Danez Smith: She’s the wind beneath my cauliflower wings. It’s Franny Choi!

Franny Choi: And it’s raining them, hallelujah! Danez Smith.

Danez Smith: And you’re listening to VS, the podcast where poets confront the ideas that move them. Hey, Frannleby.

Franny Choi: Hello, how’s it going?

Danez Smith: I am … exhausted if we’re going to be—

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: If we’re gonna be completely real. You know, we make these evergreen episodes, but in the moment right now, we are like, a day after the guilty verdict of Derek Chauvin. And like, the last sort of week and change here in Minneapolis has been cray, America has been cray since, you know, 1619. So I’m just like, tired. And I think that is maybe one thing I could say I learned from the pandemic. Like, even in the midst of my tiredness and exhaustion, I’m like, fully present and happy to be here with you right now, though. You know? (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah, no, I too, am very tired. But I can see, like, a future in which I will be less tired. Well, is that true? Can I see a future in which I will be less tired? I think that I—I see a future in which I will have the energy to be in the world in a real way, in an actual way. I suppose.

Danez Smith: Yeah. You can like, be somebody new. This is what I’m realizing, right. I saw this like— I’m not gonna say I read the article, but I did read the headline in the tweet, that article that was going around about like, you can be whoever you want to after the pandemic. Like, you don’t have to set your personality in stone.

Franny Choi: Whoaa.

Danez Smith: Yeah! And it was just kinda being like, “You know what? Just like, be somebody the fuck else.” (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Wow. Are we all gonna get to like go to college and getting the chance to be a new person?

Danez Smith: You can. Yeah. Either you know, summer 2021 or summer 2042, whenever the pandemic is over. Oh, this is a question: pandemic lasts for another 20 years, right. Horrible world, but—

Franny Choi: Ah!

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Why are you bringing this energy into my life!?

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHING) Right now. It’s a Wednesday morning. How ’bout let’s say five years.

Danez Smith: Okay, so pandemic lasts for, you know, an indiscriminate amount of time. Either 20 more minutes or five more years. Who are you going to be after the pandemic?

Franny Choi: Oh my god. I think that, like, best case scenario, I am like the Korean grandma version of myself that, like, wears whatever the fuck she wants. Mixed prints. Print, print, print; visor to keep the sun out of her face. And like, it just like, her completely rudest most standing in her truth at all times self, at all times. That’s the best case scenario; I come out like having aged, you know, 40 to 50 Korean years. But the most likely scenario is that I’m like the version of me that is like when you foster a dog, and it’s clear that the dog has been living in a not cool situation and so you, like, can’t make any sudden movements or else it’ll like, you know, run away and bark and stuff. That’s probably going to be me.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Most likely I will be like a very unsocialized, anxious, matted fur kind of version of myself, but.

Danez Smith: Aw, we’ll get you a little stress vest, though.

Franny Choi: Yeah, oh my god, please. I would love a stress vest! Do they make those? Because I want one.

Danez Smith: I think you just gotta buy a vest in like, a size or two too small.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Just like an anxiety binder.

Danez Smith: Yeah, maybe it’s like a waist trainer, you know, I don’t know. It’s the same thing.

Franny Choi: Can I just get one for like a really big dog? I’m pretty small.

Danez Smith: Yeah, just buy a corset. That’s all you need. Just like, I’m feeling stressed, somebody tuck me in.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHING) An agoraphobia corset.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHING) Yeah, there you go.

Franny Choi: What about you? What’s the best-case scenario and worst-case scenario for how you emerge?

Danez Smith: My best-case scenario is that like my Leo sun Sag rising, you know extroverted energies are just like, “Let’s go!” And you know, in a vaccinated world, I’m just out here, like, doing all the things and talking to all the people and you know, who knows what I’ll be doing by next year with all this extroverted energy? I feel like I’m just gonna be like, I think Iyanla on Fix My Life. I want to be like her in, like, that kind of situation, too, because, like, I think she’s often wrong, but she’s never scared to be loud about it. And like, she just walks into people’s houses. I really vibed when you said just like, being rude to everyone, right? I just kind of want to walk in places and be like, “This is what you are doing wrong! This is what you are doing wrong! That’s the only smart bitch here. Everybody, let’s listen to her.” And that’s kind of just like the energy I think I’ll have in the world, which will be a little bit too much and a little too aggressive. I’ll burn a couple bridges and make some enemies, but it’s okay. I think my worst-case scenario, which is also maybe my best-case scenario, is that I never really leave the pandemic. You know? I’m still answering emails like eight months late. I’m just gonna, like, lean full into like, the Lauryn Hill, like Frank Ocean school of artistry. You know, it’s just like, “Danez has a performance, y’all should, like, show up. Maybe Danez will be there.” And I just like show up places in long coats and big hats. And it’s a great gift for me to be there. But don’t count on it. You know? And so, I just become aloof. People are like, “Where have you been for the last seven years?” And I was like, “You know, I really wanted some pizza. And so I moved to Italy for eight years.” (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: And then I had—I, like, saw myself on a beach. And so, I moved to Iceland and made a beach.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) I made a beach. Made a beach.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: I can’t tell if that’s the best-case or the worst-case scenario for you. I think that, yeah, it does seem like a little bit of both. I also love the idea that after it’s over—I mean, who knows when exactly that will be but like, that some people will be like, you know, we’ll be like, “Hey, where’s Amy? Is Amy coming?” And be like, “Oh, no, Amy’s still in the panny.”

Danez Smith: (LAUGHING) Yeah, Amy’s still in the panny! Yeah, that’s the thing.

Franny Choi: Yeah. And also, like, maybe people will be like, “Oh, I can’t be there. Like, I’m just self-quarantining for the next two weeks. Just cuz.”

Danez Smith: Wow. Wow.

Franny Choi: Just for like a little retreat.

Danez Smith: Just a little retreat. You know what’s also not gonna leave? Masks. I haven’t been sick this whole motherfucking year.

Franny Choi: Right, exactly.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Yes. The reason that East Asian people wear masks on public transportation all the time has a lot to do with pollution and dust and climate change. But it also is like kind of a good idea.

Danez Smith: Yeah. Borrowing a lot of East Asian things now. I am wearing my mask all the time, I am running to class.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: You’re practically Korean at this point.

Danez Smith: That is a bad stereotype. Not all East Asian people run to class, but I will say, there were two East Asian boys in every school that ran to class and made that rumor happen. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: I’ve actually never even heard that thing.

Danez Smith: Asian niggas used to be running to class, man. But it was only the nerdy ones. The gangster ones didn’t do that shit. The gangster ones were ditching like the rest of us. (LAUGHS) But there was just like, always like, some little nerdy Asian boy, like, backpack kind of tucked and bookin’ it! (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Oh yeah, no, that’s true. That’s true.

Danez Smith: It was like, that nigga is gonna make it to second hour, you can trust.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Aww. Shout-out to you, nerdy Asian boy.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: We love you.

Danez Smith: We do love you. Also maybe, like, you can slow down. Or, you know, you keep going toward your dreams, king.

Franny Choi: Aw, we love you.

