An Interview With Danez Smith at Public Books
At Public Books, an interview with Danez Smith, whose first full-length collection, [insert] boy, "is proof of Smith’s commitment to examining and unravelling the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, and imagining how we can tell those stories differently," says Isaac Ginsberg Miller. Also: "Smith’s accomplishments are remarkable for a poet still at the beginning of his career." Here's an excerpt from their conversation:
IGM: Can you say more about the presence of joy?
DS: A lot of these poems deal with trauma or oppression, and I think about oppression as the suppression of joy. When I think about oppressing Black people, systems of racism, at their root, they’re intended to keep people of color from being able to fully experience untinged joy. That’s even a phrase I think I use in the book at one point, when I’m talking about my grandfather: untinged joy. Like, what does joy look like when it’s not because of the absence of something else? Oftentimes when I experience joy, it’s radical, in the sense that it’s joy in spite of something else: joy in spite of the sorrow, in spite of the sadness, the fight, the struggle, whatever. So I think joy is always the underlying thing in these poems. Sometimes joy gets to sing a little bit further through and we understand that, “oh, this is a joyous poem,” it’s anthemic in some ways. But even in the saddest poems I think there’s an underlying idea that the absence of joy is still talking about joy in some type of way. When I talk about trauma, I’m really saying: “Why the fuck won’t you let me have joy? Why won’t you let me be? Let me live.” Which is some colloquial shit that we say as urban and colored folks: “Let me be. Let me be me. I’m grown.” All these sorts of things are attempts at saying: “Let me have joy.” Let me just worry about that.
IGM: I’m really struck by the idea of this being a book of little failures, because it certainly doesn’t appear that way to me as a reader. It feels like a very thorough and intentional book in the way that you organized it.
DS: When I say “little failures,” it’s not a bad thing in my head. I think of art-making as a process of trial and error, and so even in those failures there’s something to showcase or something to be proud of. Every time we come to the page or to the studio space to do work, we’re trying out an idea, we’re trying to flesh something out. And we fail and we fail and we fail, especially when we have a goal in mind, just to figure out what the thing can be. So even when I say little failures, there’s some good there. Also, I say little failures just because I went into some of these projects with something in mind of exactly what I wanted it to be and it became a complete other beast. Or through the process the poem revealed itself to want to live in a different form.
Read the full interview at Public Books.