AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

VS: Live with Patricia Smith at Chicago Humanities Festival

Danez Smith: Hey y’all, this is Danez.

Franny Choi: Hey, this is Franny!

Danez Smith: And you are listening to a very special episode of VS, the podcast where poets confront the ideas that move them.

Franny Choi: Brought to you, as always, by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. And extra specially brought to you this time by the Chicago Humanities Festival, where we recorded this episode live with our guest, Patricia Smith.

Danez Smith: Holy shit, yes y’all. This is that episode. Patricia Smith is on the podcast.

Franny Choi: Yeah. We were really, really excited to get to talk to her in front of a live audience. Especially excited to get to close out Season 3 with Patricia, who we love so very much.

Danez Smith: Yeah. So after we get into this episode, sadly we will be on a little bit of a break. We’ll be back at the top of 2020 with Season 4. But while we’re away, please make sure that you dive into the archive. Y’all know what this is. We’ve got three seasons of the motherfucking jams for y’all. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: So go back, dive into the archive, revisit some of your favorite episodes with some of your favorite poets old and new.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: We’ll see you at the top of the year with some new stuff. But right now, let’s get into this thang with Patricia Smith and the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Franny Choi: Hooray!

Venue Host: Please help me in welcoming Danez Smith and Franny Choi.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Franny Choi: I’ll sit in the middle? Okay.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Hi everyone.

Danez Smith: How y’all doin’?

Franny Choi: Good! Hi! My name is Franny Choi.

Danez Smith: And my name is Danez Smith.

Franny Choi: Yes it is. And we are so happy to get to welcome you to this event with the one and only legendary Patricia Smith. Can we just make some noise for Patricia Smith?

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Franny Choi: I feel like we should just do that at the top of every show.

Danez Smith: Yeah, you know. West Side legend, you know. Winner of all things.

Franny Choi: All things.

Danez Smith: All the things and my heart. You still can’t win a poetry slam against her, not even this year, no. So I think in the great tradition of poetry slam, where Patricia had her humble beginnings as an artist, we’re gonna put ourselves in as the sacrificial poets and do a couple poems before she gets out here, if that’s okay with y’all.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Is it? Okay cool. Well it has to be because it’s what we’re doing. Okay, I’ll read first. I’m gonna read—

Franny Choi: Oh are you reading from your forthcoming collection Homie on Graywolf Press?

Danez Smith: I am, I am.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: And if you’re listening to this on the podcast, I’m currently Vanna White-ing my own book.

Franny Choi: Yes.

Danez Smith: So this is an almost sonnet. And I think it’s right to read some form, since Patricia Smith, I think, is our greatest formalist of our time, to welcome her to the stage. So this is about one of my best friends. It’s called “I Didn’t Like You When I Met You.”

(READS POEM)

I Didn’t Like You When I Met You

but like the funk of a dude unwashed & sun-whooped

i learned the need. & like dude, you were stanlk & i

was stank right back, two skunks pissed & pissing, smelling like skunks.

but somehow (was it mutual hare for a stanker fuck? a song

our dueling shoulders foind each other in? a synced nod?

being the only of our kind in a room full of not-us?) here we like

two stank bitches, thick as mothers, a lil gone off love’s gold milk.

i didn’t know when i thought, i don’t like that hoe, it was just

my reflection i couldn’t stand. i saw it. the way you would break me into a better me. i ran from it. like any child, i saw my medicine

& it looked so sharp, so exact, a blade fit to the curve of my name.

what a shame. i was slow to you. walked up on you like a bee trapped

in a car – all that fear pent in my wings, those screaing, swatting

giants

& then, finally, the window, the wind, the flowers, the honey

myqueenmyqueenmyqueen!

* * *

Franny Choi: Whew! Danez Smith, everyone.

Danez Smith: Yeah!

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Danez Smith: What you got, Frances?

Franny Choi: Okay! Here is what I brought. I am also gonna read a sonnet. Maybe what I’ll do is I’ll read the first and last sonnet in this crown.

Danez Smith: Ooo!

Franny Choi: Just so that it feels—there’s some sort of false sense of closure that will happen.

Danez Smith: Oh like most of my relationships.

Franny Choi: Aw…

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: No! Okay yeah. So the crown of sonnets is called “Chatroulette.” Do y’all remember Chatroulette?

(AUDIENCE CHATTER)

Franny Choi: Yeah, people are being—I’m sorry to—trigger warning! Chatroulette, you will have to remember it. So for those who are not familiar with this phenomenon, this concept, it was an Internet platform where basically it would randomly match up your webcam with another webcam. Which at first was like a fun way to have cool conversations, like meet people.

Danez Smith: Cool conversations?

Franny Choi: For the first few weeks it was conversations. And then it was quickly just dicks. Dicks across the board.

Danez Smith: Yeah. That’s when I came in. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) So in honor of Patricia Smith, I’ll read some sexy and slightly disturbing sonnets. The first one goes like this.

(READS POEM)

CHARTROULETTE

To see, to come, I brought myself online.

O dirty church. O two-way periscope,

refectory for Earth’s most skin-starved cocks.

O hungry sons of helicopter palms

in hopeful carousel. O gatling spray

of skin that charges forth from dim-lit shorts

when I wave back, nod, yes, I’m here, I’m real,

and shape myself a woman’s shape, a girl’s

live-action hologram projected on

their basement brains. My foul amygdala

Prince Thirstings, desperate congregations, pink

or blue-brown mammals begging for my face.

Outside the frame, my eight eyes narrow. Yes.

I nod. Amen. I am your filthy god.

* * *

Franny Choi: I think I’ll just read that one. Yeah. So no closure at all!

Danez Smith: Oh okay! You got me all pent up! I’m like, okay cool, alright.

Franny Choi: Yeah, just like Chatroulette!

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: We are so excited to have this opportunity to talk to Patricia Smith today on this very special live episode of VS.

Danez Smith: Yeah. VS fun fact: Patricia was supposed to read at our first ever live show a couple years ago, and got sick. But you know, the good Lord Jesus and Bugs Bunny have conspired.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: I don’t know, Bugs Bunny feels like God to me these days. Have conspired to—

Franny Choi: Okay.

Danez Smith: It’s weird. To get Patricia in here with us today. Franny, you know, we’re both kinda Patrician students.

Franny Choi: Sure.

Danez Smith: What feels like the most Patricia Smith thing about your work?

Franny Choi: I think maybe it is the line between sexy and disturbing.

Danez Smith: Hmm.

