cause I\u2019m not usually quiet about the books I love. <\/span><\/p>\nDo you have any specific journal\/note-taking practices in your writing? Where do the origins of poems come from, for you? How do you go about collecting ideas?<\/b><\/p>\n
I really don\u2019t. I just try to sit down and make words whether I\u2019m inspired or not. Poems come from all sorts of places, my job is to listen closely to where they want to go. I don\u2019t collect ideas. I wish I knew how to do that. I try to keep my eyes, ears, memory, and heart open so I don\u2019t miss a poem when it passes by me. Maybe I thought of poems more as ideas to work on earlier in my career, but not it feel like just trying to follow a specific thought or sound to see where it leads.<\/span><\/p>\nAs a reader of your work, I\u2019ve always leaned into the bright windows of sound that you weave into your poems. In <\/b>[insert] boy <\/i><\/b>(YesYes Books, 2014), for example, lines like: \u201cyou awoke dressed as a rose blooming \/ with blades\u201d (38) and \u201cI hear music rise off your skin. Each hair on your arm a tiny viola\u201d (109) make the ear in me sing, while also conveying the sonic as violence, as softness, as visceral tribute, as fact. You\u2019ve also spoken in other interviews about your origins as a slam poet. I\u2019m wondering about the legacy of noise\/sound in your work, and your sonic loves. What are some sonic things in the world (literal\/physical sounds, clips, songs) that inspire you? That you\u2019re currently obsessed with?<\/b><\/p>\n\n- the sounds of black churches<\/span><\/li>\n
- porch stories<\/span><\/li>\n
- black people laughing<\/span><\/li>\n
- the music of Jamila Woods<\/span><\/li>\n
- the music of K. Raydio<\/span><\/li>\n
- the music of Earth, Wind, & Fire<\/span><\/li>\n
- the music of City Girls<\/span><\/li>\n
- the music of Joseph Chilliams<\/span><\/li>\n
- gross sex noises<\/span><\/li>\n
- the Youtube series \u201cGot 2 b Real\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n
- the podcast \u201cThe Read\u201d<\/span><\/li>\n
- the sounds of POC queer people<\/span><\/li>\n
- shit my friends say<\/span><\/li>\n
- heavy rain<\/span><\/li>\n
- things people say a little too loud in public<\/span><\/li>\n
- the sound of other people humming in the shower at the gym<\/span><\/li>\n
- reading messages from Angel Nafis in her voice in my head<\/span><\/li>\n
- the sound my grandma makes when she agrees with something shady<\/span><\/li>\n
- lakes in the morning<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Something that is on my mind constantly is how I, as a writer and editor of color, can sustain my practice (and my heart) in the context of writing responsibly about my multiple identities. As a marginalized writer, it seems that one is often seen as the all-representative of their identity; I\u2019m either always cast through the lens of race in my poems, when my writing is very much about that, but also about so much more. Is this something you struggle with or think about? Do you have thoughts about writing against a consumerist readership\/culture that might try to simplify your work, or any advice for other writers of color, nonbinary writers, or writers who may be writing from marginalized backgrounds?<\/b><\/p>\n
I used to wrestle with this question a lot, particularly after a few poems of mine got a lot of attention around the time of the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the return of police brutality against Black folks and other POC returned to the interest and attention of the larger American audience. Around that time, editors\u2014a lot of them white\u2014started 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. It gave me a little identity crisis. I was looking at work that had meant a lot to me, to my community, as a currency that I didn\u2019t want to use, but many were trying to economize. What did I do? I struggled, I gave in to it, I rejected it, I felt gross, I said no, I said yes, I didn\u2019t reply, I moved further away from myself, I re-dedicated myself to my communities & self (I went thru it all, y\u2019all). I would go around asking my poetry aunties and uncles and big cousins this same question and between their mix of patience and \u201coh, they so young\u201d eyerolls, I came to this: the feeling of having to write on behalf of my community and\/or needing to perform my identity for the industry was an anxiety of someone else\u2019s invention grafted onto me. So I shook it loose\u2014it was a lot of shaking\u2014but I did it. I still have to revisit the question sometimes and I come to the same conclusion. I don\u2019t have to write <\/span>against <\/span><\/i>anything. I just have to write what is most urgent to me, write towards my most loved audiences, write to what is in most urgent need of love, and write whatever the fuck I want. Y\u2019all, write whatever you want towards whoever you want. Leave the publishing industry outside of your writing practice.<\/span><\/p>\nA poem of yours that has always struck me is \u201cLion King in the Hood,\u201d from <\/b>Black Movie <\/i><\/b>(Button Poetry, 2015). This poem re-envisions scenes from The Lion King \u2014 turning a reader\u2019s gaze towards the brutality of Black deaths, towards relentless (senseless) losses. Joy is haunted; trauma and violence is revealed. For me, this poem \u2014 through both form and language \u2014 is an instance of subverting a cultural narrative (see: Disney) into one of critique, of refusal, of reveal. This poem transformed the way I think about form, on poetry shaping\/sharpening the communities we live in, enabling us to see clearer, to call out. For you, what is your vision for what poetry (and poetic forms) can attempt to do for the world?<\/b><\/p>\n
