Author Archive
Patricia Smith
Ticked off enough to make an appearance…
Does Dana Gioia matter? Obviously more than we know…
An alert Cave Canem alum spotted this in the big man’s bio–
“An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 book ‘Can Poetry
Matter?’, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle
Award, is credited with reinvigorating the role of poetry in
contemporary American culture and giving rise to popular poetry
movements such as poetry slams and cowboy poetry.”
Is that true? Did Dana Gioia’s lofty 1991 tome miraculously give birth to slams that I participated in four years earlier?
Wow. He’s magic.
Patricia Smith
Where poems come from.
Look at these faces.
These six people allegedly held a West Virginia black woman captive for an entire week, choking, raping and stabbing her while forcefeeding her feces and peppering her with the N-word. They doused her in scalding water, ripped out her hair and made her drink from a toilet.
Meanwhile, we’re in the business of poetry.
Patricia Smith
You didn’t hear it from me…
…but there’s a little wisp of a rumor that somewhere, someday, you may be able to get up close and personal with the bloggers of Harriet. Not only will you be able to gaze upon our actual faces, but there may even be a chance to revel and weep as jewels of poetic wisdom drip from our lips!
OK, who am I kidding? There’s only one of us the public’s clamoring for, and I’m going to make sure you good people get the access you deserve. So before this rumored appearance, which is rumored to be within a month or so, I am selling armbands that may get you a privileged place in line to buy a ticket to get close enough to share oxygen with Kwame Dawes.
You heard right.
With your valid charge card number, not only can I offer actual access, I can guarantee that our most prolific blogger will write you a paragraph–or a line of his sumptuous poetry–while you wait!
This is a one-time offer, providing the rumored appearance actually becomes a reality, which I assure you it will. This is your all-access pass to the Renaissance man, a chance to be touched by genius, an unparalleled opportunity to someday be able to utter the deception “Kwame Dawes is a friend of mine.”
The line starts forming to the right, and as soon as the credit card emblazoning thingie warms up, we can get this party going. If you’re gonna be a poet, ya gotta know a poet.
I can introduce you to the best.
Patricia Smith
And pleasant dreams.
Rigoberto’s got me thinking about poetry and music, and I’ve been thinking about my favorite singers, who always seem to be poets at heart.
So 1 a.m. on Sunday morning is the perfect time to unveil my guilty pleasure, the man second only to Smokey Robinson in my heart. This was tonight’s lullaby, the song I needed to hear in order to end the day, and the reason I’ll wake up with a poem in my pen tomorrow.
Goodnight, all.
>
Patricia Smith
Poet as Platypus.
Like many other folks, I need a cap to my summer–a day or seminal event that bellows this is it, the dog days are officially over. This year, I actually had–if indeed this is possible–two ways to end the season.
The first one was to be a personal pleasure–Martin Espada’s 50th birthday bash at the Bowery. Not only was this a chance to reconnect with dozens of my favorite poets and send them off with a hug and kiss into their respective autumns, but it provided a rare opportunity to heap much due praise upon The Espada, who is everyone’s poet whether everyone knows it or not.
The very next day I planned to wave adieu to summer again from the sultry confines of the ATL and the Decatur Book Festival. There, over Labor Day weekend, I was set to read with Sherman Alexie, who I haven’t laid eyes on since he flattened me during a People’s Poetry Gathering sendup of the Taos Poetry World Heavyweight Championship bout. He beat me about as badly as I beat Jimmy Santiago Baca in….hey, wait a minute.
Anyhoo, not only was our own Kwame Dawes gonna be in the house, but I was all set to shake hands with Kinky Friedman and finally meet Natasha Trethewey so I could bask in her considerable aura and maybe absorb a smidgen of her talent. Best of all, I had plotted and planned with several of my Cave Canem brethren to meet up at Gladys Knight’s Chicken & Waffles for what we hope will become an annual pilgrimage. If you think Tabasco and syrup have no business touching each other on a plate, well you, my friend, have a lot to learn.
So it’s been a fantastic summer, and it was set to end ultra-fantastically. But since I’m typing this from my couch on Saturday evening, you can assume that something went awry.
Patricia Smith
Poetry, the Conqueror of Pimples and All Prepubescent Profundities!
Suddenly, the air is charged.
My 12-year-old is banging around the apartment, trying on first-day-at-school outfits, cooing at her image when the ensembles work and screaming like a banshee when they don’t. She has copied the official 7th-grade school supply list over two or three times, which I guess was somehow preferable to simply printing it out from the computer.
Armed with the list, we headed for Staples, and she trounced the aisles looking for a mirror (so she could see how she looked holding various folders) and gushing over her very first Texas Instruments fancy-pants, bell-and-whistles calculator. I have never seen anyone so excited about the beginning of school.