Franny Choi: Well, I think that it’s like form being used to do both of those things. There’s like a seductiveness in the rigor of Patricia Smith’s poems—

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: —that I want to try to fold into my own work.

Danez Smith: Word.

Franny Choi: At least aspirationally, you know what I mean?

Danez Smith: Yes. Yeah. A mountain we will never be able to climb.

Franny Choi: Truly.

Danez Smith: For me, I think it is something about that rigor that you said.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: You know, I think what Patricia Smith’s work does for me, it’s beautiful to see a poet that you love continue to challenge themselves and really up the ante for themselves—

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: With every poem and every collection that you see coming out. But as Patricia’s rigor rises, I never feel like she’s leaving behind the people who her poems are truly for.

Franny Choi: True.

Danez Smith: It becomes more intellectual, becomes more complex and more curious, but at the center of her poems are poems that are reaching back for a community that I think the structure of poetry maybe sometimes forgets about.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: And leaves out. And also, she made me want to be a formalist. You know, as a spoken word poet, I always used to be like, “Oh, fuck form. That’s like what the people that say I can’t write do,” and stuff like that. “So what the fuck is a sestina to me?”

Franny Choi: Right.

Danez Smith: And then Patricia Smith is just like, “Well, you know form is how you get good.” And I was like, “Wait, what’d you say?” (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Right. And what a revenge on the people who said you can’t write.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm. And I think maybe she—she may be even a poet of revenge, you know? Like I never wanna grudge her, just because I’m scared about the poems she would write about me.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah. And so we’re both sort of students of Patricia Smith.

Danez Smith: Very much so.

Franny Choi: In formal and in informal ways. I had the honor of taking a workshop with Patricia at the VONA workshop.

Danez Smith: Yeah. Myself at Cave Canem.

Franny Choi: Yeah. And so it’s great to get a chance to bring our teacher on.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Our teacher and our friend.

Danez Smith: And my mom! I lie and tell people that she’s my biological mother sometimes, you know.

Franny Choi: Aw, Patricia Smith, Danez Smith.

Danez Smith: Yeah, you know, our family started at the same plantation and here we are now, you know? (LAUGHS) Meeting each other in the meantime. Oh, slavery happens, c’mon!

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Dammit! Shit. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah, yeah.

Danez Smith: Y’all know how I got this goddamn last name. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Tell ’em. Tell ’em.

Danez Smith: Alright, well I don’t think we should waste any more time.

Franny Choi: Yeah, there’s nowhere to go from that except for amazing poems by the one and only Patricia Smith. So please welcome up Patricia Smith, everybody.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Sexy side. Disturbing side.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Hi everybody!

(AUDIENCE SAYS HI IN UNISON)

Patricia Smith: How’s it going? We good? Hi. Ok, so I figured, I’m going to read two Chicago poems.

Franny Choi: Yes.

Patricia Smith: I love Chicago. I’m from Chicago, I miss Chicago. This is “Chicago.” This is kind of patterned after the famous Carl Sandburg poem. Okay.

(READS POEM)

Chicago

SOUL Butcher for the Country,

Heart Breaker, Stacker of the Deck,

Player with Northbound Trains, the Nation’s Black Beacon;

Frigid, windy, sprawling,

City of Cold Shoulders.

They tell me you have lied and I believe them,

for I have seen your Mississippi women stumbling

Madison Street searching for their painted city legs.

And they tell me you are evil and I answer: Yes, I know.

I have seen babies cooking their hair, fingering blades,

changing their names to symptoms of jazz.

And they speak of souls you swallow, and my reply is:

On the shadowed faces of men in the factory lines

I have witnessed the beginnings of the furthest falling.

And having answered so I turn to the people who spit at my city,

and I spit back at them before I say:

Come and show me another city with head thrown back wailing

bladed blue, field hollers, so astounded to be breathing and bleeding.

Spewing electric hymns rhythmed against the staccato pound of

fiery steel presses, here is a defiant ass whupper

shaking its massive fists at sweating southern “towns”;

Feral as a junkyard mutt, taut, muscled against his enemy, shrewd

as an explorer pitted against un untried land,

Wily as a Louisiana boy faced with days of concrete,

Wiry-headed,

Digging,

Destroying,

Deciding,

Swallowing, expelling, swallowing,

Under the rubble, thrusting forth, laughing with

perfect teeth,

Shedding the terrible burden of skin, laughing as a white

man laughs,

Laughing even as a soldier laughs, addicted to the need of his next battle,

Laughing and bragging that under that skin is the cage of his ribs

And under his ribs beats a whole unleashed heart.

Laughing!

Laughing the frigid, windy, sprawling laughter of

a southern man, folded against the cold, sparkling, sweating,

proud to be

SOUL Butcher for the Country,

Heart Breaker, Stacker of the Deck,

Receiver of Northbound Trains and the Nation’s Black Beacon.

* * *

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Patricia Smith: Alright so I grew up on the West Side. Thank you! Thank you! I grew up on the West Side, so you know, the street slicing through, that’s Madison Street. Although, the last time I was on Madison Street, I didn’t recognize it. I won’t tell you why. So, I tried to figure out what would it be like to introduce people to a ride on the Madison Street bus. And this is back when I was growing up. So that’s what this poem is.

(READS POEM)

Tavern. Tavern. Church. Shuttered Tavern

Tavern. Tavern. Church. Shuttered tavern,
then Goldblatt’s, with its finger-smeared display windows full
of stifled plaid pinafore and hard-tailored serge, each unattainable
thread cooing the delayed lusciousness of layaway, another church

then, of course, Jesus pitchin’ a blustery bitch on every other block,
then the butcher shop with, hard to believe, the blanched, archaic head
of a hog propped upright to lure waffling patrons into the steamy

innards of yet another storefront, where they drag their feet through
sawdust and revel in the come-hither bouquet of blood, then a vacant
lot, then another vacant lot, right up against a shoe store specializing

in unyielding leather, All-Stars and glittered stacked heels designed
for the Christian woman daring the jukebox, then the what-not joint,
with vanilla-iced long johns, wax lips crammed with sugar water,

notebook paper, swollen sour pickles buoyant in a splintered barrel,
school supplies, Pixy Stix, licorice whips and vaguely warped 45s
by Fontella Bass or Johnny Taylor, now oooh, what’s that blue pepper

piercing the air with the nouns of backwood and cheap Delta cuts —
neck and gizzard, skin and claw — it’s the chicken shack, wobbling
on a foundation of board, grease riding relentless on three of its walls,

