Danez Smith: I see this a lot, especially with spoken word communities and how people teach young people, or when I visit some undergrad programs, and students feel like if they’re not exploring their deepest trauma, they’re not being what they consider to be a real poet. Sometimes you’re not ready for them. The field of poetry, and the stories that we can tell, and the ways in which we can use poetry are too varied and vast for me to have any type of prescriptive answer about what a good poem is. d be interested to hear how British poets of colour are already finding themselves collectivising, who they recognise as their pillars and advocates. She confesses to an obsession with the archaic and misunderstood, dead relatives, and collects vintage religious artifacts and creepy dolls. If you’re already touring, it’s like, I need a book so I can sell it. SN: That actually makes me think a lot about the specificity of the language in the book, specifically the use of the n-word, bitch, fag, etc., as a kind of love language. What we do is a collaborative art, dependent on our peers, our loves, and our world. I’m having a conversation about suicide—both a friend’s suicide takes center in the book, and also dealing with my own battles with suicidal thoughts—and now there are poems that I think help add that texture. And “acknowledgements” was titled something else for a while. Danez is also the author of two chapbooks, hands … Good lord this is a huge question that I could either spend the rest of my life trying to answer or let it float quietly over the rest of my life. Smith is grateful for a British audience while also being humbly cautious about taking the spotlight from a UK poet of colour. I think one of the episodes I return to the most is. It helps me look back up at the world with wider, more attentive sight. They, like a number of Black American poets from Amiri Baraka to Claudia Rankine, are part of a crucial transatlantic conversation that must continue to converge as nativist rhetoric rages in both the US and the UK. I have some friends who are literary nerds and some who aren’t. When you look at the T.S. And to recognize, when you’ve done something that felt hard or difficult, that it was exciting. I think the ode is sort of something that is already in the room even when you haven’t necessarily invited it there on purpose. As an identification, as a persona, when you’re writing, does it keep changing from poem to poem? What are you working on? And if a poem is read out loud, then that’s about choice, right? So I also hope they, ll be able to see themselves and not just the Americanness I. m indicting in the book, and I hope we can have some honest and good conversations. Smith currently co-hosts the popular Poetry Foundation podcast, VS. We’re often taught to think narrowly when we’re thinking about a collection we’re working on—you mine the narrow. DS: That’s just about being proud of yourself, and I don’t think that’s a strategy. The whole thing with “the I is dead,” “the I is alive”—just write what the fuck you want to write. It’s not like people having books young is a new thing, it’s just that a couple decades ago, no one paid attention to you until your third book. It kind of lives in this space now where it’s, like, a good poem is a good poem, right? About Danez. They, like a number of Black American poets from Amiri Baraka to Claudia Rankine, are part of a crucial transatlantic conversation that must continue to converge as nativist rhetoric rages in both the US and the UK. How does your poetics respond to your background in performance? Around that time, editors—a lot of them white—started reaching out to me asking if I had more work about police brutality and Black death in particular, which at times felt like a genuine interest in amplifying a the movement, but often felt like editors trying to gain cash in one the aesthetic cool of politically engaged work from black poets. What are some sonic things in the world (literal/physical sounds, clips, songs) that inspire you? Every poem is speaking to some greater outside…”) What have you learned about poems/writing/community-building from hosting the podcast? Making sure that they’re okay. I don’t have to write against anything. Every interview we do is unique and I learn something different from every guest. I often return to Marilyn Nelson’s introduction for. When you want to write about flowers, write about flowers.
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