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Interview: Danez Smith

Cover of Danez Smith's Black Movie.     Cover of Danez Smith's [insert] boy     Cover of Danez Smith's Don't Call Us Dead

 

Danez Smith was born St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of two poetry collections, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017) and [insert] boy (YesYes, 2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and are working on their third. Smith is also the author of the chapbooks Black Movie (Button Poetry, 2017) and hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). It was while a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that Smith first discovered poetry through the arts program First Wave. Smith earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. They are a co-host of the Poetry Foundation’s podcast, VS. The following interview with Smith took place at the Miami Book Fair in November 2017. Please also see Janine Harrison’s Aquifer review of Don’t Call Us Dead.

 

Judith Roney for The Florida Review:  

I dove into Don’t Call Us Dead with mega-enthusiasm because when I was handed the list of poets I’d be interviewing here at the Miami Book Fair because I have taught your poem “alternate names for black boys” in the protest-poetry section of my intro to poetry class. It’s a great poem to teach for so many reasons. It relies on this list of names, in the body of the poem, which are not names at all, but images, which is the point. It shows students how this poet, you, totally trusts the images to do the work, and I struggle to teach our young poets this form of trust.

 

Smith:

It’s hard, it’s hard. You know, I was teaching a workshop the other day, and everybody was so caught up in talking content and asking, What do you think of this poem? And talking about it as if it’s a story that somebody just told, and I’m like, No, where are the images, what makes you actually like the poem? I’d been writing a lot of poems about black boys, about police violence, about the many violences America throws at the black body, and I think I got to a point where I could no longer tell the story, I just had to curate the images, to let everybody else tell it to themselves.

 

TFR:

I like that term, “curate.” I’ll continue to teach the poem, and it makes it so much more exciting to teach it after meeting the poet and to talk about your concept of “curating the images.” About 50 percent of my students are writing about police violence. Many of my students are in that age range of about twenty-five or younger. I’m not going to ask your age—

 

Smith:

Twenty-eight.

 

TFR:

How people view the police has changed, and so the culture changes. We all know poetry should try to disrupt, and make changes, and nudge people from their comfort zones, and obviously you’re doing that, clearly, in terms of your writing as well as your performances of slam poetry and your recordings. What do you see as hoping it’s going to accomplish, and will in the future—the poetry—and continue to do so, and with media?

 

Smith:

I think poetry’s goal has long been to distill something in the human (uniquely human), and the human is often beautiful, but it can be ugly and political as well. Our humanity is an ugly and gorgeous thing. I just hope that people read and that we have a diverse readership. It’s just not about inspiring a next generation of poets, but also making creative poems that inspire the next generation of policy makers, that inspire the teachers, the lawmakers, the educators, the shakers, and the movers, and everybody that makes up our society. To make poems that push the world by pushing the readers, and by offering them something, that some bit of language that can better seed the word in their world, or with words that better describe it. I hope to put into language what I know I feel, and maybe to help other people find some way of being, of seeing, of moving forward.

 

TFR:

And that language is like magic.

 

Smith:

Language is magic, yeah. But this language is not high; I think I’m trying better to bridge those two worlds. I want my poems to sound more like me.

But there are many me’s. I think poets always randomly say some high-lyrical jargon off the cuff [laughter] because we’re not even trying [to connect], but poetry for me is most interesting when it encompasses all the language that our world holds.

 

TFR:

The form of your poem “litany with blood all over” fascinates me. This to me is so powerful: “my blood, his blood, my blood, his blood, over and over” because it works as such a visual object as well. When you say that you’re not just reaching out to young poets, or young students, but across ages that’s great but difficult. I’m fifty-six and grew up in Chicago, but I have a totally different mindset than a lot of other people from where I live now. If I showed my neighbor, for example, a poem, it would mean nothing to him. I struggle to reach those people. Tell me what went through your mind, when working on this, it seems so full of emotion.

 

Smith:

I think there’s a certain point where a poem decides it wants to break out of some type of a traditional way of being on the page—I became aware of this studying poets like Duriel E. Harris, like Evie Shockley, like Douglas Kearney—and with this poem I reached a point where I had said everything I could say, and what actually needed to come out was something more visual and less legible, but full of emotion.

 

TFR:

There’s also a powerful rhythm to read this—“my blood, his blood” from the poem we spoke of earlier, “litany with blood all over”—repeatedly, over and over with its powerful visual overlapping like a spell—I don’t know what else to call it. I suppose you could find a powerful way in a straight-form line, but to me this is so powerful that you did it like this.

 

Smith:

It had to be like that—

 

TFR:

It had to be it like that?

 

Smith:

Yes—the poem wants to start breaking out of the traditional strategy for lineation. Even other poems are kind of wonky, where, you know, poets get rather tab-happy, with the tab button on their computer and sort of start pushing lines to the other side of the page for no reason [laughter]. That’s the kind of stuff I start playing with—

 

TFR:

Tab-happy?!

 

Smith:

I don’t know what that’s called, so I just call it “tab-happy.”

 

I’m just like, okay, you wrote a poem and you decided want it to be all over the place, and that’s fine. I love those poems, I write those poems all the time.

Tab-happy sounds so fun—but I think even when the poem is hard—“litany with blood all over” is a very serious and sad poem—but still there has to be an element of play within the writing process, I believe, even when you’re writing about possibly traumatic, or serious, sad, melancholy, depressive, what-have-you topics.

 

In that moment of trying to figure out how to make this my blood, his blood, this overlapping of language and blood, I think I found a way to lift above language and it actually just becomes the blood on the page. Here’s a moment of play. I remember becoming very excited trying to figure out how I was going to do this. I started writing “my blood my blood his blood his blood” and thinking I wanted this to crash together—How do I merge these things? That part just becomes fun, you start getting into Microsoft Word or InDesign and just have fun.

