From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
Leaving/Leading
This work features Leif and Katita. It is collected in Pastoral Scanlines.
"Leaving/Leading" is a poem by C. W. Smith, collected in Pastoral Scanlines.
The work traces a date between Leif and Katita through Newcastle, moving across four settings: a zine launch, dinner at Big Al's, a rooftop bar, and a theatre. Over the course of the evening, the characters transform into increasingly elemental forms. Katita becomes "a boat drifting"; Leif becomes an obelisk "to reach her." Both eventually dissolve into the city itself.
The poem's opening establishes a domestic conversational register: “When Leif asked Katita / if she felt like joining him / for dinner / at Big Al's perhaps, / and she said sure.” This accessible language—ordinary speech rendered as verse—contrasts with the poem's subsequent abstraction into metaphor and landscape, mapping the transition from courtship into union with place.
"Leaving/Leading" is one of six instances in which Leif and Katita appear in Smith's collected works within Pastoral Scanlines. The poem's engagement with Newcastle as both map and metaphor connects it to Smith's sustained use of that city across his oeuvre, particularly in Antinomicity and Everyone I Love is Alive in the Unlimited Present of the City and its Waters. Big Al's is a recurring location in Smith's Newcastle geography. Unlike the fragmented narrative of the embedded Beach Surgery outline, "Leaving/Leading" presents the pair in a register of courtship, urban navigation, and dissolution—mapping their character-world as one of tenderness and transformation rather than cycle-management.