the slick cuisine served up in virgin white cardboard boxes with Tabasco
nibbling the seams, scorched wings under soaked slices of Wonder,
blind perch fried limp, spiced like a mistake Mississippi don’ made,

and speaking of, July moans around a perfect perfumed tangle of eight Baptist
gals on the corner of Kedzie and Warren, fanning themselves
with their own impending funerals, fluid-filled ankles like tree trunks

sprouting from narrow slingbacks, choking in Sears’ Best cinnamontinged
hose, their legs so unlike their arms and faces, on the other side
of the street is everything they are trying to be beyond, everything

they are trying to ignore, the grayed promise of government, 25 floors
of lying windows, of peeling grates called balconies, of yellow panties
and shredded diapers fluttering from open windows, of them nasty gals

with wide avenue hips stomping doubledutch in the concrete courtyard,
spewing their woman verses, too fueled and irreversible to be not
listened to and wiggled against, and the Madison St. bus revs its tired

engine, backs up a little for traction and drives smoothly into the sweaty
space between their legs, the only route out of the day we’re riding through.

* * *

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Patricia Smith: Thank you. Thank you.

Franny Choi: Patricia, thank you so much for joining us.

Patricia Smith: You are welcome.

Franny Choi: For this special episode of VS.

Patricia Smith: This is snuggly already.

Franny Choi: I know.

Danez Smith: Ain’t it? And these chairs is comfortable, I do have to say. I might steal one after.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Well let’s start off how we start off with all our guests on VS. Patricia, what’s moving you?

Patricia Smith: I think what is moving me right now is the fact that truth is in extremely short supply. I am thinking of poets as the ultimate truth tellers. And I’m trying to figure out what other ways I can write to bring people to the circle. I’m thinking about some things that came out of my last book, Incendiary Art, where I was thinking about the mothers of people who had been murdered, often by the police, but not always. And I’m thinking now about expanding that and writing some short fiction, with each story focused on a different situation with one of those mothers. I think it’s another way to maybe get some work out that will keep the conversation going, because, as you know, Black people and Black people concerns are not high on the priority list of the current administration.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm. Well, goddamn. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Yeah, to put it lightly. You said “to bring people into the circle.” Can you say what you mean exactly by that?

Patricia Smith: Not too long ago, somebody asked me—they were talking about the sometimes prohibitive emotional content of the work, that it would be very difficult to read and then read again, and how I build myself up to go out and read pieces like that over and over again. And I think eventually you get to the spot where you realize that there are a lot of people who don’t realize that we have this, what I like to call the second throat. You know, we can live our lives over here, and then we have the ability to analyze that life, to pick it up and to go behind it, and to see why it moves the way it does. And not everyone realizes that they can do that. What keeps me reading work like this is thinking in every audience there’s at least one person who needs to hear—maybe it’s a line that inconsequential in your poem. But something where they realize, I have felt like that too and didn’t know there was a way to express it. And maybe they run home, and they pick up a pen. Or they go to another reading. Or, you know, because what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get this huge community of witnesses. Because if no one is witnessing, no stories are really being told.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: Mm.

Patricia Smith: So it’s on a personal level, when someone who’s dealing with something that’s very difficult realizes there’s another way that they can get on the other side of it. But the other thing is, there’s so many conversations that are being shut down that we need to keep happening. And if we don’t say our fears and our angers and all these things out loud, we are too are being suppressed. So when I talk about growing the community, it’s those conversations that we need to have with each other. You know, we need to talk about why we hurt. By doing work that’s accessible and work that comes from simple places. My feeling is hey, I’m gonna come out and tell you what happened to me today, or how I feel about this thing or whatever. And I think it’s a conversation more than anything else, where I expect somebody to stand up and go, hey, you know, me too, let tell you how I feel about it. So it’s just kind of an artful way to begin that conversation. It’s like throwing a fishhook out. And you pull it back and there are people clinging to it, and ideas clinging to it, you know. And every time someone takes one of those ideas and runs with it, the community gets larger.

Franny Choi: Mm.

Danez Smith: How do you balance that sort of accessible entry point, telling these simple stories and really—I think your work does call forth people to realize that they can be poets, that they can tell the truth, that there is a truth out there that they can reach for. How do you balance yourself with that accessibility for who you’re trying to call into the circle?

Patricia Smith: Well, a lot of times, the work that you’re trying to write and make accessible is difficult work. It’s work people don’t really want to hear. When I did the book about Katrina, nobody wanted to hear about Katrina anymore. You know? People were tired of it. You know, there’s a bunch of people who say yes, I understand that, you know, Black men and women are being murdered, I understand that there’s a problem with the police, there’s a problem in neighborhoods, I’ve heard a lot about it, you know. So, I figured out that what you have to do—sometimes you can’t draw people into the poems with the subject matter. The reason I studied form was, I want to pull you into the poem with technique and then have you realize that you’re in a place that you wouldn’t have chosen for yourself.

Franny Choi: Hm.

Danez Smith: Mm.

Patricia Smith: For instance, writing about something that was very personal to me. And it was when I realized that my mother used to scrub the back of my neck with Lysol. Because I was too Black. I would come in in the summer, and I was too Black. So she made me sit in a kitchen chair and she’d put some of that in a little red bottle, that undiluted Lysol concentrate on a washcloth, and she would scrub the back of my neck. And I said, how am I gonna tell that story. I fought with it, I fought with it, I said okay, maybe it’s not my story to tell. And then I picked up the Lysol, and I was reading the directions on the back. And this goes two ways. It’s my way of entering the story that I don’t want to tell. And my way of giving the audience a, you know—and so I just started quoting the directions. So it’s a little bit of sleight of hand. I’m about to talk about something you want to walk away from, but I need to do something technically to pull you into the poem and keep you there so you can hear this story.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: Hmm.

Patricia Smith: I picture 800 people walking to their keyboards or their notebooks or whatever to write the exact same poem I’m about to write. Because we all have the same idea. So how is it—

Franny Choi: You picture that? That seems like a hard thing to—I would be like, oh my god, I give up!

Patricia Smith: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah, I wouldn’t do it. If I just pictured like, Ilya Kaminsky walking up to his computer to write the same shit, I’d be like, I’m done.

Franny Choi: Well I guess it’s his poem now.

