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I admit I first took notice of Danez Smith when I learned they were from the Twin Cities. Though I now call Baltimore home, I was born and raised in Minnesota too and always feel a primal sort of kinship with Black folks from the state—especially those who arise as storytellers. But my appreciation for Smith quickly grew beyond that coincidence. Three of their collections—Don’t Call Us Dead, homie/ my nig, and Bluff (the latter just released this year)—always seem to get loose from my bookshelf and follow me around; in other words, they regularly talk to me/are alive/beloved. 

From a start in spoken-word and slam poetry, Smith is as masterful a performer as a writer, igniting the possibilities of the word within both spheres. Their work speaks from the concentric experience of being Black, queer, and HIV positive in America. It sings to me—in vulnerability and power, in reverence and anger; devastating with beauty and sometimes with humor. But the now 35-year-old Cave Canem fellow has garnered far more than just my acclaim. Don’t Call Us Dead earned Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection. homie/my nig won the 2020 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. 

Bluff, centering on Smith’s complicated intimacy with the Twin Cities as well as with poetry itself in the aftermath of the COVID quarantine and murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, was just named among the 100 must-read books of 2024 by Time. 

I got the chance to talk with Smith about Cave Canem, their 2-year breakup with writing (spoiler alert: it didn’t last), and their powerful new collection, Bluff. The following interview was edited for clarity. 

Looking forward to A Home for the Heart to Live In and its line-up of Cave Canem poets here in Baltimore, could you talk about how Cave Canem has been a part of your evolution as a Black poet?

Cave Canem probably was affecting me before I even knew what it was. I feel really blessed to be born when I was born as a Black poet because by the time I was arriving into the genre in high school, there was no shortage of Black poets for folks to point me to. I knew the sort of poetry that the English teachers were trying to push on me was rather whitewashed, but I never had the idea that Black poets were hard to come by, which some of our elders who endured so much BS had to go through. I’m really grateful to Cave Canem for how they helped engineer that space. 

By the time I made it to college, my professor Amaud Johnson, unbeknownst to me, was a Cave Canem fellow. And so he was able to point me to Black folks that I should be reading and who he thought might spark something in me.

I think my last year in undergrad was my first year I went to CC. It was just revelatory to me to meet so many different kinds of Black poets who were using such varied tools to get to kind of similar goals—which maybe is capital P-poetry, but also was capital F-freedom. Capital L-love. And yeah capital L-liberation. That exploded my work.

I can tell the difference between my work pre and post Caven Canem. Still to this day, there’s so many lessons that feel like essential parts of my tool kit that I learned from the first time I went to Cave Canem or through talking to somebody I met at Cave Canem. It has just been a blessing beyond words. I am trying to put words to it, but its influence on my craft, my life, my vision—it’s incalculable.

Would you like to shout out some of those poets that have inspired you or who are inspiring you now?

I think about my first Cave Canem, meeting folks like Phillip B. Williams, T’ai Freedom Ford. Meeting L. Lamar Wilson, Ricky Laurentiis so many wonderful folks, right? Morgan Parker.

Cave Canem was a space where I reconnected with Angel Nafis, who is just so brilliant. And then the mentors, like getting to sit at the feet of Nikki Finney and Tim Siebles. And of course, Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady. Chris Abani, he was such a blessing to my writing life and my career and just my mind as well. It’s an impossibly brilliant community. Those are the some of the folks that come up most abundantly in my heart and my mind when I think about it.

What’s your favorite writing spot?

I have a couple. If it’s summer, I like to write on my porch. Our porch—I should say. My husband lives here too. I got married last August.

Congratulations! 

Yeah. That’s my baby.

So we have a nice, enclosed porch. Which is beautiful, because in the summertime, especially in the early summer, you hear the birds. And we live on the same corner as a school and so when school is in session you hear the kids playing on the playground at recess. All those summer sounds coming in just fuel me. During the colder months, I write a lot at the kitchen table or on the couch.

I also really love writing on planes. That’s one of my favorite spots. There’s something about traveling, which maybe feels like an appropriate metaphor for what writing should do. There’s something about being far from the ground or maybe up in the air that I think has a different energy. And there’s also the time limit, right? I need to get this idea out by the time the stewardess tells me to put my computer away.

I spent so much of my mid to late 20s on planes and at airports that I had to figure out how to make something of that space and that time. And now planes have become a really blessed space for writing and editing for me.

On the subject of space and place, your new collection Bluff centers on Minnesota in a way that both embraces the fact that it’s home but also looks at it with sober eyes, especially during the time that George Floyd was murdered and as that reverberated across the world. What was it like for you to turn that gaze to home in this collection? And what were the challenges there, if any?

