From Blood Dazzler:
Now officially a bitch, I’m confounded by words—
all I’ve ever been is starving, fluid, and noise.
So I huff a huge sulk, thrust out my chest,
open wide my solo swallowing eye.
You must not know.
Scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent,
I fly.
The Hudson Valley Writers Center is housed in the retired Phillipse Manor train station, a reassuringly solid building with heavy stone pillars and burnished woodwork. It boasts a spectacular view of the Hudson, with the graceful arc of the Tappan Zee Bridge to the south. Except when a train rattles past, it’s quiet enough to hear birdsong. The air is still, spring-sweet. There is no indication at all that a storm is about to strike.
That would be slam poetry champion and National Book Award nominee Patricia Smith, as the voice and embodiment of Hurricane Katrina, channeled in Smith’s 2008 book Blood Dazzler. Moving from the storm’s perspective to a devastating roll call of human victims, Smith does not so much read her poems as inhabit them, roaring and whispering from voice to voice like a virtuoso character actress.
The Writers Center appearance is a rare touchdown at Smith’s Tarrytown home between gigs; her website itinerary lists 20 events within three months in 10 different states. She’s gotten very good at packing. “I have three piles of laundry. I get home, dump the suitcase into the hamper, and pack the next pile,” she laughs.
Five-time winner of Chicago’s Uptown Poetry Slam and four-time National Grand Slam champion, Smith favors accessible language and emotional immediacy. “She throws fierce charisma,” said Kurt Heintz, introducing her at Book of Voices; a Small Press Review critic exulted, “Smith writes the way Tina Turner sings.”
“I got my introduction to poetry by getting up on stage and doing it, and there was always a mix of people in the audience—ex-cons, people who bag groceries in the supermarket, people with kids. There’s something in poetry for just about everybody,” she says. The eclectic mix matters. “It’s easy to kind of huddle around other people who are doing what you’re doing and feel safe.”
Safe is not Smith’s flavor. Her poems employ a vast range of personae: child molesters, gang members, politicians, even storms (Katrina revels in “The difference in a given name. What the calling,/the hard K, does to the steel of me,/how suddenly and surely it grants me/pulse, petulance. Now I can do/my own choking”.) This might seem audacious, but Smith shrugs it off. “The persona gets the poet out of the way. It takes courage in one way, but if the audience doesn’t like it, you can comfort yourself that it’s the persona they don’t like, not the poem. The greater challenge is writing through your own life and being completely honest.”
“Honesty” is a loaded word. While Smith made a name for herself on the slam circuit, she earned a living as a journalist, first at the Chicago Daily News, where she started out as a part-time typist, and then at the Boston Globe, for which she wrote hundreds of columns. She wrote with a raw intensity that garnered her a nomination for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, later withdrawn when the paper confirmed rumors that she’d fabricated sources and quotations in some of her columns.
Smith’s final column, “A Patricia Note of Apology,” took it on the chin: “As anyone who’s ever touched a newspaper knows, that’s one of the cardinal sins of journalism: Thou shall not fabricate. No exceptions. No excuses.” She told readers, “I wanted the pieces to jolt. So I tweaked them to make sure they did. It didn’t happen often, but it did happen.” (Website TransparencyNow.com called “It didn’t happen often” her farewell lie, claiming as many as 20 columns cited undocumented sources.)
The fallout was massive. Smith lost her job amid a firestorm of public humiliation; the resulting stress destroyed her first marriage and jeopardized her health. But by the end of the year, she’d funneled these experiences into an evening-long performance at the Chicago Cultural Center on themes of self-
destruction, betrayal, and redemption, receiving a tumultuous standing ovation.
A decade later, asked if she misses being a journalist, Smith replies with a raucous “Naah!” She’s come to see the experience as a baptism by fire. “It was basically like a blowtorch, burning everything flat, and showing me what kind of writing I was meant to be doing. I wish I had learned it in some other way, but everything I’m doing now comes from that.”
