“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.
