It is human nature to want to lock into dualities—our minds are hardwired to simplify the world when under duress. In their new collection Bluff: Poems (Graywolf Press 2024), we bear witness to Danez Smith’s lifelong, professional mission to reconcile dualities into a single, lived truth. A writer who asks as much of themselves as they do of the reader, Smith uses the full complement of their artistic toolkit in Bluff: essays, hybrid forms, wit, visual art, reportage, and an expansive empathy. It is often too much to keep asking the same people to be bold in their work, but there are never enough words to praise someone’s choice to keep being honest in public. Among other superlatives, Bluff is a test case in poetic Truth with a capital T.
During a recent summer afternoon, we spent a few hours writing to one another in a Google Doc from our respective Minnesota and Oregon homes about the nature of nature writing, how to find spiritual integrity in a writer’s life, and gay bars as sacred spaces.
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The Rumpus: It’s a million degrees in Portland. But I’ve got my patio door open and am listening to my new obsession, Jessica Pratt. I’ve had her record on repeat for the last few weeks. Who are you listening to?
Danez Smith: Lately, I’ve been listening to Kelahni’s new album, Willow’s latest, a lot of disco and house, and my weekly dose of gospel. I went to a festival yesterday and saw a great reggae cover band—shout out the International Reggae All-Stars—and I think it’s warm enough here in Minneapolis this morning to continue down that path. I’m here with the windows open, letting this humidity in. It’s the blessed season of warmth, though climate change really robbed us of winter this year.
Rumpus: Perhaps that is the perfect place to start talking about Bluff. I was really struck by “My Beautiful End of the World,” an essay that addresses, among other issues, who has access to nature and what happens when nature is imperiled by climate change. Is that subject matter that necessitated a longer form than poetry?
Smith: I wrote this book to rescue and armor something in myself but also to give tools, fuel, companionship, and hope to folks who pick these pages up. But that’s not what you asked. I wrote that essay for Atmos when the editors approached me with the pitch that included a prompt to write about “How [do] we find the light in a world that can feel so dark?” They ask such big questions that one cannot help but write an essay. I also think my relationship with poetry was pretty fraught for a time, so the essay was a place I could go play without history, or allegiance, to the form. I used to be anti-prose, for myself, as it scared the living crap out of me. But over the years, I pushed myself to say “yes” when the invitations arrived. I’ve learned how to play inside prose. I still have no clue what I’m technically doing in an essay, but that’s the fun part. I have no fear because I have no map.
Rumpus: I felt like I was discovering truths alongside the narrative voice in that piece
Smith: Sorry, but you are reading my mind, because in the essay I really wanted the reader to think alongside me. I think maybe the essay does that better than the poem, at times, allowing for thought to happen on the page and following the movement of thought from thinking to stance, to value, to statement, to question.
Rumpus: One of the “discoveries of thought” in this piece is your dawning awareness that the natural spaces of Minnesota have a profound impact on your creativity. Is that something you knew about yourself before you left for a yearlong residency in Philadelphia? That nature was an indispensable element of your creative spirit?
Smith: I didn’t! I’ve spent a cute, little bit of time in “big nature” via residencies and a little bit of traveling and hiking, but I didn’t realize how important the casual greenness of my city meant to me until then. I am looking out my window now, and it is impossible to escape the green audacity of our seasons here. I truly believe people deserve trees, grass, flowers, bees, rabbits, birds. I get angry on behalf of my former neighbors in Point Breeze [Philadelphia] when I think about how nature-bare many of those blocks are. For some, that hyper-urban, stone-and-brick might be the exact recipe for their making, or living, but I need to hear a bird in the morning. I need to have a new favorite tree to pass on my walk each month. I need to be reminded that living happens outside of human-ness. I think that is what I realized this greenery does for me: it keeps me linked to the cycles and bigness of capital “L” life. It reminds me that I exist in a world made by more than just people, which keeps my imagination porous and large.
Rumpus: My fear in this era is that people don’t understand that they are agitated spiritually, or creatively, from a loss of connection to the physical world via climate change. And that there are systems at play that determine who “deserves” nature. I think you’ve articulated a specific, subliminal experience that a lot of people have: losing connections to the natural world means activating a type of animal–human response where kindness, born out of spiritual deprivation, becomes inaccessible. Relatedly, I have this notion I’m toying with called “Safety Relativism” where people talk about why their region is going to be safest during climate change. I saw this come out in your essay, too, how the upper Midwest is going to be a good place to hunker down in the coming years. Can you talk about the duality of addressing relative climate safety against the backdrop of one’s own experience with social insecurity or danger?