Danez Smith: We love you. We also love Camen Giménez Smith. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yes. We also love Camen Giménez Smith, who, speaking of becoming the best version of ourselves, we’re really excited to share this interview with Camen Giménez Smith with you all. Carmen, in addition to being an incredible poet, who has been a beacon for both of us, is also an amazing editor at Noemi press, as well as formerly the Nation, and is also writing a book on revision. And she talked about revision and the editing process as a process of amplifying the gifts of the writer, rather than, like, stripping away what’s not working. Just like, making what is working sing louder and making the poem the best version of the poem that it can be. So yeah, we’re really happy to get to share this conversation with y’all, with one of our favorite poets ever.

Danez Smith: Camen Giménez Smith teaches at Virginia Tech and is an editor at Noemi press. Her most recent book is Be Recorder. She is currently translating the work of poet Mariela Dreyfus. We’re so excited to get into this interview with y’all. It’s a banger! And here is Carmen who is going to start us off with a poem.

(SOUND EFFECT)

Carmen Giménez Smith: I’m going to read a poem called “Like an Auto-Tune of Authentic Love.”

(READS POEM)

I’m watching an old movie in one corner

of my laptop and in another the shadows

nesting in your neck, the flickering frequencies

of your sweater, and remember the Jack Nicholson

tagline in that movie we almost watched then decided

against fearing the little taser of misogyny:

You make me want to be a better person. Sometimes

the only thing I want is to say marry me

even though we both think marriage is archaic and weird

or at least for us. It’s not marry me I want to say

but rather weld with me like a net we also sit in.

Oh FaceTime face and shadow neck and the almost synced

sound of our shared watching. You have a list of things

that are going to be the death of you,

and so do I, which we cover in our debriefings.

All of this is to say that distance makes my heart go farther

into the terrain of heartfelt and I love it: how ordinarily

classifiable it is like feeling literal figurative butterflies

in your stomach. The good being fundamental.

Surprising love can happen at any part of one’s life

like the pixels deciding when to flicker into bursts.

* * *

Franny Choi: Oh, god. I love that poem.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Thank you. Thank you.

Danez Smith: Oh, I feel so weepy. (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS) Thank you, thank you.

Franny Choi: Weepy, but also, like, I don’t know, I’ve been thinking about—ever since I first read that poem, I’ve just been thinking about that title, “Like an Auto-Tune of Authentic Love.” There’s so many, like … it’s like two steps of distance away from authentic love. Can you talk about that title, or what the auto-tune means to you, or what authentic love—not what authentic love means to you—

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: But maybe just—(LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) Let’s go there. I like going there.

(ALL LAUGH)

Carmen Giménez Smith: I guess it is, like, literally the experience of when my partner and I weren’t living together, and so she and I would watch Netflix together. And we had this whole thing, like, okay, 1, 2, 3, and we would hit, and then we would have the FaceTime and then the Netflix screen and sort of like navigating between two of them. And sometimes watching her watch and sometimes just talking to each other. And I guess the idea of the auto-tune was, you want the 3-D experience, the AI experience of the person. I guess that was maybe on the surface of it, I don’t know that I can go very much more deeply in it. But just the way in which technology and love when, you know, in a long distance relationship, have to work, but the fact that we have access to this technology of which you know, that we can be watching something together and can be, like, looking at each other’s faces, and there’s something beautiful about being able to watch her face while we’re watching the same thing. So it was this way that we had of communicating that was important for us to be able to just watch a movie together when we weren’t able to be together. And so, whatever synthetic experience we had to, you know, have it through was worth it. But there was always this time of, like, won’t it be great when we don’t have to like be like, “1, 2, 3,”, and then, like, trying to get the sound at the same time. There were all of these ways in which we were trying to simulate being together. And we worked really hard at it, so, I think that was a big impetus behind writing that poem.

Franny Choi: Yeah. Well, I’m sure that also, like, lots of people listening to this now can relate to that.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yes.

Franny Choi: Like, relying on the synthetic ways of being together.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm. The almost synchronized-ness, right, that always kind of being a little off, I think that, like, both mended and broke my heart at the same time.

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS) Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Franny Choi: Yeah. Are there new things you’re thinking about that concept as so many of us are in this moment of relying on technology to feel close to people far away?

Carmen Giménez Smith: I guess one advantage is the interesting possibilities of who you are able to bring together. So the other night, I called my sister and a really good friend of mine, Juan Luis Guzmán. And we did a karaoke party together. And it was just, like, Zoom and some app. And it was just kind of random and arbitrary. But that’s the thing that I’ve most enjoyed is the weird amalgamation of people that you can bring together. But overall, I’ve found that this has just been a very isolating and bizarre experience. It feels like it’s been 10 years, it’s been like, you know, three minutes. I feel like I’ve lost a sense of what real time is like, because so much of time is how you connect with people and move through the day. Work infects your house. And so I feel like I’m always working, I’m never working, I have enough to do, I don’t have enough to do. It’s a really fucked up long Kafka play.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: And so I’m eager for it to be over.

Danez Smith: Saaame.

Carmen Giménez Smith: I have teenagers. My daughter did her freshman year in high school on (LAUGHS) the internet. And, you know, she has her breakdowns. You know, just like, “I can’t believe that the best years of my life,” and I was like, “Wait ’til your 20s,” but—

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Carmen Giménez Smith: “I can’t believe that the best years of my life I’m spending on—” you know, and it’s true. We need, we need touch, we need proximity, we need to smell each other. We need to—and we don’t have that, and so I feel very, very, very disconnected. I don’t feel human and I’m eager to feel human again.

Danez Smith: Hmm. I wanna ask, like, what does that do for even your thinking about the work? Because I feel like human is even sometimes a question within the realm of your poems, right? But I’ve called this a very anti-poet time, because I think of all the reasons you’ve listed. And as a poet, editor, worker, in a time when work has felt impossible, what has actually brought you energy to work on? What area of your life have you found yourself pouring, like, you know, your production energy into? What’s been feeding you in that way?

Carmen Giménez Smith: I think I’m most excited to be around my students. To get back to work, to have that collaborative energy, to learn about them. And I mean, I think teaching is such an intimate experience. And I’m just not as eloquent or articulate in this realm. So I think that’s a primary anticipation. I’m eager for my kids to be in the world. I’m also eager for them to be out of my house.

(ALL LAUGH)

Carmen Giménez Smith: That’s part of it, I want them out. The fun thing I think that’s happened, and the thing that’s really feeding me, because I haven’t at all been able to write—I’ve been able to do a little bit of translation, but I haven’t written a poem in at least a year—is editing books. I’ve been so lucky to be working on some really exciting books over the pandemic. The pandemic creates this opportunity for lots of people to be involved in a conversation. And we have three people on a Zoom, and we’re all looking at the same Google doc, and we’re going through it and having a conversation. I’m so charged by that. I love that collaborative practice. And so that’s, I think, kept poetry and writing alive in me in a way that, you know, I can’t even read it. I just feel like I’m crazy. Crazy isn’t the right word. I think Kafka—I feel like Kafka would be like, “Oh, yeah, I would have told you that this would have happened,” you know?

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Let’s start using Kafka as a feeling. I feel Kafka.

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS) I feel Kafka.

Franny Choi: Like, “Oh my god, this department drama makes me feel so fucking Kafka.”

Carmen Giménez Smith: It’s so Kafka! It’s so Kafka!

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: When both the emotions and the time are doing weird things, it’s a Kafka, you know?