(ALL LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Yeah! The poems are—you know, there’s been a lot of times when I’ve clicked on something on Twitter, or I’ve heard some people talking about a reading, and I was like dammit, Danez, you know.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Or, the idea that I didn’t have. And you know, you guys do the same thing. It comes from very simple—“this happened to me the other day,” you know. And I look at it, and I go, this is where the work is. It’s not relegated to a dusty bookshelf somewhere. It’s not something where you have to sit like this and wait for inspiration to fall down on your heads. It’s right in front of you all the time, you know. And the only thing I did is I studied form because people were talking to me like other people owned form.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Patricia Smith: And I was like, you gotta be kidding me, right? So especially because I came out of the spoken word thing, it’s like, that’s really cute what you do, now we’re gonna go over here and do some real poetry.

Franny Choi: Mm.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Patricia Smith: There would be poems that I would come to again and again, and I would read over and over and over, what is it, what is it, what is it. Then I realized it was something the poet was doing technically to help heighten my response to that poem. So I think all of the canon belongs to us. It’s not in bits and pieces that, okay, we’ll let you have this now. It always belonged to us. It’s just that, I think, coming from spoken word, we had to convince ourselves that it belonged to us. And so after that, form is just something I have in my toolbox. I think we all have poems that we carry around and they’re not working, and we don’t know why. And I think that sometimes it’s because they’re asking for something we do not yet know how to do. So I think we owe it to ourselves, it’s like, why, why, why—oh! I need a repetitive form. Let me get this villanelle, let me get this sestina out here. You know, so it just gives us more options, but it also does help me take what could be really kind of emotionally explosive material and come around the back way to get to it.

Franny Choi: I think that makes sense, as you said, for engaging with the stories that are hardest to tell, or hardest to listen to. Does that make it easier as well in the process of sharing those poems? Or if not, then what does?

Patricia Smith: Yeah, form helps with it sometimes. But a lot of it depends on my yesterday and my week before and what’s in the news, you know. That brings a lot of those things much closer to the surface. So while I realize, oh this thing has just happened, so I really need to read this poem, I understand that everybody’s feelings are kind of raw around that right now. You know, I don’t claim to be totally in control of the poems all the time. There have been poems that I started and didn’t finish. There have been faces that come to me in the midst of a poem from a news story I saw the night before and then I realize, oh this has happened again, and everyone’s thinking about it.

Danez Smith: Hm.

Patricia Smith: Indeed is the fact that we are suppressing so many of the conversations we need to have. And if I can just start that conversation, even the poems that I begin and don’t finish. I think we all feel that way, but it’s so easy for us to pave things over and go, I’m glad that’s over, I’m glad I’ve gotten past that. We’ve gotten past nothing.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Patricia Smith: I mean, once you begin to develop that second throat, you turn around and the pavement’s going like this, like, come back. You can’t move on without addressing these things. You know, and I want to help my audience and my readers find a path to that addressing. So I think it’s important to get through with the poems. There’s things I’m afraid to write about. I write to kind of move sanely from one day to the next in my own life. And there are still things that I’m afraid of. But I think if I’m afraid, there must be other people that are afraid. So I will look for the work or else I will seek to write it myself.

Franny Choi: Mm.

Danez Smith: Wow, Patricia Smith is scared of something. That shit blows my mind. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Another question on form, and maybe we can turn away after this, but maybe not. It’s our show and we will geek out about form if we fucking feel like it.

Franny Choi: Right!

Danez Smith: I think a lot of your work, you know, from project to project, you sort of volley back and forth between a work like Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, which is like, highly confessional, personal, right, and then works like Blood Dazzler or Incendiary Art, which are maybe a little bit more like looking out at the world and pulling in experiences that aren’t your own. Does the utility of what form does for you feel different between some of those more confessional personal projects and then poems that are sort of addressing a larger world concern?

Patricia Smith: No, I think what it is, it’s very much from poem to poem. One of the things that studying form made me realize was how much power we actually have as poets. How much power we have for how the reader comes to the page.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Patricia Smith: Everything from how the actual poem appears on the page to line breaks, stanza, you know, if I want you to be breathless after reading this, if I want you to muse. So if I’m writing something about myself—for instance in Jimi Savannah, I was trying to really recreate the life of my parents, and sometimes you want to create a tension. You want something that people think should be loose and boundless to be very tight, you know, so the reader can’t turn away from it. In Blood Dazzler, I wanted to write that persona poem about Ethel Freeman. Katrina, there was a woman who died in her wheelchair. She was waiting with her son for a bus to come and take them to the convention center.

Danez Smith: On the freeway, correct?

Patricia Smith: Yeah. And she kept saying, “Is it coming baby, is it coming?” And he covered her against the sun. And then the bus came and she had died. And they told him that they didn’t know if they would be able to come back and get him, so he had to leave his mother’s body there. So I thought about how elderly people talk. They have these comfort spots in their language, and they circle back around on them, say a lot of the same things. So I said, okay—and this is how form works—I need for her to keep coming back around to things, so I need a form that does that. Let’s try the sestina. You know?

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Patricia Smith: So I’m grateful that I have form to address personal things because a lot of them are things that I never thought would see the light of day. And I can kind of trick myself into entering them by concentrating on the form. It’s the same way when I teach. I do a workshop called Writing on the Other Side of the Wall, you know, try to get people over there where they claim they can’t be. And the first thing I say, “What’s the thing you can’t write about?” And they all have something. And I say, “Okay, well tell me again, but tell me in a limerick.”

Danez Smith: Hm.

Patricia Smith: Right? And so they’re counting the syllables, and you know, they’re doing things. And once they read that, I said, “Okay now you have a choice. You’re on the other side of the wall, you could stay over there or you can run back.” So sometimes it’s just tricking people into knowing themselves. And knowing what they’re capable of.

Franny Choi: Your explanation of that prompt or writing assignment for your students reminded me of a prompt that you—a sort of legendary prompt that you have given both of us.

Danez Smith: It’s quite the fucking prompt!

Patricia Smith: It’s retired.

Franny Choi: Is it?

Danez Smith: Oh it’s retired?

Patricia Smith: I think so.

Franny Choi: Can you tell the audience about what the prompt was and then maybe why you retired it? This is a brutal exercise.

Patricia Smith: Okay. Alright, so, you come into workshop, you’re all happy, “Hi!”…

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: And then I say, “You know what, we really should be thankful that we’re able to come here and do this, and I know we do it with the support of people who love us.”

Franny Choi: Oh my gosh, the buildup.