 

TFR:

When did you know you were going to be a poet, when did you feel you were a poet, and when did you feel—besides just expressing yourself ordinarily as a young man and a person—when did you say, This is what I want to do? What did you first read that made you excited? Or hear? Music?

 

Smith:

I wasn’t reading. I definitely came into poetry as an auditory tradition, oratory tradition, oral tradition. I came into poetry first, at least was first excited by it, through the oral tradition. A lot of my teachers were teaching Frost and Dickinson, and blah blah blah—well, not blah blah blah, but at the time it felt like blah blah blah—and Langston Hughes was only taught if it was February. It was spoken word, it was sort of the like Def poetry movement that happened in the early 2000s that caught me up.

 

TFR:

Got you—

 

Smith:

Yes, because at first I didn’t know poets were alive.

 

[laughter]

 

All the poets they showed us in school were dead! And so I thought poetry died with the poets—I didn’t know there were still living, breathing, poets. I’m glad to see there’s been a greater shift in the last ten-fifteen years to push living poets into the classroom, and the high school and college classrooms, and thank God for it, because for so long, I don’t know what people were thinking in the ’90s and early 2000s. It felt like nobody was actually interested in bringing in anything actually contemporary to students, and what I needed was a voice a little bit closer in, well not in age, but in “moment” to me. I heard that other poets were talking about things I cared about, not just things that happened in the past, but things that still are relevant, that still have echoes, that still have resonance today, where they were talking about today. That felt important. So, you know, I first found a little poetry then. I was always going to write poetry—I didn’t know it was a career option—and in college I was part of a hip hop and spoken word arts program called First Wave at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

I was curious—we’d have these poets come through and teach us workshops and perform, and I didn’t know how they did this. How do you pay rent and call yourself a poet? Do you have a day job? Some had a day job, some did not, and I think for me it was never a question of whether I was going to write poetry but was more a question of income, which is a very real thing for artists.

 

I’ve been a poet since I started being a poet at fourteen, but at a certain point I was making enough to be a poet full time.

 

TFR:

In one interview in 2015, you mentioned that were obsessed with intersectionality. I like hearing about what other poets’ muses are, their haunts, their obsessions. Is this still an obsession?

 

Smith:

Okay, I don’t know if I’d say I’m obsessed with intersectionality, I think intersectionality is in everything, intersectionality being a foundational black feminist thought that you are never just the one thing—

 

With my first book, I was definitely obsessed with that. What happened with [insert] boy, part of my life process with trying to build that book was trying to parse out my identity to have a section that was supposedly about blackness, to have a section about queerness, or my life as a sex worker, about my family. The fun part about that was that even as I was trying to suss these topics out, they were still bleeding into each other, still speaking to each other. I couldn’t talk about just being black. I had to talk about also being queer within that, and all these other identities I hold—

 

They’re all layered over each other. I think then I was kind of obsessed with the concept of intersectionality, but not so much anymore. I think now in my work intersectionality is now just a fact. I think it was something I was playing around with in my first book, and now it’s our lives, we are, all of us, we each are our many selves.

 

TFR:

As an identification, as a persona, when you’re writing, does it keep changing from poem to poem? You’ve moved on, so what questions do you find yourself asking questions in the newer poems?

 

Smith:

I think every poem is a pursuit, is a failed pursuit of an answer, but just a poem getting a little bit closer to it. I wrote [insert] boy, and I spent time with those questions, and I wrote Don’t Call Us Dead, and spent time with those questions, and now I’m writing new things and working toward my third book, and so I have questions there that I’m trying to pursue too.

TFR:

It’s great to have a book like Don’t Call Us Dead for my advanced poetry class, for studying form—students need to see these new forms, they need to have their eyes opened. I make it a point to use few, maybe one or two dead poets.

 

Smith:

Well, now I love Frost and Dickinson, all those folks. I love William Blake, [laughter] and Keats, and stuff like that—

 

TFR:

Crazy guys!

 

Smith:

Right, crazy guys! I find something of value in that—but it took falling in love with contemporary poetry for me to be able to reach back, and where we understand something historical of note.

 

TFR:

Okay, then I want to ask a last question, did it take something to unlock the door, and there you went, and you kind of exploded from there?

 

Smith:

I didn’t love poetry for a while, and then a professor of mine in college asked me, “Are your poems only going to be good when you’re around to read them [aloud]?” And then that’s what really changed my life and sent me to the page. Then I discovered another whole other realm of possibility of how to be a poet, and I was already in love with the concept of poetry, and it was nice to discover it also be lived in a vibrant way on the page, too, because I think that’s the thing—when I found spoken word I did not also find the contemporary written word. That came later. I knew folks were speaking poetry into the world, but I didn’t know folks were still publishing books!

 

TFR:

Often people who like spoken word or slam poetry don’t think about looking at it—on the page or in a book. They think this is too quiet, or “I’m not going to get it.”

 

Smith:

No, no, books are loud, books are loud, books are forceful.

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Judith Roney

Judith Roney’s fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications. Field Guide for a Human was a 2015 finalist in the Gambling the Aisle chapbook contest. Her poetry collection, According to the Gospel of Haunted Women, received the 2015 Pioneer Prize. A memoir piece, “My Nickname was Frankenstein,” is nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She confesses to an obsession with the archaic and misunderstood, dead relatives, and collects vintage religious artifacts and creepy dolls. Currently she teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida, and is a staff poetry reader for The Florida Review.