Carmen Giménez Smith: That’s right. It’s a Kafka. And it’s procedural. And it’s like, dark. And it’s bureaucratic. And it involves, like, forces beyond your control. It’s Kafka.

Franny Choi: Yeah, yeah.

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Amazing. Oh man.

Danez Smith: I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of three people going through a Google doc, talking about somebody’s work as a form of editing. And that seems like, so fun, and so exciting. Is that a standard practice for you as an editor at Noemi? I would just maybe love to get a peek behind that window, because if I can just brag for a second. I mean, there are like, a couple of presses that when you, like, hear that a poet has a book by them, you’re like, “Oh, it has to be good,” you know? (LAUGHS) It’s like Nightboat, Noemi, you know, there’s a couple that you’re just like, “Oh, what the fuck are they doing? They’re on that press?”

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: So, you know, so, hurrah on building that press so much. It’s been so wonderful to also see not only the work, but, you know, a couple of big prizes and nominations in the last couple of years that aren’t the end-all be-all, but it’s just like, it’s good to see that name there. And that press there. Some presses warm your heart when you see them on those lists. What’s behind the magic, right? How do y’all get those juices flowing? It sounds like y’all really have a standard for time and attention that you’re paying to these authors and really trying to do the work justice.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah. So I guess, you know, I started the press 20 years ago. And at the time, there were so few presses that just published people of color, period. And then the presses that published people of color, were just like, they’re over here, and then there’s everybody else. And so, part of my vision—I mean, I was 30, I didn’t know what I was doing—was just like, how do you disrupt that? How do you complicate that? Over time, I think what I noticed, and I think I came out of graduate school, I just came out with trauma. You know? And I had to sort of build myself back up. And I had to teach myself how to be a writer and teach myself a lot of the lessons. And I was lucky when I was an undergraduate, I had a really great mentor who taught me a lot of stuff about how to survive in this world, because I think there’s a certain level of difficulty. How do you make a book that is the very best book that it could be? So I think what we do at Noemi is we come to a manuscript and we see the vision and the gift of the writer, and we say, “Are you sure you’re—because we see that you’re not quite at, you know, maximum, you’re at seven, and we think you could be at 11.” And so, that conversation of editing is going from seven to 11, right, is like, “You’re so good at this thing in this moment. So how do we, like, amplify it across the book?” Is really like working with a writer to achieve the maximum of what the book can be. A big part of that, I think, from having edited books for a long time, is just purely like a line level thing, like a sentence is a kind of information delivery experience, imagination delivery object. So how do we make each sentence sort of act in the most optimum way that it can, and so that’s, you know, it does take three people to kind of go through. And the other piece of Noemi is that it’s a place in which our editors, including, you know, volunteers, and y’all talk to Suzi recently, we’re also learning how to write ourselves. And so it becomes this laboratory where, hey, my student wants to come, you know, someone wrote to me recently and said, “I see you’re publishing this book,” and I said, “Come in to the one of the editorial meetings,” you know, like, you have nothing to do with it, but just come in here, what it’s like to bring the book into the world.

Danez Smith: That’s such a loving relationship to knowledge, you know? Like, I feel like so many editors, you send your book to the one person, you know, maybe a couple people read it, right. But it’s such a siloed experience. That’s so open to the thought, and generous, I think, to like—oh my god, I love that. (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Well, and it’s also, a book to me is written by a community, it’s written by a group of people. And so often people of color are coming up, and they go through an MFA, and they don’t know anybody, and they have their book, and they’re like, “No one ever touched it, no one else put their hands on it, except, you know, me and my one friend.” And so that’s, I think, the other is like this communion around the book, that we come together, and we just want the very best thing that can happen to the book. But on the sort of, the other sort of more marketing, there’s a difference between a manuscript and what a book is in the world. The conversation is, how do we make your book legible in the world, so the widest audience can receive it, so people can understand it? And I think that’s something that Noemi—I mean, we, everyone is doing wonderful, different things, but the thing I’m most proud of that we do as a group is that we’re able to really bring books into the world that are legible in ways that speak to the author’s gifts, and to the author’s desires for what the book is meant to say and what to be.

Franny Choi: That’s such a, like, graceful way of articulating the need for legibility. I mean, often I think that when writers of color, especially when we talk about making ourselves legible to a wider audience, it’s often kind of framed in terms of like a loss, like what gets lost by making ourselves, like forcing ourselves to be legible—how do you navigate that kind of tension that might come up there?

Carmen Giménez Smith: The first thing has to do with just having a really frank conversation of what the gifts of the book are, and what the possibilities of the book are. And to draw from the books gifts and build from them in order to develop the possibilities. One of the books that I took, you know, a while back, that there was like, it was a good book. It had one line, and I was like, “If every line could be doing this thing, you can do anything.” And so just kind of amplifying out and thinking, well, there’s poetics and then there’s praxis, right? People have really great ideas, but how do we execute them? That’s really the conversation. “I want this poem to do this.” Okay. “Well, why is it not doing this,” right? Or how is it already doing part of the thing that you’re doing? It’s all on the page. It’s right there. And so, when I think about writing—I’m not a dancer by any stretch of the imagination, but I think a lot about how people learn how to dance. And that you have to watch somebody’s body to learn how to dance. And I feel like there’s not that much difference when you’re talking about writing is that you have to watch a gesture and see a gesture and keep moving the gesture around until it’s fluid. And so that’s the conversation, and I think all of the editors have in one way or another, learned or have a fluency with a kind of translation of like, okay, this is what you want to do, well, then this is how you do it. But what’s always been really important is to honor the vision and the aesthetics of the particular writer, and always to build from that. And, to me, syntax is like a thumbprint, right. You write the way you write, and nobody else syntactically is going to do the same thing. And so it’s discerning what are the qualities of that thumbprint and then also building from that. So, the more expansive and fluid someone feels, the more able they are to achieve some of these, you know, visions. I’m making it sound like it’s magic and puppies. It’s hard, and it can be hard conversations. But, to me, it’s so satisfying to just be in that conversation. I guess the other piece of it is that we’ve all put ourselves in that place, too. I show all my work to Suzi and J. Michael and Diana Arterian. All of our editors have showed—we all look at each other’s work. So it’s like, we talk the talk, right? We’re just not like, you know, from on high, we also put ourselves on the same line, and are the kinds of editors that are willing to put ourselves on the same line in order to achieve the things that we want. What we’re saying to an author, what we hope we’re saying is like, “You’re not done yet, you have so much more left. Look at how you’re not opening your body yet. Look at the way that you’re standing in the way of just something really magic and explosive happening.” And oftentimes it’s like, you know, stuff that we have leftover from grad school. Or these ideas that we have of what is going to suit the market as opposed to like, you don’t, the market isn’t going to tell you what you need to do. You’re going to—speaking of Kafka, you’re going to tell you what to do.

Franny Choi: It’s such a fruitful and beautiful way of thinking about editing is, like, in that kind of like amplification of the gifts, rather than sort of like a, let’s restrict or let’s fix or let’s, you know, put it into like a shape or something, you know. Yeah, that’s just really beautiful.

Danez Smith: Yeah, it is. I’m wondering if maybe we could jump into editing Be Recorder.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: Just so, like, you know, since we can talk the talk and walk the walk a little bit. One, it’s such an incredible work. Like, I remember the first time I read it back when I had the galley, I was like, “What the fuck?” Just like, I’ve read it like, two or three or four times since then. Every time, it’s just like, “What the fuck?”