Smith: Whew! That is the question. I might point us somewhere else in the book’s DNA to pull in an analogy. My grandfather, who I wrote about across all my collections up until now, was both an abuser and our beloved patriarch. My life will be spent untangling the complex mathematics it takes, and took, to love him. I felt, at any given time, the desire to heal him, love him, hurt him, kill him, protect him, banish him, etcetera etcetera. I can see myself loving and loathing my grandfather when I think about this place I live. I love my “home,” but I can hate “America.” I loved my grandfather. I hated my grandmother’s husband. Duality is all there is. Any danger that is forced upon you requires duality. If you can’t leave a violent home, what do you do to survive it? If you can’t leave your country, how do you make a life worth living in it? With climate change, I think that duality persists. How do I keep living my life when, at the same time, I/we can’t keep living this way? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they are the questions I live with. I think across my collections there has always been, at the center, a tug-of-war. In Don’t Call us Dead, there was the dual star of grief and rebellion, or maybe rage and hope. With Homie, it was grief and ecstasy. I think Bluff wants to hold hopelessness and hope, rage and caution, intense love, and also intense dissatisfaction.
Rumpus: I’m reminded of the lines in “i’m not bold, i’m fucking traumatized” where you write, “some folks in my family can’t get / that to tell my story i have to confess theirs.” As you mention above, this investigation isn’t punitive, but an exposure of love, to do better, to be safer, to be kinder, to work toward what is possible and survivable. I think this collection is all about exposure of hard truths for love and the possibility of a better way of living. I’m calling this “the nonbinary gaze” because, for some of us, we have to practice, daily, reconciling what others would call contradictions about ourselves into a harmonious truth. In Bluff, you are exposing another hard truth and doing something fairly radical as a public writer: you are investigating how your writing career has impacted your mind and spirit and how you are ready for a reconfiguration.
In “on knowledge,” you write, “my career came on an elegy’s back. / i made us media, / paid the debt with my mind.” Can you describe how your perspective has changed on sustaining yourself in the writing industry?
Smith: I think the biggest thing weighing on my mind in those poems is the capitalist ambition that a career has and how that can muddy the spirit of an artist. Also, I have to remind myself sometimes that I am very much not rich and have lower-middle class guilt that comes with having more money than I used to have, so keep that bit of salt in your back pockets, folks, when considering these answers. It was a confusing time for me when my first “big” poems—“Dear White America,” “Dinosaurs in the Hood,” and “not an elegy for Mike Brown,” which spoke of pains, hopes, and injustices—all took off in 2014 and reached a lot of people. For so long, success was defined by being able to read poems in front of more and more people. That’s still a pure, little desire in my heart, that I can write poems that move people. In that way, I am humbled to have written poems that were brought into movement spaces, to have my words written on signs for marches, shared in classrooms, given to friends. That’s the artist’s dream, I think. I am forever grateful to have that. But there was a clear uptick in “acclaim” and with the acclaim, money-centered and careerist thoughts, opportunities, and the whole nine yards that came along with it. What did I say in “less hope”?
“They clapped at my eulogies. They said encore, encore.
We wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty”
Being popular feels good, attention on your work feels good, being published feels good, money feels good and is a necessity in this world—but does the poem want applause or does the poem want to be a spell for transformation? I probably coulda talked about this with my therapist, but I wrote a book instead. I wrote this book, in some ways, to save time for another generation of poets. To say to them: Do your work and remember at the end of the day what your work is for. Sure, some folks write with no mission. I sometimes let my curiosity wander away from real-world hopes and dreams, but so much of my world has demands for me. So much of the artistic practice I was raised in—and work from—is about the capacity for art to change lives and facilitate liberation. I think the poems in Bluff are me making my way back to that foundation and clearing away the clutter I’ve accumulated along the way.
Rumpus: That mission statement, “Do your work and remember at the end of the day what your work is for,” is honored in Bluff’s cornerstone poems “Minneapolis, St. Paul” and “rondo.” I do think Bluff is going to have a massive impact, and it will be, in part, for the ways in which you made these poems.
