A Conversation with Ryan Whitaker Smith

An Interview by Ben Palpant | Words Under the Words No. 6

This post belongs to a series of interviews between Ben Palpant and important contemporary poets.

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Be near to me
when my days near their end. 
For I have unfinished business
in this land of passing things.

—from "Psalm 71" by Ryan Whitaker Smith

We met in a coffee shop that my teenagers would have considered boujee. Is that the word? Maybe I misspelled it. At any rate, my dad would have called it swanky. Sitting there, you could imagine a wealthy old woman dressed in fur carrying her fluffy little dog up to the barista for a doggie drink. I didn't have to imagine it. That actually happened during the interview. So Ryan Whitaker Smith and I didn't exactly fit in with our hoodies and jeans, with our open laughter. Nevertheless, it was quiet enough for conversation and a quiet coffee shop is a rare thing these days. 

As I turn on my voice recorder, he leans down and speaks into the microphone: "For the record," he says, "I'm a film producer, so I feel very uncomfortable being called a poet."

We laugh. I say, "We're off to a great start. You know, I think any poet worth his or her salt is uncomfortable being called a poet."

"You have two books of poetry," I say. "Tell me the genesis of those books."

"I had no intention of writing a book for publication,” he replies. “I didn't think I was qualified. That's not false modesty, it's how I felt. At one point, I rewrote a psalm during my private devotions as a kind of prayer. The psalms are already prayers, so this was more like a poetic rendering. I shared it with my friend and mentor, Dan Wilt, and he found it interesting. We ended up doing several more together, a kind of back and forth exchange. By the time it was said and done, we had twenty of these poems which we printed in a little booklet that we gave as a gift to friends and family at Christmas.”

“What a great idea.”

“Well, one of those friends was Carolyn Weber, author of Surprised by Oxford. She asked if she could share them with some publishing friends of hers. Without intending to do it, that booklet became a kind of proof of concept which was picked up by a publisher. We initially just wanted to render a few of the psalms, but they asked us to do all of them, so that's what we did. Sheltering Mercy was the first and Endless Grace was the second. Now we're working on another one based on the proverbs." He glances around the coffee shop. "I feel very blessed that anyone caught the vision for it."

"Both of those books were written collaboratively, which is a unique experience when it comes to poets. Most poetry is written in solitude. Was collaboration advantageous? Was it difficult?"

"Because it was a byproduct of our friendship, because it happened so organically, it felt right to me. The biggest challenge was making it sound like it was one voice. That's why I assumed the editor role, I suppose."

"I'm assuming that the collaboration brought you closer as friends."

"We don't talk anymore." He laughs. "I'm just kidding. It absolutely deepened our friendship. We did several writing retreats together to finish the work. What a rich experience."

"Was poetry a part of your upbringing?"

"I don't remember writing a lot of poems when I was a kid, but you can't escape poetry when you go to a classical school. I remember encountering John Donne and being impacted by his work. I wrote my thesis on Donne. I love him to this day. Later, I discovered George Herbert. Those two poets were big for me, but I'm no poetry expert. I certainly came from a musical family, so, to me, there's always been a musical relationship between music and poetry. That's not a novel observation. But I would add that my work as a film producer, as a script writer, overlaps with poetry. There's a cadence, a rhythm, and a pacing to dialogue, to editing a film. I have to ask myself, how long do I hold on this particular shot and this character's lines. Does the camera stay on the character for the duration of the line? Does the line overlap with the next shot? Those are important decisions, and they rest on a musical sensitivity." He pauses and takes a drink. "There's also the actual sound of the words. For as long as I can remember, I've always been drawn to language. So even lies that are beautifully expressed are, to some degree, admirable to me. I might fundamentally disagree with whatever is being said, but I can recognize when it is being expressed beautifully. I think of songwriters I loved when I was growing up. Some of their work is flat out wrong, but I like the song."

"It sounds like you are distinguishing between form and content. The form can be beautiful even if the content is a lie."

"Precisely."

"When it comes to Donne and Herbert, was it their naked encounter with God, their vulnerability, that moved you?"

"I think that's it. You know, I've always been attracted to truth expressed beautifully. In them, I encountered rich, theological truths expressed in a vulnerable and vibrant way."

"Is there a point at which you could see yourself writing something like John Donne or George Herbert, something confessional that's not rendered?"

"It's quite possible."

"What drew you to film as a creative medium?"

"I drew constantly as a kid. It was the middle of the 80's when Disney's animation really took off. I was at the perfect age to get enchanted by the animation world, so at some point I started making movies with my friends. We ruined home camcorders trying to film underwater." We laugh. "I became enthralled with trying to tell stories with film. My parents actually bought me an editing console that had two VHS decks and you could splice your work together. It looked worse and worse, of course, the more you edited because the tape deteriorated. Anyway, that's how I started falling in love with the medium."

"Did you go to film school?"

"No, I just learned on the job. I'm still learning. I'll always be learning."

"Do you find that the experience of making a film impacted the way you rendered the psalms?"

