In Conversation With Danez Smith at City Pages

Ahead of Danez Smith's reading at Black Dog Cafe in St. Paul, Minnesota, City Pages hosts Erica Rivera's conversation with Smith about identifying as a queer, HIV-positive poet, and about their experiences in literature as a person of color. (Smith's preferred pronoun is they, them, their.) In her introduction to the conversation, Rivera explains "In the St. Paul-born poet’s second book of poems, Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press), Smith comes to terms with that diagnosis: 'i have too many words for sadness / i touched the stove & the house burned down.'" Let's start there: 

The virus isn’t the only threat to Smith's life; being black in the U.S. can be just as fatal. “America might kill me before I get the chance,” they [Smith's pronoun preference is they, their, them] write in the aptly titled poem, “every day is a funeral & a miracle.” 

The book isn’t all death and violence, however; Smith also excels in sweet expressions of love and incisive cultural criticism. Distress, courage, and eroticism weave their way through this essential read. 

Smith is the author of the 2014 award-winning collection of poetry [insert] boy, and is a founder of the Dark Noise Collective. We spoke to them ahead of the Don’t Call Us Dead launch on Tuesday.

City Pages: There’s a line in your poem “recklessly” that goes, “many stories about queerness are about shame.” What have been your experiences with that kind of shame?

Danez Smith: A lot of queer people’s narratives are about shame and that being a first hurdle in coming out or existing in the world, having shame in your body of what you desire. I think that’s sort of been, even for me, a first point of connection with a lot of other queer people: an understood shame. I think folks do a lot of work to do away [with that], too. I talked about it a lot in my first book as well -- how you do away with shame? -- but what I keep finding is that it keeps on coming up in these poems.

With the poem “recklessly,” too, it’s about Michael Johnson, who is imprisoned in Missouri because he was HIV-positive and there’s tension around whether he disclosed that to his partners or not. He says one thing, they say another. There’s a lot of racial politics wrapped up in it. That, for me, even comes to the question of shame: Who’s scared to admit what about themselves? 

Continue at City Pages.