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. I think poetry can do anything and I love that every poet is attempting to do something in their poems, we need a variety of spells to change the world. For me, poetry is an opportunity to expand and distill humanness. It is a mighty tool for us to spark protest & seed possibility, a place for us to offer our readers refuse, food, validity, and delight. Form, whether traditional, invented, or appropriated, is both invitation and trigger for all those things I think poetry can do. There are forms that play with sound to raise and relieve tension in the body (say the sonnet or the sestina), while other forms (like the invented, appropriated form in my poem you mention) trigger a reaction because it reimagines something recognizable to the reader, altering perception and building something new across an old synapse. These are all just different types of play and, for me, play is at the heart of form. I don\u2019t know what poetry forms can attempt in the world, but I know that they are useful vehicles to carry the poem towards transcendence and they are tools that we can use as writers to delight ourselves. Form, for me, is selfish. It\u2019s a chance for me to challenge myself to produce in ways free verse doesn\u2019t allow. It\u2019s a space to explore and push of my own poetic pleasure, even when the poem is riddled with emotional difficulty. I often return to Marilyn Nelson\u2019s introduction for <\/span>A Wreath for Emmett Till <\/span><\/i>where she discusses using the heroic crown of sonnets as a kind of buoy to make wading into the difficulty of his murder possible. That rings true for me. Form as often been the lifeboat what makes exploring the troubled waters of the world and myself possible, to delight in the midst of the battle.<\/span><\/p>\nYour book <\/b>Don\u2019t Call Us Dead <\/i><\/b>(Graywolf Press, 2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has generated many readers nationally and internationally. Do you have a different relationship with your poems once they\u2019re out in the world for the public to read\/digest?<\/b><\/p>\n
Once a poem is in the world it\u2019s no longer precious to me. Well, in a way. There is a necessary release I have to agree to once a poem is in the world for it is no longer mine, but the world\u2019s. This is why I try to keep my poems to myself before they are ready, before I am open to public comment or consumption of the work. I disagree with myself a little tho. There is another kind of intimacy offered in the performance of the work and that connection between me and the poem requires the publics looking, but it is still a somewhat private experience of the poem. While reading a poem out loud def is about building a bridge and home with the audience, it also allows me to get to know the poem again or really for the first time over and over again.<\/span><\/p>\nCan you speak about the process of stitching together <\/b>Don\u2019t Call Us Dead? <\/i><\/b>How did the order of the poems call and conjure? How did you find the manuscript materializing?<\/b><\/p>\n
[…] I was working on two collections, one focused on queerness, sex, and HIV and another focused on police brutality and Black death in America. When I began working with Graywolf, Jeff Shotts suggested that the two collections were having a singular, more complex conversation. I thought he was trippin until I realized he was super right.<\/span><\/p>\nBeyond that, the book came together like most books do. It worked until it didn\u2019t, I threw out half and wrote more, I returned to some old things with new eyes and fixed them up, I reordered and reordered and shuffled and cried and felt like a bad bitch. It\u2019s the work, ya know?<\/span><\/p>\nI think maybe the most interesting part of putting a book together is how you listen to and wrestle with your editors. Jeff Shotts, Parisa Ebrahimi, Phillip B Williams, and the Dark Noise Collective are the people I trust most with my work because they push me to a higher level of thinking, they celebrate my successes and don\u2019t let me slide on my bullshit. I reject the idea that poetry is a lonely art form because I know how trash I would be without the eyes and ears of others, the many people in my life that make these books a collaborative process.<\/span><\/p>\nWhat is one lesson you learned fairly early on in your writing life, that has remained with you, or that you carry forward today? (If there isn\u2019t one, what\u2019s something you wish you could go back and dunk on your younger poet-self?)<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cBaby boy, you only funky as your last cut.\u201d
\n<\/span><\/i>\u2014 Andre 3000<\/span><\/p>\nStop looking back at what you\u2019ve done and being impressed\u2014keep creating, keep moving. Live <\/span>in<\/span><\/i> the process instead of <\/span>for <\/span><\/i>the product.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Interview by Carlina Duan Danez Smith is the author of Don\u2019t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award, and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1704,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[54],"tags":[35,23],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-3Vh","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15083"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15202,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15083\/revisions\/15202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}