“Poetry for Tough Guys” was the title of a New York Times review of Devotions (2011) by Bruce Smith, a professor of English at Syracuse University and William B. Hart Poet in Residence at the Academy this spring. In that review, the critic Stephen Burt described Smith’s poems as beginning from “a notion of blue-collar manhood, full of rough edges, frustration, defiance, and pride.” In one poem, Smith likened writing poetry to how “boys (mostly) in shop class” make “something / they can carry, although they carry little.” His poetry also has been described as jazzlike, and Smith himself has noted his poetry’s aspiration to song: “When the language works to seduce and … move us, when it works its blues on us, bounces us and trembles us, makes us swerve from our upright and rational propositions … we are thinking and listening at the same time or really listening and not thinking, like a good song does.”

Smith is the author of six books of poems. The Other Lover (2000) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Devotions was also a National Book Award finalist. His poetry has appeared in numerous periodicals as well, among them Poetry, the Nation, the Paris Review, and the New Yorker. During his residency, Smith expects that “most of my time will be writing.” But he also plans “to explore Rome as if I had a dream about it once and am revisiting that dream.”