Patricia Smith: “So what I want to do today just to get a good feeling in the room, I want everyone here to tell me who they love most in the world. Don’t worry, don’t try to choose between children, just tell me,” you know. And so we go around, and they say, “Oh, my mother Louise,” “my father Ed,” and all that. And I say, “Okay, so let’s just say it all together once, just shout their names out in the room.” And they go, “Ed!” “Louise!” and I say okay, “Let’s get down to work. Now we can do the workshop.” I talk to them about everyone has something they know they should be writing that they’re not writing. And we do the little limerick thing. You know, I say, well, can we do this. And they come out with the limericks. I have to tell you this—can I tell them this one limerick?

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Patricia Smith: One student, she had been psychologically abused by her mother for years. Almost to the point of violence but not quite. And her father was just like the briefcase in the background, you know. And I said, “You ever written about that?” She said no. So the limerick she wrote—oh, the one time she thought her mother was actually going to hurt her. She wrote this limerick: “Backed into a corner I stood / She’d kill me this time, swore she would / Waving the knife / My mother, his wife / I screamed, and my father said, good.”

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (SIGH)

Patricia Smith: So I said, “Okay! You’re on the other side of the wall!” (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: “You want to keep writing?” But anyway, everybody writes the limerick. And then everybody shares what it is that they can’t write about. And then I tell them, “Okay, now we’re gonna do a process poem.” A process poem has an act, a process at its heart. So my process poem is cooking in the kitchen with my father. And it has a recipe in the center of it. You know? So it’s like if you’re teaching someone to ride a bike, you go, first you put your feet, and then you build a poem up around the process. So everybody writes a process poem, and we’re all happy. So I said, “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. I want you to write a process poem. You are outside of a room, you open the door, and the room is very cold and clinical. It’s all silver and white, and you’re not sure where you are at first, but there’s a slab in the center of the room. And you go toward the slab, and on that slab is the naked and lifeless body of the person you named as loving most in the world.”

Danez Smith: Ain’t right!

Franny Choi: I’m telling you.

Patricia Smith: “And your job is to dress them for burial.”

(AUDIENCE CHATTER AND LAUGHTER)

Patricia Smith: Yeah. And so it has to be very slow. I mean, you know, some people said, “Oh and then I put on the skirt then blouse I was done.” But it has to be, lifting the arm, it’s noticing scars, it’s men seeing their mother’s body for the first time, it’s sliding sleeves up, it’s the clothes you choose, why you chose those particular clothes. And you can go off on a tangent and talk about a time you had together, but you always have to come back to the room and complete the task. And I’ve had people say, “Oh, well I opened the door and I threw a Molotov cocktail in and everybody—”, you know. But yeah. And you know why I’m retiring it? I’m retiring it because I had done it so much that students had started to cycle around.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Like, I’d have somebody in a workshop and I’d have it all prepared and go, oh no I can’t—you know. So and it’s in a book, and I just thought, you know. But my whole thing is people say they can’t write the difficult things. And if you can write that, I think you can write anything.

(MUSIC PLAYS)

Danez Smith: Well let’s talk about you as a teacher though. I mean, me and Franny have both had you. You’re a grand and difficult teacher. One thing I’ve always appreciated about you is that since day one when I met you—I was all of 19 years old.

Patricia Smith: We go way back.

Danez Smith: Way back, way back.

Patricia Smith: 19-year-old Danez was fresh-faced.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm. I was still bisexual. It was a lot.

Patricia Smith: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: But I saw the writing on the wall.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Yeah, yeah. You know. (LAUGHS) Born a bisexual, I’ll die a lady.

Patricia Smith: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: Okay, so! One thing I’ve always appreciated about you is that no matter how much we have looked to you either as a big homie or mentor or teacher, you’ve always kind of treated us like peers, in way.

Patricia Smith: You are!

Danez Smith: But that’s like—

Franny Choi: Okay but why. How? (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) I guess, where does that come from? I don’t know, it’s so interesting to us that there isn’t this hierarchical difference. And I guess maybe the question to make it not like, “Explain why you’re nice”—

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: I guess, what do you find yourself learning from a younger generation of poets that makes you approach them in that way?

Patricia Smith: I got introduced to poetry by getting up on stage and doing it. I was very kind of not sure where my root was, and actually got introduced to the Green Mill, here in Chicago. And went to the Green Mill—

Danez Smith: Yeah, give it up for the Green Mill.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Patricia Smith: Went to the Green Mill for years and years, and it is the great equalizer, you know? You have a lot of older people, you have someone who just got out of jail for murder, you have somebody who bags groceries, you know, there was something in everyone’s life that drove them there on Sunday, to be able to tell this story to a room full of strangers. So it never occurred to me that someone else’s story was not worthy. It wasn’t that you had to be a perfect poet. It’s like, here are people who will listen to me. Sometimes something would happen nationally. I remember the Oklahoma City bombing, and everybody came there, and they all had these really kind of fevered poems that they had written that day to try to work that out. It also comes from being alive the same time Gwendolyn Brooks was alive. Who would come to readings and sit in the front and talk to students and kids as they left the stage and quote something, a line from their poem, which of course they will never forget. But realizing that I can’t just have the stories of people who are like me be legitimate stories.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: Mm.

Patricia Smith: You know, when I first met you—when I was 19, that was a very charged time where I missed the—my daddy was a storyteller, so there was this huge gap where I didn’t realize that my stories were legitimate. One of the first things that I think everybody should learn is that there are no stories that don’t count. Okay, so when I met you, you were already a poet.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Patricia Smith: You know, you were in a program, you were doing all these things, you know. But then, if I go to a grade school in Camden, New Jersey, and a kid says, “Well, I’d like to write a poem but I can’t because I don’t get good grades.” You know? “I can’t because I can’t spell.” To be able to tell them, “I’m gonna wait right here for the poem you’re going to write. And we’re gonna read it together, and then we’re gonna bring it out,” you know. So there’s always been something that someone who is not me can teach me. That’s from people who are writing their first poem to you guys. I just thought, I have my voice, but that idea of growing community and hearing something in your poems that I can admire and love and maybe fold into my signature a little bit. The whole idea of you guys come out on the stage, and it’s storytelling. And I knew that you had a great reverence for the traditional as well. And that’s what—when I was in slam, that’s the meld I wanted to see. Every time I read something, or hear something from you guys or from people who are just getting into poetry, because of you, I learn something. It’s so funny, the whole idea about hierarchy. I lost a really good friend. I had gotten invited to read in the Library of Congress with Natasha. Natasha was finishing her first term, and we thought she was leaving. So she had a thing. Luis Rodriguez, some other people. And I was like, I’m at the Library of Congress! I’m rolling around in her chair, like, “Woo! Poet Laureate,” you know.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: People are looking at me, you know, and that’s the thing, it’s just like, have fun! And so I do this reading, and I had a friend there with me. And after that reading, I guess we were all gonna go out, and she kind of started to back up, and you know. And I was like, what’s happening? And the thing was, well, you know, you have those friends now. You know, so people expect for you to become something else.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Patricia Smith: And everything’s a surprise to me. I don’t strategize, I don’t say “Oh, I wonder who’s judging this contest.” If you’re impassioned about it and you keep doing it because you’re impassioned, good stuff’s gonna happen. It just happens. That’s another thing about you guys. It’s like, we can be out, or they can be out on the dance floor.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: We could be out somewhere, let’s do this, let’s have this, I laugh, I get crazy, I love it. And there are people who are like, Patricia, she hangs out with the—. You know, as if I’m trying to like, sap youth juice from you guys or something.

