the end of the world
is a desire of the world
what type of end do you desire?
—Sun Ra, “The End”
What kind of end do our dead desire? I wish I could ask them myself. To be awake means to be in grief. In Gaza children dig through dirt for American pasta dropped in parachutes, over 40,000 dead. In Congo, over 5.8 million displaced. In Sudan over 25 million trapped in a spiral of food insecurity. A boy was shot for holding a garden tool. Today would have been my best friend’s 22nd birthday. These griefs are massive, enormous, and they must continue: Martyrdom as infinite clause. When I wrote a letter to Allah at 7 with no response back, poetry became a way to cope with the uncertainty of the afterlife.
Now I think of poetry as potential for the divine to vessel answers. This last Ramadan felt different, there were more stakes to our fasts, more tears in our prayers. The crescent moon dictates the month worship works harder, and it is also a time when the need for poetry is even stronger. When the bridge between here and hereafter is as thin as a thread. What is the bridge between God and divine silence, between the blank page and the dead, but our most condensed and precise language? Poetry is but one of the few simple tools that can juxtapose the fluxed positionality of helplessness and power, of the potential and privilege to be able to write anything at all. When I ask my dead what I can do to bring them back, the only answer I have for them is my most precise and most reliable form: poetry. This grief is encompassable, unimaginable so instead, “you rely on the poem’s failure to deliver the magnitude of loss.”1 Danez Smith’s Bluff is a book we can depend on to bear the weight.
Smith is a poet our community has relied on for years to answer our most unyielding questions. Walking into a poetry workshop at Brave New Voices International Slam Competition at 16, I saw Danez for the first time. Our team in St. Louis had planned choreographed outfits with around three outfit changes a day. That day’s outfit was monochrome and I was assigned the color green. Danez was also wearing a green striped shirt with a gold chain, for me of course. The room was silent, every word they spoke held to a reverential regard. A talk of legends. It was in their books, their slam videos on Button Poetry, that we as young poets from St. Louis remembered “why we wrote it” and were propelled into the corridors of the writing left to be done. Smith’s Bluff is a collection that we all need to seed, swallow, and spit. With gentle and generous hands, they guide us back to the only home we might ever know: the page. A home like any other home that is familiar but not kind, holding starkly both our most familiar and uncomfortable pasts. The poems in this collection address poetry for what it is, both crucial and useless, seismically subject-altering yet a fundamentally stagnant praxis. Bluff addresses the paradox of being a parable and parody of the poetic enterprise.
The poem, “i’m not bold i’m fucking traumatized” goes,
“the problem with being a poet is the line
so thin it’s not a line between your history (personal)
becomes your history (collective)”
I’ll add here that the problem with being a good* poet is that the poem’s proximity to the inarticulable truth almost always enacts an exodus of the personal, which then becomes the collective’s devout word. For queer communities of color it was in poems like Smith’s iconic Button Poetry poem “Genesissy,” that heaven was finally ours. Outside of St. Louis Smith became an international phenomenon, inviting everyone in the room to articulate a collective grief and joy. With any great artist comes a band of followers who crave the poetic potential of their articulations, and with that, a parody of the original word: unintentional mimicry that theatrically presents itself to white audiences to pimp a poetry slam for the 30. Everyone in and around slam poetry knows the scoresheet of tropes and clichés of the white poetry slam judge which is no different from that of a present-day journal editor. However it is those few poets who write with an original voice, who reject the notions of audience, that are able to touch divine truth.