“Everything” includes teaching as well as performance and publication. Smith is on the faculty of Cave Canem, a celebrated retreat for African-American poets, and has taught at Georgia Tech University and the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program. This fall, she’ll teach creative writing at CUNY College of Staten Island. She’s also taught in prisons, senior citizens centers, and elementary schools.
“You want to talk to as many people as you can,” she says. “In every classroom, as in every audience, there’s always one person who’s going to be changed, and that’s who you’re talking to. You don’t know who it is, so you have to assume it’s everyone. The first time someone comes up to you and says, ‘I’ve felt that way too, but I didn’t know what to do with it or how to talk about it,’ you realize that everything you write carries a responsibility.”
She’s especially passionate about bringing poetry to children. “When I was in fourth, fifth, sixth grade, I didn’t know that option was available to me. We’d have about two paragraphs in our English book—we’d do Robert Frost and then it would be over. I wish I had known back then that I had that second throat. The only difference between me and somebody who doesn’t write poetry is that something happened in my life to click that throat open.”
Her childhood on Chicago’s gritty West Side was lonely. “I was an only child, so my parents’ way of introducing me to the world was to keep me away from it. My mother was very protective,” she says. Her third book, Close to Death, opens with a poem by her father, a factory worker murdered by a gunman at age 62.
When she was about nine years old, Smith started writing in spiral-bound notebooks, creating a fictional character with an ongoing life. “Erica. I got the name from TV,” she recalls. “Erica was white. She had dark hair and blue eyes, which I thought was just the best combination. She was a cheerleader, the class president, she had all these brothers—to me, this was a great life. It was the first time I realized it was possible to create a world that was nothing like the world you were in. It was a secret escape.”
Though she wrote and reread her Erica stories for years, it never occurred to Smith to write about her own life. “I didn’t have much. There was nothing going on. Of course, there was a lot going on—you realize later with a poet’s eyes and a poet’s insight, you turn back and see how much poetry was there.”
Smith calls writing “a real skill for living, to process what’s happened to you, even if it never comes out of your drawer.” Even when people feel entitled to write, she says, many limit themselves to one genre. “Just think of yourself as a storyteller, not a poet or playwright or short story writer. A poem is a snapshot in a longer narrative. Continue, and it could become a short story. Or shine a light from another perspective, it’s a children’s book. We cage ourselves so early to all these possibilities, we think we’re not this or not that, when it’s all coming from the same well.”
She gets ideas from “reading history, news—a lot of ideas from news—from people you meet,” looking for an unexpected point of entry to the material. Smith doesn’t rewrite a lot on her own. “I need to get up in front of an audience to work on the poem. The first draft kind of comes out of a fever. You’re there sweating over lines and thinking about words. I talk out loud all the time. All the time. A poem doesn’t begin to have sense for me till it hits the air. I need to hear how it sounds.”
Blood Dazzler began as a single poem, “34,” which gives last words to each of the 34 nursing home residents left to die in St. Bernard’s Parish. Smith performed it in Palm Beach in 2007, and felt discomfort and shifting in the audience. “Some people just wanted Katrina to be over,” she reports. When an audience member told her, “They had Mardi Gras, didn’t they? It’s better now,” Smith started writing more poems about the hurricane and its aftermath. She’s currently collaborating with Urban Bush Women choreographer and principal dancer Paloma MacGregor on a dance-theater piece based on Blood Dazzler.
Smith’s second husband, Bruce DeSilva, is a writing coach for Associated Press; their household also includes Smith’s 13-year-old granddaughter Mikhaila, the only daughter of her only son. “We’re all only-children in my family,” she says ruefully. The poet confesses to an obsession with the sit-com “The Golden Girls,” watching reruns over and over. “I love ‘The Golden Girls’! Bruce asked me, ‘What’s the attraction?’ It’s the idea for me as an only child that you’d have that female companionship, the roommates—it’s like having sisters when you’re a grownup.” Or three older Ericas.
“In black family tradition, there’s always a storyteller, a front porch griot who spins tales with touches of down-home magic,” Patricia Smith wrote in one of her Boston Globe columns. Sometimes that tale-spinner picks up the force of a hurricane.
This article appears in May 2009.