Franny Choi: Take it, please.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) Youth juice.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: There’s a whole other direction this could go. And it’s like, that’s where the life is now. I mean, you guys are taking yourself so seriously, and you’re studying who’s at the top, and you know. And this is not a place for that. So I think what happens is, we waited so long. Those of us who started on stage waited so long for legitimacy, that some people still wait, and then when they get it, it’s like, well, no, I am—

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Patricia Smith: No. I’ve chosen to stay centered in this life. It means that I’m gonna stay where the life is. You know, where the people are still energized and electrified by words that come out of someone’s mouth. And they go home and they say, dammit if I can’t do that. It’s never—you know, I’ve seen people get up and say, “I am poet, you are audience. I have come to impart my—.” You know, it’s like shut the f—

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: (LAUGHS) You know, and they put the book in front of their faces and drone for 45 minutes and you are now changed.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: You know? So you’re part of the community that keeps me alive in a way.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Patricia Smith: Keeps me rooted and centered and—

Danez Smith: It keeps the work real it sounds like.

Patricia Smith: —makes me always remember not only where I came from, but why I came to this place.

Franny Choi: Mm.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: I think that it would be great to hear you read one more poem, Patricia, and then for us to move to a little game. And then we can close out.

Patricia Smith: It’s a hazing thing isn’t it?

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Patricia Smith: You know, I forgot I was gonna do another poem, so I’m gonna do this thing. Oh, is that too long?

Danez Smith: We got time!

Patricia Smith: No, it’s alright. Okay, so this is a race thing.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: A race thing? Are you Black? (LAUGHS) You know, I don’t see color, so.

Patricia Smith: I don’t see color. (LAUGHS) Okay!

Danez Smith: Everybody gray, you know.

Patricia Smith: (LAUGHS) So, when I was in Chicago—(CELL PHONE RINGS). Husband, incoming call, so what.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: He gonna listen to this later.

Patricia Smith: Okay, I want everybody to say, “Hi, Bruce!” One, two, three.

Franny Choi, Danez Smith, and audience: Hi Bruce!

Bruce: (VIA PHONE) Hi!

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: She just hung up. Amazing.

Patricia Smith: He’s like, “Hi everybody.”

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Yeah, he wants to get into a conversation now.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: Alright, so—(CELL PHONE RINGS). He’s calling back, no!

(ALL LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: So, I went to school on Milwaukee and Addison. I went to Schurz. My parents thought that they put me in a transfer program. (CELL PHONE RINGS) I’m doing a show, honey. I’ll call you back.

(ALL LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Okay! So, anyway, my parents thought—you know, there was a transfer program where you could go to a school that was outside of your neighborhood. And my parents thought, well, we’ve got to send her to a white school because they’re all good. Not! I went to a school that had a graduating class of like 800 people. And it was a bad white school. I know those exist. But I was very confused racially. Because I would get on the bus on the West Side, I’d go all the way across the city. And so I was one person on the bus, and then I had to be another person over here. So I had a guy I had a crush on, and he was white, and he had blue eyes, like all the Jesuses at church. And his name was Jimmy Connoll. So this is—is he here?

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: Please welcome Jimmy Connoll!

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: (LAUGHS) It’s like Jerry Springer, you know. Jimmy comes out and I try to strangle him.

(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: Okay.

(READS POEM)

Dear Jimmy Connoll

Dear Jimmy Connoll, who snatched an ill-fitting but culturally snug

Afro wig from my head while I stood in the chow line on a Tuesday

at roughtly 12:30 p.m. at Carl Schurz High School on the northwest

side of Chi: o.k., maybe you suspected that it was just a weirdness

plopped atop me, you couldn’t have known that the damn thing

wasn’t anchored down by bobby pins or that my real hair was flat

plaited dusty and matted beneath because that Tuesday all I cared

about was the sheen that showed, not the shameful itch beneath.

The stated color of the wig, Jet Black IA, was actually two shades

too black for me, just some cheap tangle to imitate real hair

‘cause real hair cost up in the dollars and I was just stalking the kink

anyway, the natural ignored root. Didn’t want to rattle anyone.

Dear Jimmy, I was your public personal curiosity, mantel-ready

and scrub-skinned in your presence, aching through the ritual

of Tri-Hi-Y and Latin Club, every word I spoke tilted obediently

up at the end. I was a thing with no color. But it was 1970, a year

with its stupid fist in the air, and since my hair was the only thing

I couldn’t change (yes, I still believed that pesky skin thing could

be negotiated), I surrendered to letting those naps say Negro out

loud. There it was, undeniable, shifting as I stumbled, the front

inching down my forehead, the back lifting for a flash of private

knotting, oh no, I was way too big a slice of colored, something,=

had to be done. Jimmy, how noble of you to take it upon yourself,

to slap me back to center, to staunch my wacky revolution. What

courage it took for you to confront that most formidable wrong.

Remember when yo held me in your arms? You were chaperone

at a freshman dance, and by then I was so in love with you my ribs

ached from struggling to hold that huge sin in. A downbeat,

you with arms outstretched, and I signed myself over, told myself

maybe he, maybe I, dared a maybe we, prayed me pale and pliant,

prayed you’d wash me woman with that stabbing blue Jesus gaze.

When the music stopped, your mouth touched my cheek, and I

dizzied myself writing, dreaming, building whole futures on that

blazing square of skin. Now I know you were aping the room over

my shoulder, googoo jungle mug, look ar me rocking the world

of the colored girl! Later I bet you laughed, mocked how my hips

sought yours, bubbled your perfect lips obscenely, hooted monkey.

