A Brief Bio

As you well may know by now, my name is Joel Smith, and I appreciate the time you’ve taken to browse my site. I imagine that you are reading this page because I have directed you here as a professional resource. Even if I haven’t directed you here, please feel free to read my brief self-description just the same.

To begin with, let me tell you a few things which might collect the years of my life  into a manageable package. I was priviliged to grow up in the Adirondack mountains, surrounded by miles of solitude and beauty. I suppose that my youth was rather average—if one can even make such claims. The various communities in which I was raised were predominately evangelical Christian, and this was my primary orientation toward God, the world and other people. This of course was both a blessing and a burden and I have spent a great deal of time unraveling the binary effects of my upbringing.

After finishing high school, I spent a year in Argentina studying both the Spanish language and  the Bible, and both of these areas of study were oriented primarily toward Christian missionary work. This was, at the time, the most difficult year of my life. The shock of language, culture, and religious community were overwhelming for the American teenager that I was. I stumbled through friendships and various modes of understanding my relationship to religious practice and belief. Ultimately, I gained a rather adequate mastery of castellano rioplatense (the dialect of Buenos Aires) but rejected the system of belief with which I was presented. I did not even know how to form the questions which I felt must be asked in order to say “credo.” When I left Argentina a year later, I was unsettled from any kind of religious belief and in the absence of any kind of structured meaning about life, I became rigidly self-reliant.

Several months after returning to the United States, all that self-reliant work of my mind was laid to waste. In October of 2004, my father took his own life. The event still resonates with me as I now write, nearly five years later. The confidence which I had gained in my own temporal achievements withered in the face of a very tangible mortality. Death had come near to me, and I experienced an emptiness which the “shabby equipment” of words fails to capture, even now. The darkness, the new found complexities, the questions which arose from this event reshaped my intellectual life. My meager reflections on life were redirected to face this new found reality.

Since then, my intellectual life has primarily turned around questions of theological nature which in turn lead me back to questions about the nature of language, history, psychology and their juncture in the art of poetry. Thus, I have endeavered to read, study, write, and converse my way into what Eliot beautifully describes as “a raid on the inarticulate / with shabby equipment, always deteriorating.” Ultimately, it is my goal to carry this endeavor perpetually into a classroom, guiding students to the intersection of community, mind, and language as experienced in poetry and other forms of writing, even their own.

In the past several years, and in the years to come, my own “raid on the inarticulate” has taken on a very particular task—namely loving my wife. Marriage, in the most beautiful of metaphors, can be likened to the salvation of grace preached by St. Paul in his letter to the Roman church:

νυνὶ  δὲ  ἑλευθερωθέντες  ἀπὸ  τῆς  ἁμαρτίας  δουλωθέντες δὲ  τῷ  θεῷ  ἔχετε τὸν καρπὸν ὑμῶν εἰς ἁγιασμόν, τὸ δὲ τέλος ζωὴν αἰώνιον.
And now, since you were set free from you errors and enslaved by God, you have your fruit in sanctification, and its end—eternal life.

As we have been given the end of what the Hebrew poet called “the way of life”—namely eternal life, and thus are able to freely pursue the means—the way of life itself, so marriage perpetually grants us the end of love given—love returned. Like salvation, marriage has been, and will continue to be, a beautiful mystery to grow through and into the greater mystery and miracle of life itself.

I hope that this description of myself has been profitable, as it has been so for me. One of the difficulties of our life in a community of language users is to resist descriptions of ourselves from the outside much like Carroll’s Alice resists the pigeon’s description of her as a snake. Because she refuses the pigeon’s exterior and relative description, Alice doesn’t lose her humanity. Yeats recognizes the problems of external description as well:

How in the name of Heaven can he escape
That defiling and disfiguring shape
The mirror of malicious eyes
Cast upon his eyes until at last
He thinks that shape must be his shape?

from “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”

Thank you for allowing me to fashion a shape of my own, one I hope reflects me in a light both simple and true.