently.

Besides writing more poetry, Smith also plans to continue his didactic pursuits in the future. “My writing informs my teaching and my teaching informs my writing,” he explained. “I wouldn’t want to give up either one of them. It’s a happy place to be.”