Poised on the edge of the emotional maelstrom known as middle school (hello pimples, gossip and–omigod–boys), she is dancing toward the chaos with both eyes open, singing even. (If you have not heard the entire score of “High School Musical 2″ screeched by a tuneless preteen, you have not lived. And you will no longer want to.)
I can’t stop looking at her. Amazing. And I can’t help but think back to when I was 12, penning anguished little poems in my wire-bound notebook, thinking there wasn’t anyone but me writing, no one but me needing to write. I hadn’t read any poems in school (we’re talking about the Chicago public school system, where even math was an elective), and certainly didn’t know that there were people who made a living writing poetry, and that was an option available to me.
My granddaughter, however, is a different breed.
Patricia Smith
It’s 1:31 a.m….
…and I’m exhausted. But I’m sitting in front of my laptop, bleary-eyed, listening to a muted Lightnin’ Hopkins and staring at the 17th line of a poem that I’ve been working on for four years.
This profession–this writing of measured and meaningful lines–is for crazy people. I can hear the warm, contented snoozing of my husband and granddaughter, and I long to join them in the sleep of the blissfully unaware, but there’s this–line. I could forget it for now, sleep on it, but I can’t help feeling that I’m on the verge of a breakthrough. And after four years of nada breakthrough, I’m not about to doze off and miss the big moment.
I know that this line will complete the poem–finally–and that the poem has the potential to be a soul-shaker, a disturbance, a ripple in the cosmos. It’s like being on the verge of childbirth. It’s just that I’ve been in labor so long everyone’s lost interest. Before giving up on me an hour or so ago, the 12-year-old dismissed my delirium with an exasperated roll of her eyes and this oft-repeated phrase: “Oh, that poem. Grandma, it’s just a line.”
Just a line? They really don’t get it, do they? There’s absolutely no way to explain that nine words, tweaked mercilessly at least once a week for the past 1460 days, can feel so vital, so damned necessary, and not tomorrow, but right now. It’s like childbirth. You struggle and sweat to bring something into being. And once it’s there, out in the open air, you should feel relieved–but damned if you don’t miss the pain.
Patricia Smith
What I did over (the last week of) summer vacation…
Certainly couldn’t afford to, but this past week I decided to reread the poetry books I keep rereading. Trying to think of why I keep coming back to these volumes, I realized that I was thinking too much. Let’s just say riveting narrative, muscle, muscle, muscle, guts. Let’s say porch stories, inherent music. Let’s say I’m a creature of habit.
For the record (not in the order I crave them, but in the order I picked them up):
Sherry Fairchok, The Palace of Ashes
June Jordan, Haruko/Love Poems
Stephen Dobyns, Velocities
Rafael Campo, The Other Man was Me: A Voyage to the New World
Tyehimba Jess, Leadbelly
Steve Davenport, Uncontainable Noise
Diane Ackerman, Jaguar of Sweet Laughter
Elizabeth Alexander, Venus Hottentot
Roger Fanning, The Island Itself
Jan Beatty, Boneshaker
Richard Wright, Haiku: This Other World
Lydia Melvin, South of Here
Sharon Olds, Strike Sparks
Roger Bonair-Agard, Tarnish and Masquerade
Remica Bingham, Conversion
Douglas Goetsch, Nobody’s Hell
Kwame Dawes, Wisteria
Frank X Walker, Buffalo Dance
Tony Gloeggler, One Wish Left
And what a week it was. I hope this list will pique your curiosity, spark a discussion, at the very least lead you to check out and discover a poet you didn’t know before. Questions and conversation welcome. Post your own can’t-resist list!
Happy summer perusing.
Seacrest. Out.
Patricia Smith
I’m certainly not proud of the fact…
….that approximately 13 seconds after Charles Simic was named poet laureate, I went alookin’ for him on YouTube. And I discovered that he is the only person with a heartbeat who hasn’t been captured by a cell phone camera in bad light and plastered across cyberspace. He is simply NOT THERE.
That was very disappointing. You see, every time a laureate gets his wings, I launch into an intensive study of his writings, background, muttered wisdoms and, yes, his voice. I’m convinced there’s a prescribed path to the big office, and I wanna be on it.
You heard right. I’ve got my eyes on the prize. I want to follow proudly in the footsteps of the 12 white men, 2 white women and one black dove who’ve been undisputed sultans of the stanza. But every couple of years, when I study up on the current laureate, I find I’ve got a long, long way to go. All I need to encourage me is the appointment of a a young chipper whose stature seems vaguely attainable. Instead I get this:
Patricia Smith
Kudos to the culprit.
I I don’t know when this video was filmed, although it looks to be about 10 years ago. What I do know: this is Marc Smith, inventor of the poetry slam, devil or angel, miracle worker or madman, love ‘im or hate ‘im. This is what he does that made me do what I do.
I’m positively weepy watching this.
Enjoy.
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