Dear Jimmy Connoll, did you talk about it with your friends, did you

snicker and plan, did you think about the second after, whether you

would dorp the wig at my feet or run away holding it high over your

head? You held it out and I took it. And all my air became pointing

fingers, open mouths, shouts from the windows, laughing from

the floorboards, guffaws from the wiry crown uncurling in my hand.

You stood your ground, smiled sweet simply, urged me to understand.

I looked numbly at the thing that I held. Suddenly I was blacker than

I ever wasm colored all over everything, Negro was unleashed, jigaboo

came tumbling down, jungle bunny came out of hiding. My real hair

unflattened in new air, popped its day of dust and sprang corckscrews,

lending the drama its only motion. I opened my mouth to drown you

in raging, rip deep gash through the god of you. But all that came out,

stunned for all this time, were the first three words of this poem.

* * *

Danez Smith: Wow.

Franny Choi: Patricia Smith, everyone.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Patricia Smith: I could’ve read something funny!

Danez Smith: It’s fine. I’m angry now. Fuck Jimmy Connoll. I hope he does show up—

Franny Choi: Fuck Jimmy Connoll.

Patricia Smith: Don’t think I didn’t try to look his ass up, too. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: I’m not opposed to jumping people to this day.

Patricia Smith: I could’ve read something funny. Everybody’s like, okay, thank you for that, now…

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Before we move to the last portion of this event, which is playing a little game—speaking of fighting—we just wanted to ask for a quick piece of advice.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: From you to us.

Danez Smith: Mentor us.

Franny Choi: Yes, please mentor us. This is a thing that interviewer after interviewer seems to be obsessed with whenever they talk to us, which is the sort of like, question of slam. And of spoken word. It’s always like a “how do you know when you’re writing a spoken word poem versus a page poem.”

Patricia Smith: People are obsessed with that.

Franny Choi: Right!

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Patricia Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Or how do you—like, do you know how you’re gonna perform it when you write it and stuff. And just sort of like, they can’t seem to let it go. The spoken word past and present of our lives.

Patricia Smith: Yeah, yeah.

Franny Choi: I guess the question is like, what do you do with that obsession?

Patricia Smith: You know, just—oh, what was I—I was just in, was it Newcastle? It was London. Yeah.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS) Some English city.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: No I was just in the UK, and I’m trying to figure out which stop this—

Danez Smith: Flex.

Patricia Smith: It was London. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Was it London, was it Milan, I can’t remember…

(ALL LAUGH)

Danez Smith: I was lecturing at Oxford…

(ALL LAUGH)

Franny Choi: I was in Cambridge…

Patricia Smith: I got advice for you two, alright.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: Okay, so I’d done this reading, and they said, “Oh, we’re gonna talk to you afterwards.” And I swear, the guy turned to me, and I saw it in his eyes, and the first question was, “When you slam—”, which is something I haven’t done in—slam’s a competition, right?

Danez Smith: Right.

Patricia Smith: So they called slam poetry the type of poetry that used to win the competition, which just meant that you usually didn’t have the paper in front of you, you emoted, you actually looked like there was an audience out there, you know, something like that. It used to make me really angry, because I realized that slam is kind of the trendy, sexy thing.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Patricia Smith: And if you are looking for someone to come talk to your students or something like that, and they have questions, I’ve learned to kind of grit my teeth and say, okay, let’s talk about slam for a while. But it’s something you do on the way to something else. Or it should be. You know. Although I do know some people who are 50 years old who are still sleeping on people’s couches and doing pass the hat and stuff like that.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Patricia Smith: But you know, you realize, okay, this is where I decide, is this something I want to do for the rest of my life. Do I want to do poems publicly, and if so, what is the next step from here? And when I told you that I started to look at people and say, oh, there’s a whole technical aspect to this that I know nothing about, that’s where I decided to go, and just meld the two.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Patricia Smith: So what I think we all do relatively well is we know how to handle a mic, we know how to read and have a creative conversation with an audience, I know how to go into a bar where the cappuccino machine is going at full speed and I know what to do if the mic is broken, you know. But I think we need to realize and accept that it’s going through phases, but it’s always gonna be there. People are fascinated by it. As they’re fascinated by celebrity, as they’re fascinated by a lot of entertainment, you know.

Danez Smith: Mm-hmm.

Patricia Smith: And what I do is I use it as an entry point. I say that it was invaluable for me. I wouldn’t have chosen any other way to come up. I wouldn’t know the people I know. I am closer to some people in this community than to members of my own family. I mean we just all kind of grew up together. I got children who have gone into it.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Taking over the family business.

Patricia Smith: Yeah. But it can be an albatross. I tell people who are in it now, “Be prepared, you will never shake it.”

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: Hm.

Patricia Smith: If you make any kind of name for yourself while you’re doing it, that will be who you are. I remember having a couple of books out and being on my first AWP panel and being so thrilled. And so they’re going down the row, and they’re introducing, “Oh, this is Molly Peacock, blah blah blah, it’s Tom Sleigh, blah blah blah,” you know. And they get to me, and they go, “and Patricia Smith, slam poet.” And then you realize that we were first used for entertainment. We have a dead-ass panel. If we add a slam poet, people will come and you know—

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS) Truly.

Patricia Smith: You know? So we were really kind of—so you have to kind of force and say, “Thank you, I’ll be reading from my book—”

(ALL LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. I was in something one time and Billy Collins was there. He really just kind of came up to me—because I was doing the same thing he was doing. We were both teaching at this thing. And he came up to me, just confounded. He said, “I don’t know you.” And the way he said it was like, “You have not been legitimized with me.” You know, are you making money? I’m making money. If they’re looking for a way to belittle you, “Oh you’re that slam poet.”

Franny Choi: Uh-huh. Right.

Patricia Smith: “You’re that performer. Can you tell me—do you study theatre?” You know, it’s all toward performance and away from your poetry. And the best revenge ever is to just write the shit out of your poetry.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm. There you go.

Patricia Smith: Where they’re just like, you know, something blows out of their head.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: But just to make sure, yes, I can’t craft this any better than I have. I know, and to know yourself, you can’t argue with this right now.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Patricia Smith: And little by little, they’ll come to realize that there has to be a space for us, no matter where we came from. But you know, we didn’t go to Iowa, you know. We didn’t win X, X—well you’ve won all the awards, but.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: X, X, X award. I was online, I said is this negro in England?

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Winning the Forward Prize? You know, it’s like—what!

Danez Smith: But you know—

Patricia Smith: And so that’s when it happens. That’s when you know, hey, no argument here.

