Smith is a writer and editor. In this essay, she discusses how William Carlos Williams' "Overture to a Dance of Locomotives" juxtaposes the modern world of locomotive travel with thoughts of the infinite.

In William Carlos Williams and the American Poem, critic Charles Doyle observed that Williams' undertaking was a process of distilling things to their essence:

Seeing clearly, for him, was the great virtue…. Throughout Williams's career we encounter the isolation of the moment of clear perception or experience as if it were hard won from the ever- encroaching flux. In a constant state of alertness the artist makes his discoveries…. Genuine contact is made through concentration on the object with great intensity, to 'lift it' to the imagination. An object lifted to the imagination reveals its 'radiant gist.' Sometimes this is simply discovered, while at others … the process is completed by the poet by...