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: It’s a, you know, there are some poems that just like, kinda knock your breath out. And there’s always, you know, the mind is always activated in new way.

Franny Choi: Yeah. You know those books where like, you read it, you read a book, and then you’re like, “I’m a better writer now.”

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah, exactly! You know, it’s like, I know it’s a good book when I have to stop myself from writing.

Franny Choi: Right, right, right.

Danez Smith: When I’m like, inching towards my notebook and being like, “You have a thought,” and it’s like, “Girl, stay in somebody else’s thought for a while. Be changed.” So anyways, one, praise. But two, yeah, in all those magical moments, can you identify maybe one for us and our listeners that you think editing helped? Yeah.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Sure. Well, I guess one way is the things that you don’t see. And that is, at a very late stage, that book, I did so many revisions. I mean, I just, I have hundreds of files of revisions of that very sort of late in the game. And I think, I mean, Jeff already had it. I sent it to my friend, Dana Levin, and she went through and she’s like, “Cut out all of the endings.” I was like, “Okay, okay.”

Franny Choi: Whoa!

Carmen Giménez Smith: So the poems, not all of them, but she was like, “You do this thing. And it’s like, you sort of double down on this ironic thing.” So I went through, and I was like, “She’s totally right.” And so I took out every single thing that she did. It was almost every—not every ending, but it was definitely over 70% of them. And they were better. I’ve never met a revision that wasn’t smart, or worth taking into consideration. So, to me, and that’s how the book is communal, right, so many hands were laid on it with love and with attention. It’s so much better without those endings. I’m so grateful that I put those poems in her hand for her to see that. I guess the other thing that I really worked hard on was the sound, because it was so hard to keep the syntax and keep, you know, without punctuation, to keep that forward momentum and to also maintain sense. And that just sometimes felt like taking out one word, taking out another word. It was a lot of really, like, I want to say line-level, but it was like word-level, where I have to hear it and hear it and hear it and hear it and hear it so many times in order to create that fluidity all the way through.

Danez Smith: Amazing. I love the note about the endings, because that’s the type of edit that teaches you about your poetics, not just a bunch of poems, right?

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah.

Danez Smith: And you take that into the rest of the work, right. Now, like, I have certain notes that I’m like, oh, Airea D. Matthews lives in my brain forever when I think about gerunds, you know?

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: You know, and now, like, I imagine, you know, like, every time you have an ending it’s gonna be, “Is Dana Levin gonna tell me to cut it?” (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: That’s right! That’s exactly right. It was totally life-changing for her to just sort of name what I knew implicitly. And I think that’s why you invite a lot of teachers into your life is, sometimes you don’t have the language to understand what’s not right. And then someone gives you that language. It’s also knowing who to ask for what problem, right? And so, when we’re editing with Noemi, sometimes I’ll have, I’ll just ask a friend. I’ll say, “I know that you write this particular way, will you take a look at this manuscript, you know, it’s all hands on deck, you know, we gotta support young writers of color.” And so, I think that’s also knowing who do you bring these problems to in order to find the solutions?

Danez Smith: Hm.

Franny Choi: Yeah, wow. I love that, the like, who do I know that can fix my roof? Like, who do I know that can fix my title?

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Yeah, I don’t know.

Danez Smith: It’s a great tip for editors. Actually, you know what? Mahogany Browne did that for me, on my first chapbook ever. She read it and she was like, “I can read this, but like, somebody else would be better.” And she called Ocean. That was how I met Ocean Vuong. She was like, “This is about queer desire in a way that I don’t know how to articulate. So, you talk to Ocean.” And that was like, yeah, it was powerful. That’s a great editorial skill, right? The editor does not need to be the final authority on the poem, right? But the editor that sees the work and also knows what will feed it. And sometimes that’s not the editor, right? Sometimes it’s like, yeah, somebody else’s eyes need to be on this.

Franny Choi: Carmen, do you feel, when do people call you? If you’re not the roof guy, like, are you the title—like, what do you think that you might like get called in for?

Danez Smith: The kitchen, the plumbing.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Um … I guess … I mean, I guess I’m sort of, because I’ve been editing for so long, I can wear many hats. I’m more of a contractor. And so I can say, “You know what, you need to hire a special tile person for this, but I can tell you that this is the plumbing you need. And this is—”

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Carmen Giménez Smith: But I think what I’m good at is just sort of stepping away and just saying, clearing away the brush, I guess. It’s like really getting at, like, why not just build around the very best thing you’re doing and not hold on to all of this stuff that’s B+, C–, right? Like, the idea of expertise is complicated. But when we look at a dancer, what we see is, again, I guess, fluidity. One of the most striking things that ever happened to me when I was a young writer, I went to this thing that Juan Felipe Herrera put together. It was at CSU Humboldt. And it was like you were working with drummers and opera singers, it was like another time. You can’t even imagine something like this happening. But there were these great, amazing ballet dancers. And it was this small little venue and we were watching them, these ballet dancers. And they were so noisy. They’re like, (GRUNTS AND EXHALES), and you’re like, “What!?”

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: And you realize, like, of course! They’re like doing serious physical shit, right? They’re like carrying each other. But it doesn’t occur to you, when you see a ballet dancer, how much exertion there is involved in their action. And so, I think about that with writing is that, like, we’re performing a kind of fluidity and elegance. But there’s also this exertion that takes place. That exertion is kind of back-ended, right? It’s back-ended in the process of refining and creating sentences that are beautiful. And they don’t—it’s not about being grammatically correct. It’s about being beautiful, and rhetorically sound. And so that’s the exertion, I think what I like to do is find where’s the best use of energy? Why isn’t the body activating in the same way throughout a poem? And so it’s sort of finding the best moment and then using it to sort of amplify outwards and question, you know, so many of us we start a poem, and it’s like, dah, dah, dah, DAH, right? And it’s like, just go to DAH, right?

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Like, just go to the big moment.

Danez Smith: My dance heart is tickled. I used to dance, and I work with dancers a lot. I feel like that’s the main, like, other folk I collaborate with. You know, I think you sneak up, you do the dah, dah, dah, DAH, because, until you learn not to be scared of that DAH, you’re going to need the preparation, right? I feel like you look at a writer over time, right, I feel like even reading you Carmen, you know, like, you can see development, right? Like from Milk and Filth to Cool Futures to Be Recorder. Right? It’s like, oh, like, maybe there’s less time in between those big moves, right? And then you’re able to actually, like you’re saying, expend energy on what actually does take bravery at that point, right? So how can you go deeper into that thing. It’s like seeing a dancer, right, who can do the, like, arabesques so easy, who can do all that thing, they do that incredible move, right, because all that other shit is now child’s play, you know. And it’s because they know their bodies, because I actually don’t have to jump that hard to do this is, because I actually just have to extend a little bit and it feels good. And so now, let me do this thing that truly requires my focus in danger. And pushing that line sort of further and further. I think that’s the beautiful part about writing is that, our body is the mind. And it gets to change. And sure, the mind can also, you know, degrade and slow down, too. But, I don’t know, I feel like I’ve done this a couple of times on this show, but I think about like somebody like Toi Derricotte, who, I just think is like, writing the best poems of her life right now, right? And if you look at her work, it’s like a lesson in that no fear, right? Just going further and further into it, into the move, into the topic. And now it’s just like, watch me get off! (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and just to build off of that, I think the other thing is, conception isn’t writing. It’s producing. What writing really is is revising. And revising is thinking through something. And as a teacher, the most exciting moment for me is when a person encounters the experience of finding the thing that they didn’t know the poem was about. And realizing, control is terrible for art. Once we’re able to let go of willing control, that’s when the most exciting things happen. That’s what Keats’s negative capability is all about. But we are artists. So we’re controlling. How do we let ourselves go? We let ourselves go by following what’s most exciting and what’s possible, this intangible possibility that language and poetry offers us. What I love about poetry and how we access that intangible is that it has sound and figure. We have no control of how the sound and figure comes out of our body. But if we let the sound and figure be our guides, that’s when really exciting things happen. That’s where we’re able to let go of our will.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Franny Choi: Whew.

