Ron Smith

Ron Smith’s book That Beauty in the Trees is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press. His The Humility of the Brutes, Its Ghostly Workshop, and Moon Road were also published by LSU Press. Smith’s poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The Nation, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Five Points, and Arts of War & Peace (Université Paris Diderot). He is currently Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, Virginia, and Poetry Editor for Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature. From 2014 to 2016 Smith was the Poet Laureate of Virginia. In 2021-2022, he partnered with the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to present poems associated with Man Ray’s Paris years.

  • Rizal Stadium, World War II

    He was almost home, poor guy.
  • Football & the English Language

    My first year as high school coach, five points
  • Rome/Glasgow: Early March

    Our favorite time to visit—cool air for all-day walking, in
  • This Moment

    You know when darkness seems to pour
  • Moveable

    Swords drawn, Hem and his bronze friend
  • Don’t Know Much About the French I Took

    I silently disapproved when they said, “Let’s go French
  • Remedios Varo’s Locomotion Capilar (1959)

    Riding the bicycles of their beards,
  • ORACLES | HOME FRONT

    Gone, even the singing fountain, here
  • Winkles & Dillisk

    Does he suspect the boys
  • Coda alla Vaccinara | A Dusting

    From Keats’s grave, past the Paladiana and Coyote
  • The Caravaggio Room

    Yuck, you heave in front of that sick boy
  • Early Christianity: A Poem | Rome

    OK, says James, let them keep their foreskins.
  • κάθαρσης

    Dr. Clark ordered daisies