Poetry That Asks 'Why?'

At the Boston Globe, Kate Tuttle profiles Harvard Graduate School of Education doctoral student and National Poetry Slam champion Clint Smith. Smith, who read from his new book last week at Harvard Book Center, remarks that all of his work aims to answer the question "Why does the world look the way that it does today?" More:

Thanks in part to his popular TED talks and a high Twitter profile, Clint Smith was already well known as a poet and thinker even before he began work on a doctorate at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.

But Smith, a New Orleans native, doesn’t see his new role as a graduate student as a change in direction. “I kind of follow in the tradition of some folks — some thinkers and scholars I really look up — who reject the idea of intellectual compartmentalization,” Smith said, citing W.E.B. Du Bois as a model in rejecting “this notion that your intellectual project could only manifest itself in one particular way.”

For Smith, a National Poetry Slam champion who began writing verse while teaching high school English, all of his work — whether as an educator, a social scientist, or a poet — aims to address the same set of questions. Chief among them is the big one: “Why does the world look the way that it does today?” It’s a question Smith looks at through the lens of racial inequality in everything from education to incarceration to images in popular culture.

Continue reading at the Boston Globe.