English grammar-school dropout in the 60s. Attuned to poetry when the hormones started running. Blessed with a teacher who went outside the curriculum, he continued his self-education through magazines: Agenda, Stand, Grosseteste Review. Strives to maintain catholic taste (not RC). Trained as a Psych Nurse “for something to fall back on”: failed to fall & retired in 2007. Emigrated to BC in 1974. Two marriages (one current): two kids, 4 grandkids (1 in Vancouver, 3 in Calgary). Hobbies include breathing, hiking, kayaking. Reads obsessively. Life-long small press fan – Nomados & Book Thug among current favourites in Canada.

Pete has written reviews &/or essays (from micro to a forthcoming book chapter) on W.D. Snodgrass (Agenda, UK); Kathryn MacLeod, Alice Notley, Karlien van den Beukel, Rosmarie Waldrop, Tertia Longmire & Aaron Williamson, Keston Sutherland, Lissa Wolsak, Lisa Robertson, Nancy Shaw & Catriona Strang (all in The Gig, Toronto); Jennifer Moxley (jacket #9, on-line); Barry MacSweeney (The Paper, UK); Trevor Joyce (Crayon #5, USA); Sharon Thesen (The Capilano Review, Spring ’08); John James (The Salt Companion to John James, UK).

Conducted the first interview with Lissa Wolsak in Six Poets: Views & Interviews, The Gig Documents Series, #2. (Toronto). An interview by Nate Dorward and a Pete Smith Sampler of poems is found in The Fly on the Page The Gig Documents #3. Another interview appears on-line as part of a Rob McLennan project (http://12or20questions.blogspot.com/2008/06/12-or-20-questions-with-pete-smith.html).

Pete's individual poems have been published in magazines such as dANDelion, W, The Gig, Tinfish, jacket (on-line), and appear in the following anthologies: 100 Days, Barque Press, (Cambridge); April Eye: Poems for Peter Riley, infernal methods, (Cambridge); A Meeting for Douglas Oliver, infernal methods, Street Editions & Poetical Histories, (Cambridge); Rocksalt, Mother Tongue Publishing (Salt Spring Island). 

Long sequences: [on-line] CLIV (Alterran Poetry Assemblage); Second Horace and Evacuation Procedures (Great Works); [and in print] Mother Tongue: Father Silence (Tinfish magazine, Hawaii & as a self-published chapbook); Out-takes From the Deanna Ferguson Show in Antiphonies: Essays on Women's Experimental Poetries in Canada (The Gig, Toronto).

Chapbooks: 20/20 Vision and cross of green hollow (Wild Honey, Eire); John’s Book of Alleged Dances (Kamloops); Harm’s Length (Poetical Histories, Cambridge); Strum of Unseen (above/ground, Canada).

Some of the longer works reflect engagements with the works of visual artist/writers - eg, Roy Kiyooka in Mother Tongue:  Father Silence and Fred Douglas in Strum of Unseen.  In 1999-2000, for the then Kamloops Poets' Factory, Pete curated a series called Writing Out Self & in a studio at Kamloops Art Gallery.  This comprised alternate workshop sessions with readings from poets from the Kootenay School of Writing Collective in Vancouver.  Readers included Lisa Robertson, Lissa Wolsak, Ted Byrne, Michael Barnholden and Aaron Vidaver.  In 2001 Neon Haibun, a collaboration with his daughter, photographer Hannah Naomi, was exhibited at Exchanges Gallery in Victoria BC.

Pete read at the Kootenay School of Writing (Vancouver) in 1998 and 2004, and in Cambridge, England in 1999 and in 2006 when he was one of two Canadian poets invited to read at the Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry in England. He has a weekly one hour poetry radio show at CFBX92.5 in Kamloops, BC (www.thex.ca) on Wednesdays from 1 to 2 pm, Pacific Standard Time.

A ms Bindings With Discords seeks a Canadian home.