It was difficult. I don’t think I was a good poet of place before. My first three books it was sort of hard to tell where the poems were happening. They didn’t feel grounded. It just kind of felt like any town in America. There would be brief flashes like “i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense” or “Tonight, in Oakland,” a couple of poems here and there that root themselves in place, but I was maybe a little embarrassed my poems didn’t have place impressed upon them as much.

Even before George Floyd’s murder, I already had some pots boiling in my brain about how to pay my respects to the place that raised me and that I really love. With the pandemic I was so ready to get out of Minnesota again, but then quarantine, and just the world going digital for a little bit, made me stay for longer than I had intended to. In that time, I really fell in love with the city. With the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder and the uprising, I just felt galvanized to this place again. Maybe trauma bonded. But I couldn’t deny the electricity that I get from this place, and the love that I have for it and the ways I think this place is ripe for conversations and rehearsals and practices towards freedom.

Also in that time, I was going through intense writer’s block, so I wasn’t really writing a lot. But I was doing a lot of living, a lot of thinking. And by the time I was ready to write again, what poured out of me was Bluff, which was these questions about what is the usefulness of art, how did art move in the world and these critiques, love songs, battle cries for Minneapolis and the people that ground me here.

What was challenging about it was the fear of flattening this place into something consumable. Or maybe just flattening it because it’s only my view, right? But I think fear and challenges are great things to have in the writing process because they make you cautious. And writing good poetry is a balance between risk taking and good caution—needing to take the big swings but understanding that big swings sometimes damage if they’re a little bit off aim. So I was happy to walk with that fear while making the poems because I think it steadied my hand and kept me from talking out the side of my mouth about my people. It was good fear.

Let’s talk about writer’s block. The blurb on the back of Bluff mentions you taking two years of artistic silence before writing the collection. I think a lot of people can identify with times of creative stasis, especially having that experience during the COVID quarantine. What was it like for you and how did you come out of it?

It was the longest I had not written in a way I found productive. I was still trying to write in that time, just—shit was bad. Looking back I think, okay two years, that might not be that long. But it was for me.

Something that transformed my thinking about that time was an essay about and titled “Silence”, from Carl Phillips’ My Trade is Mystery. He talks about that road in between the poems, where you have to do the living and the experiencing and the thinking in order to get to that next utterance. Reading that made me a lot kinder about what was happening.

What felt like two years of writer’s block—now on the other side, I see as two years of meditation and research. It’s very Western and American to think that writing is only the stuff that is productive, you know, the stuff that can be moved toward product. And I already don’t believe that. I believe that all art making must be more about the process than the final product. And if the process is valued, that’s what makes the product worth sharing with others. I think now, thanks to what I experienced and thanks to Carl’s shifting of my vision of it, that not writing for two years is a part of the process. It is not wasted time, but it is time when the language is in a cocoon. It needs to change itself. It needs to figure out itself.

But it can be scary when you’re in the midst of a long break like that. Those questions of will I ever write again pop up.

How I came out of it—I was given a notebook by a really good friend of mine. One of the people I’ve known since the very first poems I was writing. She gave me a notebook for Christmas. That felt like an invitation, an encouragement to try language again. So I made a challenge for myself. I was like, okay, you haven’t written for two years. What if you just wrote every day for a year? And so I wrote a haibun every day for a year. That was my challenge to myself.  

Can you describe what a haibun is?

It’s a Japanese form, traditionally a prose poem followed by a haiku. They are used for travel logs, traditionally. So this was my year living, traveling through the body and through time. I would write my haiku in the morning, and then my prose poem at night, so I kind of reversed it. The haiku, I’d do in bed—just 17 syllables coming right out of sleep. And then I’d sit down at some point in the day and write a prose poem to go along with it. I did that for about six or seven months. I was having fun with that, and ideas for poems started to return to me. Language started to pop up at random times throughout the day that wanted to be attended to. So that got me writing poems again, and I wrote every day that year. It was 2021, and by the end of that year, I was writing the poems that would lead to Bluff.

I think part of the silence was just that I had written three books. I published three books in five years. That’s a lot of poems—especially with all the poems that don’t make the books, right? So, I think I just needed a rest. But I was really glad for that rest in hindsight. Not to diminish the first three books, but to me the voice in Bluff feels very different. I feel older, more weathered—in a good way. Clearer eyed. I think you used the word sober which is a big theme. So yeah, my shoulders felt different by the time I got back to poems.

Are you still journaling?

