Patricia Smith 101

Poet Patricia Smith has never been one to rest on her laurels: though she’s received an impressive number of awards—the Kingsley Tufts, the L.A. Times Book Prize, the Lenore Marshall—her work becomes gutsier and more technically dazzling with each new book. She cut her teeth on the stage, winning four individual titles at the inaugural National Poetry Slam. And she’s an innovator on the page, following in the footsteps of technical magicians such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden. A child of the Great Migration, she’s written about her West Side Chicago upbringing with verve and rigor. She’s a rare poet whose gaze has consistently turned outward, focused on the lives of others, a quality that connects her to predecessors from Homer to Edgar Lee Masters to Charles Reznikoff. Whether wearing the mask of persona or writing about her family, Smith offers perspectives and voices too little heard and, in doing so, expands what’s possible in poetry, politics, and popular discourse. This selection of her poems, ordered chronologically, offers a brief overview of her career.

“Sweet Daddy”
Published in Smith’s first book, Life According to Motown (1991), and later reprinted in her third book, Close to Death (1993), this powerful early poem is an index of some of Smith’s enduring habits and concerns, a key to what has characterized her work over the course of her career. One thing is character itself: a keen sense of what makes people themselves. The character in this poem, Smith’s father, might be one reason for her abiding interest in people: a rapscallion who “wrote poems on the back of / cocktail napkins,” he recurs in later poems, providing irreverence, joy, and—in the shadow of his murder—a deep sense of loss. The techniques she uses to bring him to life on the page point toward other strengths: the way her bluesy lines dance down the page and her exquisite sense of timing and drama, the poem’s ending all the more devastating for readers’ anticipation of the shift from comedy to tragedy.

“Always in the Head”
Smith worked for years as a journalist, writing stories and columns for the Boston Globe and Chicago Sun-Times. In this poem from Close to Death, that work as a reporter becomes the subject of her poetry. The long quotation that opens the piece—apparently, the transcription of an interview—suggests that some of Smith’s talents as a poet (her ear for voice, her eye for detail) might have been honed at her day job. But the intentionally jarring shift to Smith’s house and life also shows readers what poetry can do that journalism often doesn’t do: speak to the human behind the news and offer a visceral sense of its impact. “I am afraid of the stories,” she admits. The poem’s ending is particularly poignant in the context of her own biography, especially the manner of her father’s death, and in the context of the book, which grounds her broader inquiry about race and violence in the living example of her son.

“What You Pray Toward”
One consistent thread through all of Smith’s work is sensuality. No matter her subject or approach, her poems are resolutely rooted in the senses, practically bursting with sights and sounds that evoke the ache of having a body. No surprise, then, that this ode to the female orgasm from her book Teahouse of the Almighty (2006) is a master class in tone and syntax. Note how the first section about “Hubbie 1” moves from energetic takedown into its punch-packing ending or the way the second section rushes and runs on, its long first sentence imitating the “express train / slicing through [her] blood.” Her vivid, self-effacing language reflects the many things sex can be: pleasurable, funny, frustrating, ecstatic. Indeed, this poem ends in a surprising place, charting a course from irreverent bawdiness to something, in the quiet final lines, like joyful reverence.

“The President Flies Over”
Smith is a master practitioner of the dramatic monologue, a rich and varied poetic tradition that runs from Robert Browning to T.S. Eliot to Ai. The wide range of guises she’s adopted—sex worker, child murderer, Medusa, Ray Charles—is matched only by the empathy she stirs with each voice. Blood Dazzler, her celebrated 2008 collection about Hurricane Katrina, is both panoramic and kaleidoscopic in its use of persona: even the storm itself gets a say, shares its side of the story. This poem from that book takes the point of view of George W. Bush. Her imagination of him isn’t without insight, but the goal here is not the compassion or complexity she shows Katrina’s victims in poems such as “Buried.” Instead, readers get a critique, a portrait of the leader as indifferent and distracted, which culminates with the flatly brutal final lines.

“Hip-Hop Ghazal”
Like one of her major influences, Gwendolyn Brooks, Smith has a formalist’s imagination and dedication. Especially in more recent work, she challenges herself with forms ranging from the sestina to the abecedarian to rhyming couplets. In this piece originally published in Poetry in 2007 and included in her award-winning collection Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), she reinvents ghazal, which finds its origin in seventh-century Arabic poetry. In many ways, her ghazal honors the contours of the historical form, retaining the traditional long-lined couplets, the refrain end word, even the concluding self-address, which here adds a note of comedy to the poem. But the poem’s riffs and vernacular diction not only modernize the ghazal but also re-contextualize it, reminding readers that, like hip-hop, the ghazal is rooted in performance and community. Smith’s playfulness and unabashed celebration of bodies also connects the poem to the feminist poetic tradition, especially to Lucille Clifton and her “homage to my hips.”

“Black, Poured Directly into the Wound”
Smith has always been concerned with history, but Incendiary Art (2017) marks a new scope and sweep for her work. In poem after poem, with cool-eyed ferocity, Smith directly takes on the spectacle of anti-Black violence in America, addressing subjects from the Tulsa massacre to Rodney King to Ferguson. Central to Smith’s inquiry is a fellow Chicagoan, Emmett Till. In this portrait, readers sit close to Till’s mother in the aftermath of her son’s murder, overhearing her thoughts. Unlike in Smith’s persona poems, Mamie Till doesn’t speak directly; instead, her perspective is filtered through free indirect discourse, as if her pain were too large to comprehend. The poem’s eerie lyricism captures the enormity of her loss, showing how it has warped the world, and delves into the more complex parts of grief—into guilt, rage, isolation. Smith’s mastery of form is also on display here: the poem is an ambitious double golden shovel that puts the poet into dialogue with past representations of Black suffering.

“When Black Men Drown Their Daughters”
One of Smith’s greatest strengths as a poet—and one constant in her career—is her willingness to take real risks. She is unafraid to write her way into difficult, thorny subjects, to probe areas that are unknowable, extreme, or politically fraught. This poem comes from a sequence in Incendiary Art about two separate incidents in which Black fathers murdered their children. The reiterations of the title throughout the poem—the repetition and variation of its syntax—capture the struggle to untie the tight knot of these crimes, of the mind circling the unthinkable violence at the poem’s center. The reference to “another scientific tome” and the parody of academic language in the first stanza both suggest pitfalls of this kind of poem, of writing about this kind of subject: it can reduce victims and perpetrators to objects and transform individual psychologies and complex histories into politicized, capital-I Issues. But the surreal, visionary lines of this poem—a newer register for Smith—manage to wring humanity from the situation without reducing its mystery or horror. In the end, the daughter’s gaze never wavers and neither does Smith’s. Her talent for seeing “wrecked science” behind newspaper headlines is an ongoing gift to poetry.