As a poet gaining international acclaim for passionate prose and brilliant, boundary-breaking lyricism, Danez Smith thinks we can do a better job introducing the art of poetry to children.
“I didn’t realize that poets were alive for a very long time…because everybody who was taught to us was dead,” says Smith, who will appear at the Central Library on Feb. 10. “I didn’t think that there were poets that were thinking and writing to the world that I lived in and walked around in.”
Then, as a teenager in St. Paul, Minnesota, in the early 2000s, Smith — who uses plural, gender-neutral pronouns — came across the cable television series Def Poetry Jam, which featured hip-hop and spoken word poets like Black Ice and Lemon Andersen.
“What pulled me into their work was that they were talking about things that I knew with language that felt like my language,” says Smith. “Through the work of contemporary artists is the way that we hook kids into poetry…by showing kids — or adults, whoever — that poetry is a tool to think through and catalog our humanity as it exists today, as a tool to reimagine the world or to write down our own experiences.”
Smith, who began penning poems in high school, has been doing just that for some time now. And they’ve been catching a lot of notice with every new project released.
In 2017, the poet-performer released Don’t Call Us Dead, which earned the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award and was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Before that, their 2014 book, [insert] boy, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Smith’s work has also been featured in The New York Times and on PBS NewsHour as well as The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Smith also co-hosts the popular poetry podcast VS with Franny Choi.
Smith, a former First Wave scholar who earned an undergraduate degree at UW-Madison, will return to Madison with their latest collection, Homie.
Released late last month and already heralded as another triumph, Smith describes Homie as “a book that largely explores friendship and intimacy.” Smith says this project “feels like it’s very different from my last collection...because it points towards more joy in the world or even in myself.”
That’s not to say that Homie isn’t as heavy as Smith’s previous books. Poems in the book broach topics like “the death of a friend of mine and my own suicidal ideation and generally just the fucked-up-ed-ness of the world,” says Smith, who is black, queer, HIV-positive and heavily tattooed. “But it’s all of that while still trying to hold joy at its center.”
The book is full of fun moments mixed with deep, inner reflections on love — all of it using very frank, fragrant language and an ample amount of cuss words.
A lively, high-energy performer, Smith hopes those who read their work or attend live readings find resonance in the poems.
“My hope is that people find my work useful,” says Smith. “I want to help people think about love and who they choose to love, not just those people they were born into loving. It all comes back to how we make space for the people we love and how we love them.” n
Danez Smith reads from Homie at the Central Library on Feb. 10, 7 p.m. The event is hosted by the Wisconsin Book Festiva
