Most recently, Smith debuted her first memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Simon and Schuster). Keep Moving would go on to become the title of a collection, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (2020), and an interactive journal (2021), joining the poet’s six poetry collections. “It was about burning sadness and grief as fuel,” she tells me in this conversation.

How did she know I was awake? Smith became my starting bell each day. They always appeared within a minute or two. Start coffee, open laptop, scroll while awaiting the new post. Before we understood that this is how the poet talks herself through heartbreak.Īt the time, I was getting up early to start over on a project I had scrapped again, and Smith’s morning microdose of poetry kicked off a new routine. Perhaps you know the poet Maggie Smith from “Good Bones,” the poem that went viral in 2016, the one that ends with that wildly hopeful line, “you could make this place beautiful.” Or perhaps, like me, she first captured your attention with her Keep Moving posts, the short daily affirmations she began sharing on social media in 2018. Maggie Smith, from the collection, Keep Moving It does not stop, and it does not flow backwards. “Think of what water does when it encounters a barrier: it goes around, over, under.

Maggie smith keep moving