Yeah. That private writing practice I still keep up to this day. I think it’s so important for writers, once you are in the career of writing, to have a practice for yourself that is writing for language’s sake and for your own record keeping. That is not moving towards publication. That is not in danger of other people’s eyes.

What you are describing reminds me of lines from “stoop poem” in Bluff:

this poem was so happy
before it knew it was a poem & knew
immediately the weight of audience

Sometimes we forget the importance of allowing creative work to just be for us and recognizing the energy in that and remembering it is an essential, powerful thing.

I don’t know where I lost it. Coming from the door of spoken word, which meant that poems were literally being written so I could get on stage and perform them, and then moving into publishing—I loved that. But it meant not far from the impetus of the poem was always this question of, or expectation that somebody else might read this. And I think part of what I was experiencing during that year-long writing exercise after the two years of silence was having to make my thoughts legible to myself, first, before I was ready to arrange them for somebody else. 

It’s really been a blessing just in my spirit. I love my journal. Sometimes I’m just writing journal entries, you know, here’s what life was like today and sometimes it does take the shape of poetry. But it’s for me. For me.  And giving that space to myself helps me be that much more clear and generous when I do turn language towards others.

You mentioned that through Bluff you were questioning the usefulness of art. There are three poems in the book titled “anti poetica” that really interrogate poetry with lines like:

no poem to admonish the state
no poem with a key to the locks
no poem to free you

or

who cares how long i’ve spent with my poems – those shit psalms those rats of my soul – headfirst through the window me at their ankles demanding substance, revelation, sudden gravity

I think it is so striking how this collection, which is brilliantly written and your longest book to date at about 146 pages, is engaging with this question around its own value and purpose. Can you talk a bit more about how you were reckoning with poetry in this book?

I think poetry is kind of like God. My favorite Christians or theologians, I should say, are the ones who make space to wrestle with questions of divinity and of holiness and God. Not the ones who just believe in its power because they were told it was powerful and because they feel its power, but the ones willing also to wrestle with power. I think that’s what I needed to do with poetry. Especially because, in the midst of the uprising—yet another man killed for the crime of being Black and inconveniencing somebody’s time and capitalism and who fucking knows, no reason at all, and once again it was local—in the midst of that time I couldn’t think of anything more useless than writing poems.

Where I’ve settled is that no, I don’t think poetry is sufficient. I don’t think poetry is a sufficient answer to: what is your activism? How are you trying to change the world? But it is fuel. And fuel, which is energy, is a necessity right? There is no movement without energy. A car cannot travel without fuel. A bike cannot go forward without the energy from your legs. Everything needs force. And I think art can be a very essential part of bringing energy and force to movements.

Toward the end of Bluff there is a poem called “ars poetica” which ultimately speaks back to the anti poetica poems—answering them or taking poetry into its arms again. But maybe in a different way. Is this poem a part of where you were arriving on the question of poetry?

I’m glad you brought up “ars poetica” because if you only read the first let’s say third of the book, you get this idea that I really hate poetry or that I find it useless. But then 119 pages in, there’s this poem, “ars poetica”, that’s just like screw all the rest of that, I was tripping! After all this wrestling with the question: is poetry valuable, is it sufficient, you get to these lines, which I really love:

dear reader
whenever you are reading this
is the future to me, which means
tomorrow is still coming, which means
today still lives, which means
there is still time
for beautiful, urgent change
which means there is still time
to make more alive
which means there is still
poetry.

Poetry is not just the cataloguing of the past and of experience, it is a tool that we can use to look forward into the future. Poetry is your invitation out of the status quo. And is your invitation into dissatisfaction. Which can be the invitation into action as well, and to movement. It is an invitation so that we can make the table bigger and invite more folks to these conversations. 

I think the art that I’m trying to make and that writers like Solmaz Sharif and Saul Williams and Reginald Dwayne Betts and our co-panelists for this event all are trying to make is to pull people into action, into being better witnesses and better advocates for each other—and of love.

It all comes back to love for me. 

CityLit’s A Home for the Heart to Live In is this Sunday, December 8 from 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. at the Motor House’s Main Theater, 120 W. North Ave., Baltimore, MD.

In addition to featured authors Danez Smith and Reginald Dwayne Betts, the event will include readings from Abdul Ali, Brian Gilmore, Alan King, Terri Cross Davis, Hayes Davis, Lauren Russell, Kateema Lee, Jadi Z. Omowale, Steven Leyva, Alexa Patrick, and Stewart Shaw.

Registration is requested, but not required. Walk-ins welcome.

Note of disclosure: the author of this article serves as a board member for CityLit Project