Poet Danez Smith does not care what elite white literary circles think about their work. “I’m not going to be in places that I’m not interested in being,” they said. “I don’t think all-white, straight literary circles have anything for me.”
Instead, Smith said they prefer engaging in places where they feel “additive.” On Sept. 13, SUNY Oswego was one of those places.
Smith spoke to SUNY Oswego students at a virtual meeting hosted by creative writing professor Soma Mei Sheng Frazier. While the virtual format confined Smith’s lively personality to a small rectangle, students still had the opportunity to hear them recite their poems and answer their questions.
Smith read excerpts from pieces including “summer, somewhere,” “waiting on you to die so i can be myself” and “I’M GOING TO MINNESOTA WHERE SADNESS MAKES SENSE.” The poem “summer, somewhere” received the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America in 2018.
They also read an unpublished poem inspired by their barber to be included in their next collection of poetry, “Bluff,” set to come out in August 2024.
Smith’s poetry touches upon the hardships they face as a queer and Black person. However, they said they now avoid using their poetry as a way to cope with trauma.
“It’s dangerous to have your coping mechanism also pay your rent,” they said. “I try not to write and publish things that I’m very much in the midst of dealing with emotionally and spiritually.”
Some staples of Smith’s writing are the explicit themes of sexuality, violence, racism and queerness, topics that many conservative politicians have advocated censoring from school libraries. Smith called the recent book bans in Florida and Texas “ridiculous” and “fascist.”
“A long project of the Republican Party has always been to stupefy and unenrich the minds of Americans,” Smith said. “Because an uneducated or unfed mind is a really easy mind to control.” However, they are not pessimistic, reiterating that “books will win.”
Smith is known for their spoken word poetry, a method Smith said they try to evoke in their written poetry. “I try to keep my poems as close to the way I talk as possible,” Smith said.
One broadcasting student said Smith’s poem “Dinosaurs in the Hood,” made her rethink the consequences of her studies. “[The poem] made me feel critically about how my reporting in journalism will affect stories about people in groups I do not personally identify with and how I will have to stay conscious of not exploiting trauma I have not endured,” the student, Gabrielle Lagatella, wrote in the meeting’s Q&A space.
Smith’s background as an actor influenced their style of emphatic spoken word poetry. They advised creative writing students to enhance their writing by studying theater. Theater, according to Smith, brings together text and space.
Smith’s virtual visit was the first on a roster of authors meeting SUNY Oswego students through the creative writing department’s Living Writers Series. Frazier, who leads the program, invited authors she believed were “making waves,” hence the program’s theme, “Waves.”
Smith said they would love for the university to invite them again for an in-person event, preferably in September or April, when it is not during the heavy Oswego winter.
“We’re all better people when it’s not the snow,” Smith said.
Smith’s art can be found online via websites such as the Poetry Foundation, an American literacy society created from Poetry magazine. Other resources allow for the purchasing of their art, including a paperback version of the “Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems” poetry collection.