Danez Smith: Franny, you look—are you overwhelmed?

Franny Choi: I’m just letting it reverberate in me a little bit.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Can I ask, was there a moment like that or a thing that you had to let go of in the process of writing Be Recorder? That you had to kind of, you know, release your hand on.

Carmen Giménez Smith: So I did. Danez, you mentioned something about the differences between Milk and Filth and Cruel Futures and Be Recorder. And that’s definitely like, I love Milk and Filth. I think it’s a really strong, figurative, the sentences are really tight, but it’s tight. You know, it feels like (GRUNTS). I think every book is a question that an artist is asking themselves. It’s an investigation. And one thing I know that I learned from that is how to really control an image system. I learned how to really own a declarative sentence. And, you know, it’s punctuated to the, you know, to the nth of its life. But then when I worked on Cruel Futures, I had to actually write a lot of that book in a short amount of time. There’s a poem in Cruel Futures. It’s called “Oakland Float.” Giovanni Singleton had told me about doing floats, right. And she was like, “It’s incredible. You gotta do it.” So I went to Oakland, and I did it. And I wrote this poem. And I was like, “Oh, I’m gonna show it to Giovanni.” So I wrote it up, and I sent it to her. And then, you know, she’s busy, and it was taking her time. But classic me, I’m like a compulsive reviser, I was like, da-da-da-da-da, you know, I was revising, revising, revising, revising. And I sent it to her. And she’s like, “I like the first version better.” You know, normally, I’d be like, “Well, I need to show it to someone else,” but I was like, “You know what, I’m gonna listen. I’m gonna listen to that voice.” This is with City Lights, you know. This is like, you know, the bongo drums, and we’re just gonna write whatever and publish whatever, I’m just gonna go with a different kind of less controlling, you know—and that was such a moment of like, of just the universe telling me listen to this and follow this. So I just got softer, the lines got longer. Be Recorder, the poem it started, like, at least 10 years ago. The question that I had was because I was so, like, hanging on to dear life with punctuation, like, well, what is it to write without punctuation? And the other question that I brought to it was, how do questions work rhetorically within a poem? So to bring those, it’s kind of like an experiment, I’m going to write a poem in which I don’t use punctuation and I ask a lot of questions. And that, you know, the practice of trying to write without punctuation made me realize—it’s like, I put on my kaftans instead of my girdle, you know.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHING) I was like, I like this kaftan. You know? So that’s really like the evolution that’s taken place, you know. And I hear it in the poems. I like punctuation. I like the music, and I like what it adds. And I don’t know if I have another poem like Be Recorder in me, but I definitely feel a lot less constricted than I did before I started working on it.

Franny Choi: Ahh.

Carmen Giménez Smith: As you write more books, as you get older, the vestiges of influence—well, first of all, I’m still influenced, I don’t stop. I’m lucky because as an editor, I get to be influenced. I have, you know, lots of younger people reading my work. You know, like, Suzi is such a phenomenal editor. She just has an ear for, like, the contemporary that has helped me so much. So, allowing those new influences, but also, you learn what your body can do, and you realize that it can do things that you didn’t know that it can do. And my body can do these longer, funnier sentences that are a little bit more glib, that still draw, like, I always will sound the way I sound. But the way I execute stuff feels more comfortable and more natural.

Danez Smith: Is it kind of the difference between, like, maybe, like, the younger poets’, or writers’ like a desire to, like, form a voice, as opposed to, like, you know, just sort of like being within that voice? I think it comes a little more familiar, whatever that can mean to a writer.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah, you know, it’s—I am an amalgamation of all of the poets that I’ve ever read, whether I like them or not. But I think what you see with a young poet, a developing poet, an early poet, a first book poet, an MFA student, a non-MFA student, is, they’re picking and picking and picking, and then that becomes the thing, as opposed to the picking and picking becomes the start of the thing that you then sort of shape and say, “Okay, now, this is my special spice.” It’s learning what your special spice is, right? That’s, I think, a really important evolution. Every book that you read—so it’s the ability to absorb, but also reinvent what influence can do to a book.

Franny Choi: Do you have any advice for those younger, earlier, more emerging poets who might be, like, more in that picking bits stage and, like, having maybe some more trouble finding that special spice? Like, yeah, what advice might you give just generally to folks who are in that?

Carmen Giménez Smith: I think that nothing is sacred in terms of your own writing. That if you start latching onto a draft, it’s almost time for you to do something murderous to it, because, I always tell my students, “You know, this isn’t the only book you’re ever going to write in your life.” So whatever it is that you want to hold onto, really ask yourself how important it is to hold onto it. 99.5% of every revision I’ve done has been the right decision, whether that poem survives or not, because every revision is a lesson. It might not be the lesson for that poem. But it’s definitely going to be a lesson that resounds throughout your life. We learn from making mistakes. It’s interesting with art, how difficult it is to translate that, right? Like, we don’t want to make mistakes, because we receive art and it feels like we look at a painting or we look at a poem in a book, I’m like, “Ah, fuck, man, that’s really good.” But you don’t see, like, underneath the painting the are sketches. There’s a sketchbook that someone did 1,000 drawings before they even started painting on the canvas. And the same with a poem, you don’t see the 30, 50, 100 drafts that lie underneath it. And so we think that has to come out of our body. And when we write a poem, and it feels like it looks like a poem that would be in a book or magazine, we’re like, “Okay, I did it.” But that’s actually the time where you’re like, “Okay, now I’m going to fuck it up. Now, I’m going to cut out the first five lines. And now I’m going to put the ending at the top. Because, all of those kinds of radical, aggressive, surprising, destructive things produce new exciting things that you don’t expect. And I mean, not to bring up Robert Frost, but (LAUGHS) no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. If there’s anything that I think is a maxim that is so important to think about when writing is, if you know what you’re saying, and if you know what you’re going to do at the end of the poem, your reader’s gonna know. There’s no surprises. You have to seek out the surprises. And the surprises only come from revision.