When I first read “rondo” I felt like I was experiencing a piece of visual art. Visual, inventive form courses through this book. I want to know about the genesis for choosing to incorporate visual elements in your work. Were you in conversation with other artists? And what result did you hope for when using this approach to tackle the subject of the I-94 freeway construction project?
Danez: Douglas Kearney. Duriel E. Harris. Avery R. Young. Phillip B. Williams. Jonah Mixon-Webster. Terrance Hayes. Fatimah Asghar. Franny Choi. Courtney Faye Taylor. Alison C. Rollins. Airea D. Matthews. Isha Camara. So many brilliant poets are doing incredible work dreaming into the possibilities of form and visual fields. I feel so moved by their visual ferocity that I can’t help but feel them in the room when I work on my little picture poems. I knew “rondo” would be a form before I drafted it. I knew I wanted to confront or embrace the freeway in some way, that I wouldn’t let myself just write it down the lyric road. I needed to set a container so I could find its shape. I sat on writing that poem for a good five years before I finally had the guts and the right crumb of language pop into my head to give it a try. There have been these subtle visual plays in my books for the last few collections and I think this [book] is a slightly more robust display of those poems and little experiments. I have a lot of visually playful stuff that will never, at least now, see the light of day. I feel indebted to the poets I mentioned because I think the visual field is a way to get into the poem when words-only doesn’t allow you entry.
Rumpus: Knowing it must be written but waiting for the right convergence of awareness and capabilities is such an underrated skill in writing. Figuring out “the when” is crucial.
We also could have spent the entire interview talking about the hybrid poem-essay “Minneapolis, St. Paul.” One element that came to mind in response to this work was the duality—if we can return to that concept again of experiencing the weight of that moment unfolding in real-time as a community member and, also as a writer known for describing the contours of The Cities [Minneapolis and St. Paul] from your community’s perspective. In light of how you talked about the cost of your career, what, or who, held your allegiance in writing about George Floyd’s murder?
Smith: My allegiance was to community, to honesty, to urgency, to witness, to service. I think when writing that piece in particular, there is no time for the other anxieties that color the book. I hope that those anxieties are useful and lead to something rigorous rather than purely indulgent [or] self-deprecating when they come up, but there isn’t time for that in what that essay-poem hybrid is trying to accomplish. I think that’s why I like books so much. You can say so much across a collection. The thoughts are both individual and a constellation. It allows every poem its own mission, to need what it needs. And at the time of writing and editing, this piece had its own hesitations that were not about me, the writer.
Rumpus: Bluff also argues that the group of people who create the conditions for another’s “bravery” should not be the same people celebrating said individual’s “bravery.” I felt a respite in your poems when you celebrate the people and spaces that the uninitiated cannot touch. For instance, in “Queen Performing ‘And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going’ in a Blue Dress, Saloon Bar, Minneapolis, 07/2022” you transported me to very specific queer spaces in Minneapolis: the Saloon, Gay ’90s, the 19. It felt like an ode to the feeling queer people experience when they gather for self-celebration. I wanted to talk about this poem because I think it beautifully addresses how we love ourselves through performance and how we entertain and uplift through imperfection and play. What does the gay club mean to you?
Smith: I’m glad you connected with that poem. It’s one that sits close to my heart and one of my favorites to read, as well. Fun facts: I wrote it after coming home from the Saloon, in a big green notebook, about four tequilas deep, after I announced to my now-husband: “We have to go home so I can write a poem about this bitch!” After the little volta in the middle I said, “Ah-oh” aloud and maybe cried a little. I love me a gay club, a gay bar, and, most of all, a gay dive! The 19 burned down recently, and while it’s going to come back, I have been feeling the loss of that precious and most queer space. Gay bars are, to me, a bit of heaven. Heaven sometimes sucks, but the potential for heights of ecstasy are a little higher in a place like that. I think so much freedom happens in them. So much desire. So much drama. So much laughter. The outfits. The Queens. The gogo’s. The regulars. The crushes. The making out. The break-ups. The meetups. The bathroom. The bathroom! The special nights. Pride. My God. The bartender who is stingy and the one who pours too much. The friend who only drinks water these days. The-meet-me-at-the-bar bar, before the other bar. The horrible food. I don’t have a good answer, only praise. It was important to capture a moment where the “speaker/me/voice of the poem” had complete victory—victory in survival, hope, self, and possibility.
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Author photograph by Anna Min
