Clint Smith Returns to His Roots in Poetry

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, which debuted at #1 on The New York Times bestseller list and won a National Book Critics Circle award. His new book, Above Ground, is a return to his first love: poetry, the art form that first drew him into being a writer. I met him when he joined a poets’ group chat I’m a part of, and the other members immediately warned Clint, who is a die-hard Arsenal fan, that I root for Tottenham, Arsenal’s rivals. Despite this rocky start, we’ve managed to remain friends.

I have no authority to make the following proclamation, but I think Clint is one of the most important writers in America today. His ability to weave complex subjects into clear narratives feels more vital than ever. In an age of endless “what-aboutism,” Clint’s commitment to truth, history, and shared public institutions rings out like a well-tuned instrument in an orchestra of car horns. He is the rare public intellectual who can remain clear-eyed about this country’s systemic evils and still make you feel hopeful for its future. I know superheroes do not exist, but if one day I saw Clint on top of a building in a cape, I would not bat an eye. Tonight, he is reading at the O, Miami Poetry Festival, a month-long celebration of poetry that I founded in 2011, and in advance of that, I asked him a few questions about his poetic practice, his writing community, and his soccer fandom.

P. Scott Cunningham: You followed up a New York Times #1 nonfiction bestseller with a book of poems. Was your agent or publisher like, What the hell, Clint?

Clint Smith: Ha! Luckily I have a fantastic agent, Alia Hanna Habib, who supports whatever creative project I choose to pursue, and Little, Brown was also excited about the chance to publish some poetry, which they don’t typically do. It’s been really fun.

PSC: How the Word Is Passed, your book before Above Ground, was a research-heavy, nonfiction book. What was it like to come back to poetry? Were you writing poems while working on How the Word Is Passed, or did you take a break completely?

CS: I love writing across different genres, but poetry is and always will be my North star. Even when I’m not writing poems, poetry is on my mind. It shapes the way I approach every project. When I’m writing a nonfiction book I’m thinking about the music and cadence of the language. When I’m writing an article for the Atlantic the way I think about structure is often informed by poetics. So, it’s always shaping my thinking. With regard to Above Ground specifically, I started writing these poems when we first found out my wife was pregnant with our son, which was in 2016. I didn’t begin working on HTWIP until 2017. So some of these poems were written beforehand, but many of them were at the same time I was writing HTWIP. In many ways, the poems in this collection serve as time capsules, helping me to archive moments, feelings, and ideas that I’ve wanted to hold onto over the past several years about parenthood, but also everything that happens around it.

PSC: You’ve told me part of the inspiration for Above Ground came from the assignment O, Miami gave you for a publication called Jai-Alai Magazine, which paired kid poets with adult poets. You were asked to write a poem after a poem by a Miami elementary school student. Could you talk about what role that experience had in forming Above Ground? 

CS: That was such a fun assignment an a really generative writing exercise! I wrote a poem entitled “Ossicones” about those horn-like protrusions on top of a giraffe’s head and trying to explain what they were to my son. It was the beginning of a series of poems that were trying to place the experience of parenthood in conversation with different parts of the natural world, and I’m not sure that would have happened in the same way with the prompt from O. Miami. Appreciate y’all!

PSC: When my first kid was still an infant, a poet said to me something along the lines of: “If you like this, wait until the first time they run into your arms and hug you when you get home,” and your poem “Ode to the Bear Hug” captures that moment perfectly. It’s an ode to a small, wonderful thing every parent will implicitly understand, but it’s also situated not terribly far away from much heavier poems about drone strikes and electric chairs. How did you think about ordering the book, and what significance does the proximity or distance between these disparate subject matters carry for you? 

CS: Part of what this book is wrestling with is the simultaneity of the human experience. How moments of joy, wonder, and awe sit alongside moments of despair, anxiety, and fear. How we often experience intimate moments of celebration amid the larger backdrop of social, political, and ecological catastrophe. How parenthood is one of the most remarkable experiences of your life and also one of the most difficult. I’m interested in how we hold all of that at once. I wanted the order of the poems to reflect how these experiences aren’t neatly compartmentalized into different sections of our lives, so they shouldn’t be in different sections of the book. They should sit alongside one another, because that’s how they exist in the world. Life is full of cognitive dissonance, I wanted to lean into that, not away from it.

PSC: One of the things I love about your writing, and this is true whether you’re operating in prose or poetry, is its clarity. Poetry is a genre that can sometimes feel purposefully unclear, as if the presence of clarity somehow reduced the possibility of mystery or complexity. The composer Morton Feldman, who didn’t exactly make crowd-friendly music, was asked one time what the job of the composer is, and he responded, “To make things clear at all costs.” What is your relationship to clarity? Is it a concept that’s useful to your practice?

CS: Part of my larger project as a writer, I think, is a rejection of the idea that writing with intellectual rigor has to come at the expense of legibility. I think a lot about accessibility. I want people to read my nonfiction work and feel drawn into the story. I want people to read my poems and feel like it’s not a code they have to unlock. In part, that’s because when I write I’m always thinking of the 15- or 16-year-old version of me. I’m trying to write the sort of work that teenage Clint would find interesting, engaging, and moving. To be clear, I think writers should write in whatever way makes the most sense for them, and there are poets I love who write work that really revels in complexity. It’s not a bad thing; it’s a stylistic choice. In the same way there are visual artists who paint in abstract styles and artists who paint more direct representations of the world around them. There’s no wrong way to do it, it’s just a choice each artist makes for themselves.

PSC: I’m curious how the forms of the poems arose for you. Did you have specific ideas going into the original drafts like, Ok this is going to be a prose poem, this one will be in tercets, etc. or was each poem telling you after it existed, This is how I should be organized?

CS: The form of the poem is something that almost always happens in revision. Many of these poems went through three, four, or five different forms over the course of the editing process, and then again when I was determining the order of the poems. Sometimes it’s a question of finding the form that most suits the poem, and sometimes there’s a situation where, for example, I feel strongly about a certain poem all being on a single page, and that might shape what form it takes in ways I hadn’t fully considered until I saw the entire project laid out. It all depends.

PSC: A bunch of poems in the book are written “after” poems by friends and peers of yours, such as Hanif Abdurraqib, Nicole Sealey, Matthew Olzmann, and Safia Elhillo. Could you speak a little bit to the idea of community in poetry and what role it plays in your art?

CS: Last night I did an event with our friend Nate Marshall in Madison, Wisconsin, and a person in the audience asked me who some of my favorite poets were. I told her that I felt very lucky that so many of my favorite poets were also my friends. I’m constantly inspired by the incredible work that these aforementioned poets, and so many others, are doing in the world. It’s often the case that I feel most inspired to write after reading their books.

Another way to answer your question is that I came up as a poet in spoken word and poetry slam scenes. So, a sense of community was deeply entangled in my understanding of what it meant to be a poet. The open mic was a communal experience. In poetry slams you were on teams. Community and relationships were central to what I understood writing to be, and I’ve tried to hold onto that. (Shout out to our fantasy basketball group chat!)