Danez Smith: I think there’s two types of revision that I maybe try to implore my students. There’s like the technical kind, which is you pushing that craft, whatever meets you by pushing the machine of the poem, but also, it’s another chance to be vulnerable to being wrong, being vulnerable to whatever emotion might come, right. Like, I had one student, and I remember her breakthrough, because I was just trying to be like, “Yo, if you still have all the same data that you had when you enter the poem when you exit it, what is it?” You know? (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah. Yeah. It’s not a police report! You know, it’s art. The thing that’s also exciting about poetry is that it’s a place of self discovery. We come to art to learn about ourselves. You know, make art! Enjoy it. Be changed by your process of art. And then imagine that the art that you could bring into the world might change someone else. That’s why we make art, it’s a gift to a future audience who needs to be changed. If you think about the poems that first gave you goosebumps, and you know, it wasn’t someone saying, “It’s sad when grandmas die,” or you know what I mean? Like, whatever it is that people often arrive at. And so often you see writers, they didn’t necessarily come into that poem that changes our life knowing that that’s where the poem is going to go. Those are the best kinds of poems for us to read. And so those are the poems we should start writing.

Franny Choi: Hmm. Yeah, I mean, it feels just like the difference between art and propaganda, where if you start with the motive in mind of, like, “I’m going to change the world through this poem,” then, like it can only ever get to the level of propaganda. Which is like good for propaganda, you know?

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah. (LAUGHS) Not for art, yeah.

Danez Smith: Even in titles, right. Cruel Futures, Milk and Filth. Oh, I was so jealous of that title when I first saw that book. What a—I was like, “Oh, oh.” (LAUGHS) Just because my first little manuscript title was like, I forget what it was, but it was like something “and Filth” and I was like, “Oh, I didn’t think of milk. Oh, that’s—”

Carmen Giménez Smith and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: But there’s—I think you say in, it’s a line in Be Recorder, in one of the smaller poems, that you’re a poet, “mean and brilliant.” And so I think there’s this embrace of meanness or of, like, the sort of real or, like, not interested in the hero, some type of narrative, right, that leans towards cruelty, that leans towards filth, this embrace of stuff in your work that I find liberating. Was there somebody whether a person or poet who gave you permission to sort of go towards that edge? And where has meanness, embracing meanness in poetry led you?

Carmen Giménez Smith: I guess when I think about, you know, the idea of meanness, Milk and Filth really was a book about female anti-heroes, and the idea of, you know, growing up, good Catholic girl, you know, the idea of being bad was subversive. And so I was always attracted to that as a child. I was like, “I do not like being good. I much prefer being bad.” And so, the poetry that I was drawn to—you know, Anne Sexton is not mean so much as it is just like acute, you know, without a filter and just will say the things that no one will say. And to me, that’s always been the most exciting poetry, including like Alexander Pope. You know what I mean? Like Alexander Pope was kind of mean and would be sort of a mean girl now. So I think it’s also like the person who speaks truth, the child figure, the fool figure speaks the truth, which I think, you know, I often more think of myself as like the fool in poetry, right? Like, wanting to say the thing, saying the thing in a cheeky way, so I can get away with saying the thing. I keep saying, I keep thinking of Joan Rivers, because Joan Rivers is also such a major figure in Milk and Filth. You know, there’s a poem about her.

Danez Smith: And that’s a mean motherfucker. (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: She’s mean! She was like, to me, there was also this kind of like, she was like the first abject female I ever saw on TV, right? Like she was on Johnny Carson, and she was just like, talking shit, but also, like, putting herself on the line in this way that I hadn’t seen and I was really attracted to. And so that kind of set me on the course of like, I want to do that. I don’t want to be Joan Rivers, and I don’t want to be on the Johnny Carson show. But I want to do what she does, like, be in the world and just kind of say, the things that no one wants to say.

Danez Smith: Shout-out to the Joan Rivers of poetry.

Franny Choi and Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah, I just don’t have like a palatial, Versace-like, you know, apartment.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Not yet.

Danez Smith: No, I was saying to Franny, I was like, I think mean femmes are the best femmes, right? Like, you want like, two or three mean femmes on your team.

Franny Choi: Oh yeah.

Danez Smith: Because they are actually the most like, they’re actually the most, like, loving motherfuckers you know, right? (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Exactly. And soft! And soft.

Danez Smith: And soft, yeah.

Franny Choi: And you certainly don’t want them, like, not on your team.

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHING) Exactly.

Franny Choi: You know?

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah, exactly.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Franny Choi: Okay, so now we’re going to play one of my favorite games, which is called Fast Punch, where we’re going to give you a rapid fire list of categories of things. And we’ll ask you to tell us either, depending on what you decide, the best thing of that category, or the worst thing, in a kind of rapid manner. So for this game, Carmen, do you want to say the best of things or the worst of things?

Carmen Giménez Smith: I feel like the best of things feels like the safer path. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: I think it definitely is. Yeah, great. Let’s do it. Let’s do best of things.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Okay.

Franny Choi: Nezzy, you wanna start?

Danez Smith: Yes I will.

Franny Choi: K.

Danez Smith: Alright. Best of your book titles.

(TIMER TICKS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Um, Milk and Filth.

Franny Choi: Great. Best luxurious breakfast.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Avocado toast with bacon. Made by Shoan Patel.

Danez Smith: Wow, another breakfast related question. Best morning pastry.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Does French toast count as a pastry?

Danez Smith: Yeah. Yes.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Okay. Then French toast for sure.

Franny Choi: Sure. Okay, cool. Best thing to listen to when you’re sad.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Hmm. Gosh. The Smiths, but, you know, the new Smiths, not the—

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: The poetry cover band Smiths.

Carmen Giménez Smith: The poetry cover band Smiths, yeah.

Danez Smith: Alright. Best dairy product.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Oh, none, pass! Lactaid!

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: Okay, post Lactaid, what? (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Post Lactaid. Strawberry Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

Franny Choi: Ooo.

Danez Smith: Ooo, good answer. (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Best kind of pen.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Felt tip purple.

Franny Choi: Mmm.

Danez Smith: Best thing that is filthy.

Carmen Giménez Smith: God, I don’t know. I mean, I mean, my filthy thing.

Danez Smith: (SCREAMS)

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Yes! Oh, man, you win with that one. Best kind of bar.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Milk chocolate.

Franny Choi: Whoa. Oh, love it. Yeah, great.

Danez Smith: Best outside smell.

Carmen Giménez Smith: It’s in the Southwest when it’s about to rain, the smell of the earth, but it has to be in the Southwest.

Franny Choi: I guess the only one that I’ve got left is, best cookie.

Carmen Giménez Smith: My chocolate chip cookie. The ones that I make.

(TIMER DINGS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: I mean, I don’t want to brag but, yeah.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: You doin’ something extra to them cookies? Whatchu—

Carmen Giménez Smith: I’ll send you some. I’ll send you some.

Danez Smith: Heyy!

Carmen Giménez Smith: Send me your address, and I’ll send you some cookies.

Franny Choi: Whoa, wow.

Danez Smith: Yes, please.

Franny Choi: Amazing.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Franny Choi: Carmen Giménez Smith, you won the game!

Danez Smith: You won!

(SOUND EFFECT)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yay, thank you! (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Oh, I should have asked karaoke song. Well, what is your karaoke song?

Carmen Giménez Smith: Well, it depends on the crowd, but my very—I think I have a toss up for the most requested Carmen karaoke and that’s “Tyrone” by Erykah Badu or “Proud Mary” by Tina Turner.

Danez Smith: Whoa!

Franny Choi: Woww.

Danez Smith: Very different energies, but both require a show woman.

