Kay Smith

1911-2004

Clara Kathleen “Kay” Smith was born in Saint John on 30 April 1911. At age 14, Smith published her first poem, “Twilight Garden,” as the result of having won a contest sponsored by the Buffalo Sunday Times. She graduated from Saint John High School in 1928, and then attended Mount Allison Ladies’ College (later Mount Allison University), where she studied speech and drama until 1933. She returned to Saint John, where she set up a nursery school with her friend, Marjorie Cowan. In 1934-1935, she became a member of the Saint John Theatre Guild and participated in a variety of amateur theatricals until the end of the decade. In 1940 she moved to St. Thomas, Ontario, where she taught English and drama and directed theatrical productions at Alma College, a private girls’ school. She returned to Saint John in 1942, where she took up a teaching position at Saint John Vocational School. She remained there for almost thirty years and was director of the school’s annual Shakespeare play. Smith became part of a group of artists and writers in Saint John who met regularly in the late 1930s to read their writing to each other. They eventually joined the Canadian Authors Association. Smith’s verse soon began to appear in both Contemporary Verse and the Canadian Poetry Magazine. She was also a frequent contributor to John Sutherland’s Montreal magazine, First Statement, during its initial year of publication (1942-1943) and ultimately, her first volume of poetry, Footnote to the Lord’s Prayer and Other Poems (1951), was published by First Statement Press. In 1962, a substantial number of her poems were collected in Fiddlehead’s Five New Brunswick Poets, and 1971 that her second volume of poetry, At the Bottom of the Dark, was published by Fiddlehead. It was followed in 1978 by Fiddlehead’s When a Girl Looks Down. In 1980, the League of Canadian Poets published Again with Music: Seven Poems. In 1987, The Bright Particulars appeared, a collection of earlier and new poems, selected and edited by University of Prince Edward Island scholar and poet Richard Lemm. The chapbook White Paper Face in the Window was published in the same year by William Prouty’s Purple Wednesday Society at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John (UNBSJ). Smith continued to publish new poems regularly in UNBSJ’s literary magazine, The Cormorant  and served on its editorial board from 1987 until 1998. Later she taught courses in creative writing in 1986 and 1990 at UNBSJ. In 1986, she was made a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets. In 1988, she received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from UNBSJ, and in 1990, received the Moncton 100 Award for having published the best book in English by a New Brunswick writer in the preceding five years. In 1991, she received the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English-Language Literary Arts.  On 18 September 2004 Smith died at the Dr. V.A. Snow Centre in Hampton, New Brunswick.

Predominant New Brunswick Residences:

Saint John

Archival Material

• Kay Smith fonds
  ⌄
  Location

  University of New Brunswick Archives & Special Collections

  Website/Catalogue Record

  View Archival Record

  Retrieval Number

  MG L 48

  Date Range of Material

  1831-1998, 2010

  Extent

  30 cm textual records
  1 zip disk
  2 artifacts

  Scope and Content Note

  Fonds consists of notebooks kept by Kay Smith in which she would record her trips, walks, books she had read, names and addresses, and appointments, and some poetry. There are also two pieces of Deichmann pottery (the Deichmann’s were friends of Smith).

• Kay Smith oral history fonds
  ⌄
  Location

  Provincial Archives of New Brunswick

  Retrieval Number

  MC1690

  Date Range of Material

  [ca. 1989]

  Extent

  Textual records and 2 audio cassette tapes

  Scope and Content Note

  This fonds contains transcriptions of three interviews conducted with Kay Smith, completed on 27 June 1989, 30 October 1989, and 3 November 1998. Kay Smith talks about her parents; Prof. Brown, who encouraged her interest in poetry; the poetry reading she attended when Sir Charles G.D. Roberts and Bliss Carman read their own verse; the St. Anne de Bellevue and Ottawa visits with the Roberts family; her interest in drama; her love of Mount Allison University; and her experience in Westport, Massachusetts Theatre.