Danez Smith: Based on what you said, I think, you know, I feel like every time I see you I owe you a thank-you. Because if you look at the current fabric of American poetry, how much people like me and Franny and all these other folks who have started in slam and moved toward something else that is truly—it’s different than it was 10, 15, years ago.

Patricia Smith: Yeah.

Danez Smith: And any time I pinpoint it, it’s you who changed that fabric.

Franny Choi: Mm-hmm.

Danez Smith: You showed all of us who were in slam who wanted to imagine ourselves as bigger and better, or just not as one type of poet, right, you’re that map for us.

Franny Choi: Yeah.

Danez Smith: What you did, and I think you braving into it and really changing—you know, you fucked shit up! With the books that you wrote, and your quest to be a better poet, and a poet that didn’t forget about that there were real communities out there that needed poetry, you’re that map for us. I mean, I’m about to cry, but I really feel you have changed the texture and the fabric of American poetry. So I just want to thank you for being brave and opening that door for all of us.

Patricia Smith: Thank you, love.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Patricia Smith: Thank you so much.

Danez Smith: Alright, so let’s play a game. Okay, so on every episode of VS, we like to play our little game called This vs. That, where we like to put two people, places, concepts, things, you know, nouns and shit, in a battle and decide who would win in a fight. Because these motherfuckers won’t stop bringing it up in our interviews and stuff like that, we’re just gonna go ahead and invite page and stage into the forum today. So they can just go ahead and duke it out.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: But we’ll do it slightly different. We’re gonna put page and stage in three different competitions.

Franny Choi: Three rounds. Three-round slam. (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: It’s like a decathlon, a triathlon.

Franny Choi: A triathlon.

Danez Smith: Yeah, Greek, it works! Cool. Okay, so we’re gonna put page and stage into a triathlon and see who really comes out on top, once and for all. Just settle this bullshit. Okay, y’all ready?

Franny Choi: Yes.

Danez Smith: It’s participation time. Step up to the plate. Alright. Cool.

Franny Choi: So the first round is a physical fight.

Danez Smith: Yes.

Franny Choi: Who would win in a physical fight, between the stage poem and the page poem.

Danez Smith: Yeah.

Franny Choi: Not that those- I love how we like, broke down the binary, and then we’re like, okay, binary time.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Back to the binary!

Danez Smith: It’s a game, it’s a game.

Franny Choi: It’s a game. Yeah. So who would win in a physical fight, the spoken word poem, or the poem on the page.

(BELL RINGS)

Franny Choi: Make some noise if you think the spoken word poem is going to win in this fight.

(AUDIENCE CLAPS AND CHEERS)

Franny Choi: Okay, okay. And then make some noise if you think the artfully crafted page poem is winning in the fight.

(FAINT APPLAUSE)

Franny Choi: People in the MFA programs are like, yeah, please, please, maybe.

Danez Smith: Please! (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: Oh wow.

Franny Choi: Patricia?

Danez Smith: Miss Smith?

Patricia Smith: I was gonna say the page poem because it has grant money.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: Ahh!

(AUDIENCE LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: It’s got backers, got a lot of people in its corner.

Franny Choi: Yeah. Hiring a team. (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: Yeah. I think the page poem would win initially, and then after the whole show was over, out back, the spoken word poem would get it out behind the dumpster and beat its ass.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Amazing. Alright so round - Wait so who wins that round?

Danez Smith: I think it’s page.

Franny Choi: Page.

Danez Smith: Page, one. Stage, zero.

Franny Choi: Okay great. Round two. Who wins the Democratic primary nomination, between the page poem and stage poem?

(BELL RINGS)

Franny Choi: Okay so make some noise if you think the spoken word poem is the nominee for the Democratic primary.

(AUDIENCE CLAPS AND CHEERS)

Franny Choi: Okay. And make some noise if it’s page poem 2020.

(AUDIENCE CLAPS AND CHEERS)

Danez Smith: Y’all trippin’. Americans don’t read! (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Alright, Patricia who’s winning—

Danez Smith: They wanna have a beer with the spoken word poem, you know what I’m saying.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Who’s winning the Democratic primary nomination?

Patricia Smith: Yeah. See I think Biden is the page poem.

Danez Smith: Oo!

Patricia Smith: I’m gonna say the spoken word poem.

Danez Smith: Woo! Alright.

Patricia Smith: We need some chaos!

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Those straight little lines will not be getting it.

Danez Smith: Alright, we’re at one-one now.

Franny Choi: One-one. The final round is, who wins your hand in marriage?

(BELL RINGS)

Franny Choi: Make some noise if you’re marrying the spoken word poem.

(SILENCE)

Franny Choi: Damn!

(AUDIENCE CHEERS)

Franny Choi: Okay, no no no. Okay, good. And then make some noise if you’re marrying the artfully crafted page poem.

Danez Smith: Woo! (LAUGHS)

(AUDIENCE CHEERS)

Patricia Smith: Did anybody else have like, actual poets in their head?

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Because I have poets in my head, and it’s like, whoa, let’s see now.

Danez Smith: Well see my thing was, I can close a bad book, but I can’t really get out of a bad spoken word poem once it’s going. It’s hard to walk out. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Oh wow.

Patricia Smith: Oh wow. I have a poet in my head right now. Definitely a page poet.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Patricia Smith: Okay let me get a spoken word poet in my head now. You know what, when I drink, which is seldom, we play a game. It’s like, we do a men of poetry calendar.

Franny Choi: Ohh.

Danez Smith: Oh we have done this before. I’ve done this with you.

Patricia Smith: Yes. Think about that for a minute. Danez wants to be July.

Danez Smith: Naw. I just want to curate. In oil. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: Okay, I’m going to say page poet because we need a paycheck.

Danez Smith: (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Wow.

Danez Smith: Wow.

Franny Choi: Super, super real.

Patricia Smith: We need to eat.

Danez Smith: Damn.

Franny Choi: (LAUGHS)

Patricia Smith: Ramen only goes so far.

Franny Choi and Danez Smith: (LAUGH)

Danez Smith: Well, in a turn of events y’all, page poetry has won the day. (LAUGHS)

Franny Choi: Books over everything, I guess.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Danez Smith: Books sell, hats do not make the rent. Patricia, thank you so very much.

Patricia Smith: You are welcome. I can see you now—thank you all for coming!

Franny Choi: Patricia Smith, everybody.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

Patricia Smith: That was really cool. Thank you!

Danez Smith: Yeah. As you all know, this is just the very beginning of the Chicago Humanities Festival, running through November 10, so thank you one more time to Patricia and y’all have a great night.

(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)

(MUSIC PLAYS)