Franny Choi: (GIGGLES)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Karaoke is my game. If I hadn’t made it in poetry, I would have been a professional karaoke artist.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHING) Amazing.

Danez Smith: Carmen Giménez Smith, are you ready for our second game?

Carmen Giménez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: This is This vs. That. We’re going to put two—today, groups of people in competition with each other, and you tell us who will come out victorious if it was a fight. Alright? Remember a fight, physical fight, not who you hold closer in your heart, who beats who up. Alright?

Carmen Giménez Smith: Okay, okay, I can do this.

Danez Smith: Alright, cool. So for today’s This vs. That, in this corner, we have amateur dancers. And in that corner, we have amateur poets. Who wins in a fight?

(BELL RINGS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Amateur dancers.

Franny Choi: Yeah?

Danez Smith: Yeah?

Carmen Giménez Smith: In a fight, in a physical fight. Uh, yeah!

Franny Choi: (GIGGLES)

Carmen Giménez Smith: I mean, just on pure muscle and strength.

Franny Choi: But what about the scrappiness, the scrappiness of that early career poet? Nothing?

Carmen Giménez Smith: I’m sorry. I love you, but, I’m a betting woman, okay, and I’m thinking my money, $20 is gonna go with the dancers.

Danez Smith: Okay, what if it’s a bunch of depressed college student amateur poets versus a bunch of, like, very energetic and well-trained, like, six-year-olds who’ve been doing ballet for two years?

Franny Choi: Whoa.

Danez Smith: I’ll give you 10 depressed college poets. And 50 (LAUGHS)—

Franny Choi: That’s a lot!

Carmen Giménez Smith: Wait, you’re asking me who wins?

Danez Smith: Yes.

Carmen Giménez Smith: The dancers! The dancers always win.

Danez Smith: Okay.

Carmen Giménez Smith: They’ve got the brawn. They’ve got the endurance. They’ve got the focus.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: Okay, yeah, you’re right.

Franny Choi: No, no, you’re right. Well, congratulations, dancers.

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: You won again.

Danez Smith: You won the poetry podcast.

Carmen Giménez Smith: This time.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHING) Yeah, this time. Meet me out back. Meet me … at AWP. Don’t meet me at AWP.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Don’t meet me at AWP, it’s too—

Danez Smith: No, don’t make the dancers come to AWP. It’s one of the only places I feel cute.

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah, right. Where you look around and be like, “I did okay.”

Danez Smith: (LAUGHING) Yeah. Yeah, I’m a AWP 8, whatchu talking about?

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: I’m a dance conference 4.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah. You know, if you’re an AWP 8, you’re an MLA 12.

Danez Smith: Ooo! (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Need to start going to MLA, yeah!

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Okay, great. Well—

Danez Smith: Alright.

Franny Choi: Game number three, we’re going to play This vs. Something Else, where we’ll give you the choice between staying in this world or being transported to an alternate world, which we will propose to you. So for this This vs. Something Else, we have this world, this, or a world in which everyone has to publish their first draft along with their final draft whenever they publish a poem.

(SOUND EFFECT)

Carmen Giménez Smith: I would like that world. I would like the alternate world. Yeah, cuz I think it would be, like, famous people, they really are like us, you know. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Carmen Giménez Smith: They do go to Walmart and have to buy toilet paper like the rest of us, so.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yes, that’s the world I want to be in.

Franny Choi: Like, the price being that, like, your own first drafts—

Carmen Giménez Smith: Oh, I don’t give a fuck. No, I don’t care about that. No, I have no pride. Pride is also a very dangerous thing for art. So I’d happily do that.

Danez Smith: Yeah, I feel you. At least with this one, too, I will say you can also, like, you have proof that it went somewhere.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Yeah, exactly!

Danez Smith: A scarier world would be like, okay, for every poem you publish, you have to publish one that you hoped not to see the light of day.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Exactly.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: That’s right, that’s right.

Franny Choi: Like a random other draft.

Danez Smith: Yeah, just a random one that you, like, never took out of your notebook or your Notes app, you didn’t even like—

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah, the one that you just X’d out and didn’t even save in the doc. (LAUGHS)

Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGHS) That’s right, that’s right.

Franny Choi: But you’re in the New Yorker, and it’s like, boom, and then also, turn the page. Here’s this weird one that’s just—

Carmen Giménez Smith: It’s about Justin Bieber. And you’re like, “I don’t even remember writing this.”

Danez Smith: Yeah, here’s what I wrote when I was real depressed at 3AM one night, you know.

Franny Choi: 17 years ago.

Franny Choi and Carmen Giménez Smith: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: Here’s my third poem about my dad I wrote when I was 17.

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think that it would be nice to see first drafts, if that was like the online bonus content or something. Like I don’t know if I’d always want to see the first draft, but it would be nice to have the option.

Danez Smith: Shout-out to Ben Tucket over at Guernica. They do Back Draft. And yeah, I’ve been—Ben Purcket, Purkert, it’s okay if I’m mispronouncing a white person’s name. It’s 2021. Solidarity.

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: But Ben Purkert, he does Back Draft, which he interviews poets about a first, or somewhere in the draft, and then the final version of the poem. And they do this cool slider thing so you can go back and forth.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Mmm, I like that!

Danez Smith: It’s really cool. But then you talk about, it’s like a whole interview series about the act of revision. It’s cool. Check it out.

Carmen Giménez Smith: I sometimes bring a draft to my students, when I’m teaching revision, especially to undergraduates, I’ll bring a draft and I’ll just show them how—we’ll do it together. I’ll say, “Let’s revise this together.” And we’ll just kind of go through it, you know.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Franny Choi: Wow.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Because it’s just like, low stakes. Drafts are low stakes, you know?

Franny Choi: Yeah, yeah. There’s also a site called Underbelly that Maya Marshall and Marty McConnell run. And they, yeah, they ask people to send in like an old draft, and then the final, and then write just like a little essay. And then there’s also Midst, have y’all seen Midst? It’s like a program, like a word processing program that was developed so that you can see as a video, a sort of time lapse of how a poem has changed. So you basically, you write in it, and then edit in it, you know, and then once you save it, then you can save it as a, like, .midst file or whatever, and then it shows a video. Yeah. And so then the journal, like the issue of the journal is just like, you know, 10 of these videos. It’s pretty cool.

Carmen Giménez Smith: That’s incredible.

Danez Smith: Wow, that’s so cool. Because those are the things that make—and it’s so critical, right, when you’re at that emerging stage or, like, first falling in love with it, you need to fall in love with the process, not the product, right? And that is such a tool to fall in love with the making of the thing, not just the made. Ah! Ah!

Franny Choi: Love it. Carmen Giménez Smith, thank you so much for spending this time with us.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Oh, it was such a joy! Such a joy to talk to you today.

Franny Choi: Where should people look to find your poems and find your work in the world?

Carmen Giménez Smith: I mean, you know, Be Recorder is the last thing I feel like I did. I haven’t, like I said, I feel like I’ve been quieted a little bit by this pandemic. I’ve been doing a little bit of translation, but for the most part I’ve just been editing, so I’m excited about the books that Noemi is doing and really about the authors that I get to work with, so.

Danez Smith: Shout-out to Noemi’s subscription program, too, y’all. If y’all don’t know about that, you can sign up for a discount and just get all the books every year. I am a member of that. So, do that.

Franny Choi: It’s really, really cool.