"Probably. I think that there's a relationship between poetry and dialogue. It's all about selection and omission in film. It's about what you show and what you don't show. I think it was Scorsese who said that cinema is all about what's in the frame and what's not. That's the same with writing. You're working within space and time. What are you going to do with the space you've been given? When it comes to writing dialogue in a script, I'm always writing with economy in mind. Poetry is also about the economy of language."

"Many young writers are so caught up in what they're trying to accomplish that they forget about the economy of language."

"I suppose that's probably true in film as well."

"When it comes to rendering the psalms, how did you decide to end your lines? Was it a straight line-for-line decision? Was it the rhythm of the line?"

"There wasn't any unifying filter for those decisions. Each one was different. We kind of let the text speak to us, we let it dictate those decisions more organically."

"Can we get into the weeds a little bit? What was your workflow?"

"Let's see. I would go through the psalm and separate it into sections based on the idea communicated. Then I would try to write something that captured that idea. Once I had done that, I would try to stitch them all together. Sometimes, you know, one line in the original text was one line in our rendering, but sometimes that one line in the original became ten lines in our poetry because it was so pregnant with meaning. We wanted to unpack it a little bit."

"When I talk to other writers, sometimes they'll tell me that if they aren't writing, they become agitated, a little bit cantankerous. Did you find that the writing process made you a better person when you were writing? "

"That's probably because writing is their primary creative outlet. With my life, writing is only one part of my creative output. I've always got something that requires my creative effort, so I don't feel that way in general. Let's just say that I like to stay busy."

"How does the work of John Donne, George Herbert, the psalmists—even the work of Ryan Whitaker Smith—minister to a people hammered by societal and personal catastrophe? How does poetry serve people who feel like the world is falling apart around them?"

"I don't know how most people interact with poetry, but for me, when my soul feels heavy, the best thing I can do is go read the Psalms. I always find something new. It's about the combination of truth and the beauty of the language, it's about honesty and vulnerability. I think that poetry in general can be a comfort to people. Maybe it's the beauty that comforts us, I don't know."

"Do you find that true of the music industry as well? Does a singer climb the charts because she comforts people? You know, the psalmist is crying out to God and we find a kinship in those cries. We feel like the psalmist is articulating something we wouldn't otherwise know how to articulate. Is the fervor attached to a popular singer connected to the fact that she is crying out on our behalf? Maybe she is saying what we don't know how to say?"

"Yes, I suppose there's some of that. But the pessimist in me feels like that's rarely the reason for popularity. I think the difference might be, I don't know, maybe the simplicity of the words on the page. Nobody is wearing a shirt with Luci Shaw's face on it."

"Maybe we should fix that problem." We laugh.

"I guess there's something simple, something very humble about the written word. It's not as tied to image. I would hope that a singer's popularity is due, at least in some way, to her skill and her vulnerability, but I'm afraid that image and marketing are tied up in it as well, so it gets a little complicated."

"Is part of the problem that many popular singers are actually validating us?" I ask. "I mean, Donne and Herbert don't validate our feelings. We recognize ourselves in them, but they change us somehow."

"Yes, they make us face uncomfortable truths about ourselves. I think it's rare for pop culture to produce something—whether a song, a movie, or a book—that forces us to honestly look at ourselves in the mirror. Is the song shaping our character in a substantive way, in a good way?"

"If you had just a few minutes to say something to Donne and to Herbert, what would you say?"

"That's tough. I feel a little paralyzed by the question." 

"Now you can understand why I like asking the questions," I say, "rather than answering them."

"I see that. Okay, let's try this. . . I guess I would thank them for expressing the truth beautifully. I would say, thank you for giving me the words to describe what I lack the ability to describe. I mean, there are phrases from those writers that never leave you. It still amazes me that you can read those guys even today and be moved in our day and age without strobe lights or smoke machines. It's just words on a page, but tears come to the eyes. Those guys never set out to be culture makers, to be famous. They were just trying to be honest with God."

Smith, like Frost, has many miles to go before he sleeps, so we say our goodbyes. I step out of a world of black and gold decor and into the cool February air. Daily life sweeps me once more into its current, but there is a pause in the motion, just before I open my car door. In that interval, I give thanks for poets like Ryan Whitaker Smith, poets like Donne and Herbert and the psalmists, who are still honest with God. If not for them, who will break into our brokenness and lead us to the foot of God?

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Ben Palpant is a memoirist, poet, novelist, and non-fiction writer. He is the author of several books, including A Small Cup of Light, Sojourner Songs, and The Stranger. He writes under the inspiration of five star-lit children and two dogs. He and his wife live in the Pacific Northwest.

Ryan Whitaker Smith is an author and filmmaker from Nashville, Tennessee. He is author of Winter Fire: Christmas with G.K. Chesterton and co-author, with Dan Wilt, of Sheltering Mercy and Endless Grace, two collections of prayers inspired by the Psalms. Under the moniker Ryan Whitaker, his film projects include the romantic drama Surprised by Oxford, the fantasy series The Pendragon Cycle, and a forthcoming adaptation of G.K. Chesterton's comic adventure The Ball and The Cross.