The power of poetry

📘 Discover the poetry of Clint Smith

Every once in a while, you come across a voice that is so fresh that it stays with you. This happened for me one day earlier this year. I remember precisely where I was when it happened. I was pruning some hydrangeas, listening to Terry Gross on Fresh Air when she introduced me to Clint Smith.

He had written an award-winning nonfiction book about slavery that was named one of the ten best books of 2021 by the New York Times Book Review and became a #1 New York Times bestseller — and now he was back with a collection of poetry, his second.

As I listened to him that day, both sharing his story and also reading some of his poems, I was struck by his style and subject matter — and his ability to convey moments in time and juxtapose realities.

Part of what poetry does is allows you to - and maybe the better word is forces you and pushes you to see the parts of yourself that you might not otherwise have encountered or might not have otherwise paid attention to.

-Clint Smith on Fresh Air, March 29, 2023 (source)

If you’d like to listen to the full Fresh Air interview, here is a link (I think you’ll enjoy it):

🎧 Fresh Air: In ‘Above Ground,’ Clint Smith uses poetry to confront the legacy of slavery (37 minute listen)

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I’m sharing two exchanges below that really caught my ear and help to give a sense of his style and how he thinks. In the first, he shares how he thinks about the human experience and parenthood and reads his poem “All At Once”:

CLINT SMITH: Yeah. Well, it's so good to be back with you, Terry. It's always a pleasure to be on this program. And with regard to this first poem, so much of what I've been thinking about over the last several years is what you've kind of alluded to, the simultaneity of the human experience, which is to say, how do we move through our lives holding wonder, joy, awe alongside fear, despair, a sense of catastrophe. And a lot of what I'm thinking about in this collection are - is that idea in a sort of - in the context of the larger human experience, but also through the prism of parenthood and how parenthood is both the thing that shows you parts of yourself that you have never experienced before in ways that you are incredibly proud of, and also in ways that you're ashamed of - how being with your kids is, you know, full of joy and levity and laughter, and also that parenthood is one of the most exhausting, difficult and fear-inducing experiences in the world. And so I'm thinking about the simultaneity of our lives both in a macro context, in a geopolitical context, in an ecological context, but also in the specific granular details of our own lives.

GROSS: And you have the ability to put it all in words that really perfect the thought, clarify the thought. So would you read for us "All At Once"?

SMITH: I'd be happy to.

(Reading) "All At Once." The redwoods are on fire in California. A flood submerges a neighborhood that sat quiet on the coast for three centuries. A child takes their first steps and tumbles into a father's arms. Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow. A forest of seeds are planted in new soil. A glacier melts into the ocean and the sea climbs closer to the land.

(Reading) A man comes home from war and holds his son for the first time. A man is killed by a drone that thinks his jug of water is a bomb. Your best friend relapses and isn't picking up the phone. Your son's teacher calls to say he stood up for another boy in class. A country below the equator ends a 20-year civil war. A soldier across the Atlantic fires the shot that begins another.

(Reading) The scientists find a vaccine that will save millions of people's lives. Your mother's cancer has returned, and doctors say there is nothing else they can do. There is a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away. (Source)

The juxtapositions are powerful.

Later in the interview, he discusses becoming a father and read his poem “Counting Descent II,” which has a beautiful rhythmic quality to it with its unique use of numbers. This poem, perhaps more than anything else I’ve heard or read this year, has stuck with me.

SMITH: I always thought that I was going to be a dad. I don't think there was ever a point in which that didn't feel like something I was moving toward. And I - with the exception - and I write about this at the beginning of the book, is when my wife and I got news that we were - that fertility was going to be difficult for us. And it was very uncertain. And the pregnancies themselves, when they even happened, were uncertain and incredibly emotionally and physically difficult especially for my wife.

I always imagined myself as being a father, but there were certainly moments where fatherhood felt more distant. And so I feel enormous gratitude to look at these two little humans that we brought into the world because there was a point in which that that was - it was uncertain whether or not that would happen.

GROSS: I want you to read a poem about that. And this is a poem about meeting your wife and deciding to try to conceive pretty soon because of the problems of fertility.

SMITH: (Reading) "Counting Descent II." My son was born on the 71st day of spring on the fifth floor of a hospital in a city with a history of burning. He had two grandmothers in the room and four generations in the world. My daughter was born on the 59th day of winter and two doors down from the room her brother was born in 21 months before. Both of my children were induced several weeks before they were due because waiting any longer would have been a risk to both of their lives.

(Reading) I met my wife two years, one month and seven days before our first child arrived and three relationships after I assumed no one like her existed. We sat at a table in a city 893 miles away from where we live now for four times more likely than we planned and talked about things we had spent half our lives attempting to forget. When the bar closed, we walked two miles to her apartment, where two dates later we'd kiss for the first time.

(Reading) After 17 months and three doctor's appointments, we started trying to have a child because the doctor said we had less than a 1% chance. I'm not sure how they came up with that number, but I remember all the doctors kept saying, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

GROSS: So that was a follow-up poem to the title poem of your first book of poetry, which was also about thinking about your past in terms of numbers. I'll just quote a few lines. You write, my grandfather is a quarter century older than his right to vote and two decades younger than the president who signed the paper that made it so. Why do numbers have so much power where you're counting, you know, the days, the months, the distance between?

SMITH: Yeah, I should say that this poem and the one that preceded it were inspired by a mentor of mine, Alan Michael Parker, who's a professor at Davidson College where I went, and he was my advisor. He was one of the people who introduced me to poetry. And he has a poem in this book that - in his book that uses a similar conceit that I was so drawn to. I think numbers are such an interesting way to document one's past. I like the idea of the specificity of these moments.

And for me, poems, especially these sorts of poems in this collection, are time capsules. They are attempts to capture a moment in time. They are attempts to archive a moment, a feeling, an idea, an event so that I might be able to look back on it in the way that one looks back at a picture in a photo album or now a picture in your phone from years ago, and be drawn back into a moment. [emphasis added] And I think that using numbers in the sort of conceit of this poem and the previous "Counting Descent" is just another way of creating sort of time capsules within the larger time capsule of the poem and bringing me back to those moments that, whether they were positive or negative, whether they were imbued with joy or distress, are important for me to remember. (Source)

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I recently received a copy of Above Ground as a gift and have been thoroughly enjoying it. (While one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, I quite like the cover, too.)

Above Ground by Clint Smith. Photograph © 2023 by Bryce Payne.

If you have someone who enjoys poetry in your life, consider sharing Above Ground. While this is not a formal gift guide, if I were to recommend one book for 2023, this would be it.

If you’d like to check it out, I encourage you to visit your favorite local bookstore or library. I’ve also included a few links below for your convenience:

📚 Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Powell’s Books | Hachette (publisher)

Please note: These are not affiliate links; I am sharing for your convenience only

Go deeper:

• About Clint Smith

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Be well,

-Bryce