Carmen Giménez Smith: Thank you.

Franny Choi: Carmen, will you do us the honor of closing us out with one more poem?

Carmen Giménez Smith: Sure! And so, speaking of putting your poems—this is a poem that I shared with my friend Juan Luis Guzmán, just the other day, and he just moved the sentences around and so I really—this is, he’s changed it and that’s it. That’s where we’re gonna read this poem from.

(READS POEM)

Geography as Swerving

[POEM TO BE UPLOADED AT A LATER DATE]

* * *

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Danez Smith: That was Carmen. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: It sure was. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: It sure was. No, I’ve really felt like, I don’t know, seriously, the other day after we finished that conversation, I literally felt electric and, like, buoyant and, like, tall as shit. I was like, “Yeah! I’m filled with poetry right now because of Carmen!”

Franny Choi: Yeah, yeah, like, literally got smarter as a result of that conversation.

Danez Smith: Might be a badder bitch. Might have revised myself. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: I love talking to poets about revision. What is one of your favorite revision exercises that you teach or use for yourself?

Danez Smith: This is one that I use for myself. So, you know, I don’t even know if I’ve taught this one formally in the classroom yet. But one thing I sort of, like, believe a little bit is that, there should be one true thing in every poem. And I don’t necessarily mean like biographically true, but I mean like sort of one line or heart that if the rest of the poem fell away that that would stay. When I’m editing, whether I feel like that statement is already there or not, I will kind of just ask myself, like, eventually, like, “Okay, what is that statement?” And if it’s in the poem already, then I’ll highlight it. And if it’s not there, I start asking myself in the poem questions that are helping me sort of dig towards what am I trying to say, what am I trying to say? Eventually, hopefully, I get to say what I need to say and then I can, like, keep or erase as much of that question asking and answering as possible. If you notice, there are a lot of questions in my work. And so sometimes those questions are like a result of me actually like trying to think and get to the next place. If the thing is already there, then I’ll do that same sort of question and answering, but after the line to see what else is there, right. Saying that true thing in a first draft or an early draft always sort of signals to me that I had more thinking to do. If that truth came to me so early, why am still looking at this, right? What else is there to trouble? That one is a little bit more exciting to me, because then I get at the bottom of my thoughts. And I actually feel like I get to challenge my thinking, because I’m no longer in search for the truth, but rather, I’m in search from the truth towards something more. So, yeah. So those are two things I do, right, just playing your own little poetic Q & A. And that’s the Danez Smith method. Franny, how about you? What’s a revision process that you either teach or something that you reach towards when you’re trying to get deeper into your own work?

Franny Choi: Have I talked about my exquisite starfish activity?

Danez Smith: No, and I love this name. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHING) First of all—

Danez Smith: Fuck a corpse, how about a starfish?

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Yeah, so this is an exercise that I’ve used now, just a few times, that I’ve taught in a group setting in order to kind of ask questions about voice. So what we do is we do an exquisite corpse. If you’re not familiar with that, everybody has a piece of paper, you write a line, pass it to the right, the person writes the next line. And then generally speaking, what folks do is fold the paper so that you can only see the line that came just before yours, but you don’t know the whole context of what’s come before. So, there’s a little, you know, it becomes a little improvisational, it becomes a little spontaneous and surprising at the end to put it all together. I have my students write like a title and the first line, and then when it comes back to them, then they write the last line. So then, when you receive your poem, it’s kind of at least it has like the bones of being your poem. And then we open it up. And it’s fun to, like, read those sorts of things out loud. And then what I say—this is the starfish part, because a starfish, if they lose one of their limbs, then they can regenerate that limb, right. So what I have them do is circle the line that they feel is most outside of their voice. I ask them to take that out, and then write the line the way that they would write it. So then it’s a question of like, “Wait, how do I write? What is the voice that’s truest to me?” And then I ask them to take that line that they took out, and have that be the first line of a poem and then try to write a poem in that voice. So then it also teaches them to, like, what do you learn from writing in a way that you wouldn’t naturally come to, that sort of feels foreign to you. So I think that it helps do both of these things. Dig down a little bit deeper in, like, what you do and what you do well, and also, like, stretch your imagination to see what you might learn from going outside of yourself.

Danez Smith: That is sooo cool! Oh my god.

Franny Choi: Yeah, exquisite starfish!

Danez Smith: What a wonderful prompt!

Franny Choi: Thank you, Danez.

Danez Smith: Oh, I am impressed! Oh, that is such a good prompt.

Franny Choi: Thank you!

Danez Smith: We’ve talked often about how, like, imitation is important, but I think it can be so scary to imitate, like, the masters and stuff like that. And so just imitating a classmate, too, just feels like very low stakes, right? Like, I maybe can’t imitate Lucille Clifton but I can imitate this nigga, like, Cody you know? (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) I love that Cody is always your stand-in for just random boy.

Danez Smith: There’s no man named Cody. It’s the name you have to shed at 18.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Franny Choi: Or you become Codus.

Danez Smith: Codysseus. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHING) Codysseus! Well, shout-out to Codysseus. If your name is Codysseus, please, you know, tweet at us, leave a review, you know, email [email protected] (LAUGHS) But yeah, let’s thank some folks and get on out of here.

Danez Smith: I would like to thank … Group B from Cave Canem, 2011. That, I think, was one of the weeks of my life I learned the most about revision. And I still feel like I’m at that table with those eight Black women in my head. The voice that is, like, Danez’s revision voice, like, is at that table. And even though I’ve learned so much, it just kind of has the tone. I’m there when I’m revising. I’m at that table with those women learning about how to make a poem sharper. So just thank y’all. Thank y’all for that magical week. I still feel affected by it to this day.

Franny Choi: Oh, I love that. I want to thank folks at Kundiman, too, but maybe I’ll just thank the faculty of Kundiman that have been there during the two times I’ve been able to go to the retreats. So that includes Jaswinder Bolinaand, Don Mee Choi and Giles Li and Lee Herrick and some other folks who now I—are not, have left my brain, but just like, all past and future faculty of Kundiman, thank you. We also want to thank Ydalmi Noriega and Itzel Blancas at the Poetry Foundation. We want to thank our producer, Daniel Kisslinger, who has to comb through a lot of tape of us saying things that don’t end up on the show. We also want to thank Postloudness. Thank you to all of you all for continuing to listen to us here in Season 5, staying alive.

Danez Smith: Make sure you like, rate, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure you follow us on Twitter @VSthepodcast. And if this is coming out in time, make sure you vote for us on the Webbys.

Franny Choi: Oh, yeah!

Danez Smith: Yeah, you can go to our Twitter @VSthepodcast and find the link for that. But we are nominated next to, like, Oprah’s Book Club and Keep It with Ira and them. And those are podcasts that I listen to. So I’m like, whoa, that’s crazy.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: Thank you, Webbys, for the nom. We’re glad to be Olivia Lux. We are so nice and so liked and we’re not gonna win. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: We’re not gonna win.

Danez Smith: We’re not gonna win, but it’s great that we’re in it.

Franny Choi: Vote for us though, vote for us.

Danez Smith: Definitely vote for us, you know, we would love to be a lovely fifth alternate. But no, but thank y’all, love y’all, be safe. We’ll see you in another two weeks with another great poet. Bye!

Franny Choi: Byyye.