I often know — or think I know — that I have found the right language for relating an experience when the act of speaking a poem out loud makes me shake.
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Black. Wild. Laughing. Revisiting Danez Smith’s Homie and Reading at Fresno State by Angel Gonzales
Smith is writing from the margins, not about them, centering on all the things that are often denied, like love, tenderness, pain, friendship, and most importantly, joy. But there is no way around it, as Smith says when speaking about their process for self-care after writing about Black trauma.
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Patricia Smith is an award-winning poet on and off the page – author of eight books of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist, and she’s also a four-time National Poetry Slam champion. But what always remains at the center of her work is the fact that Smith is a storyteller. She’s able to situate and fully immerse readers that we bear witness to the most complicated of circumstances with every fiber of our beings, and this craft is mastered and beautifully exhibited in her newest collection.
Winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award, an NAACP Image award, an LA Times Book Prize, and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, Incendiary Art has us bear witness to rage, grief, violence, loss, and the fire of resistance through imagery packed with particulars and description and lines that are equally as dense as they are musical, and we always remain aware of our bodies for the adventure that is the collection, feeling such charged emotion from the very first poem all the way through to the end. Smith was available to answer some questions about her award-winning book in advance of her reading at Fresno State on Tuesday, March 5th 2019 in the Alice Peters Auditorium. She responded through email and wrote about the audience for Incendiary Art, the undercurrent of the collection, and her attempts to balance topics both heavy and light.
A Normal Interview with Patricia Smith
“I wanted those gunshots to resound from first page to last”
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