Smith is a writer and editor. In this essay, she describes "i was sitting in mcsorley's" by e. e. cummings as a meditation on love as well as an individual's relationship with the natural world.

At first glance, e. e. cummings's poem "i was sitting in mcsorley's barely seems to be a poem at all. Arranged not in stanzas and lines like most poems, but in paragraphs like a prose passage, the poem further baffles many readers with its bizarre spelling and punctuation. Much of the poem seems to be an incomprehensible run-on sentence, the words following one another with no apparent logic. Once a reader puts aside his or her expectations of what a poem should look like, however, "i was sitting in mcsorley's" is revealed to be not only a deeply poetic piece of writing but a poem with a strong connection to the rest...