In the age of experimental contemporary poetry, we are seeing the expansion of visual imagery in the potential of the blank space of the page. Sometimes I feel the use of these forms can be a bit unintentional and/or lacking in purpose. The beauty and aesthetic of queer people of color is something the white spectacle can easily bathe in. Buzzwords and images of violence play well to the white-led masthead, but what do they do for the community they are writing for besides decorate the dinner table? Smith uses experimental forms to do what Amiri Baraka describes as Afro-Surrealist: “…stories of real life, now or whenever, constructed in weirdness and poetry in which the contemporaneity of essential themes is clear.”2 Bluff builds a cage of knowledge inside a matryoshka doll of happening: at once we are in love, the people we love die, and the world continues to burn—
“joy is not the antidote to suffering
it happens inside it”
Smith reminds us that the poem is still a border where the state actively works, a cage that has limits, and can just as easily be intentionally restricted. What does a poem being gentrified look like? In the poem rondo, the construction of an interstate, personified as a thick black line running through five pages, rails down St. Paul, Minnesota. As you read you travel down the highway, offshoots like street signs remember the places and the people who once lived there. The reader must resort to footnotes to remember what was lost. The displacement of a community is felt through language’s visual potential. I know where I am before I read the poem. The forms in this collection do not decorate the poems, they home them. Contemporary poetry sees new potential. This is when the contemporary poem becomes not just an insight into the creative imagination, but also a visualization for those who rely on memory to geographically place a denied history. When all we have is an outline of our past, who dares to remember for us? This exploration of form is one of geography, land, and language. In “Two Deer in a Southside Cemetery”:
“so why are we in the cage?
because we need to survive.
why do we need to be in the cage to survive?
because they will make use of us
if they don’t find us beautiful.”
The collection addresses our lyrical entrapment without ever limiting us to seductive narratives. Are we capable of building borders within our borders? To kill the state within us? What if this collection is the first to address and rehome this fateless word? Smith takes leaps in our formal education by glitching the sonnet, locating it on 14 different planes, 14 different x- and y-axes. Axes which are both open to time and space, resisting the cage form of the sonnet, allowing for 14 different openings, 14 different intersections. What will break the institutions within our poetic forms? Smith tries water, howl, and want, demanding us to look at the face that reflects in the black box of the page. In “sonnet”:
“they told me my leash was beautiful
so i loved the leash”
Smith confronts “ars poetica” and plays with alternatives: anti poetica and ars america. One of the most famous examples of meditations on poetry is Archibald Macleish’s poem “Ars Poetica,” which ends, “A poem should not mean/But be.”3 The “anti-poet” Nincanor Parra used language that was not emotionally congruous with the subject matter but was able to highlight the tension between the connotative and the denotative.4 There are ways to play with the idea of poetry working both as enforced and receding action, so that when a poem is written, it never stops coming into being. The gears of the poem can work forward or backward, playing with future and past. What does this mean for our dead? Slam poetry proves that poetry is a verb and that the inaction of lyric is a permanent stake in the air that tries to claim us. If we write about the dead, do they survive as long as the poem? The second anti poetica poem in the collection goes—
“nothing radical in being the america’s enemy”
What is the impact of a poem when our mere being is militarized by the state but the radical assertion that what is happening is real, that the violence is as true as a poem. Smith grounds us in their second ars poetica piece, a love poem, to the religion of belief that the community of poetry enacts. The poem stakes that we are all here to bear witness to the world and in each other’s poems we find the pen of more certain Gods. The paradox of righteousness of what it is to mean and what it is to be is wrestled with through the collection. There is a confident kind of insecurity that permeates these poems—a real voice that plagues us all, lying beneath the decorated voice: Smith’s voice is the one we are all too afraid to say out loud.
At the same university Smith attended 17 years ago, I now argue with professors whether art is political. When I’m too tired to argue with them, I point at history, at writers from my country whose hands were cut at the wrists for writing about partition. I point at Smith, I point at “Minneapolis, St. Paul”:
“if the cops kill me
don’t grab your pen
before you find
your matches”
Poetry may not be a verb but it is the fire under our seats that gives our language urgency. What do poems really do in the face of atrocity? In “less hope”:
“when they aren’t
killing you, they’re killing someone else.”
and in “it doesn’t feel like a time to write”:
“poems feel so small right now
my little machines fail me”
Smith is not afraid to call out the size of language, however small it may be. Somehow it must honor the moment and its memory. In “volta”:
“my most docile and stunted
weapons rounded into words”
Poetry as our strongest weapon can feel rather pathetic in the face of unexplainable and unwritable violence. The first step to the radicalization of our imaginations is to address the size of the language in our lives. Smith spits these poems on the rooftops of our “secure” homes, reminding us that the terror of the world is right at our doorstep and the first thing we can do is call it for what it is. The line between decoration and demand is rather small. How can we charge a beautiful poem with radical action? First by pulling the reader out of themselves into a world of invented creative space. Smith writes so good it makes you look up from the page after reading to look imaginary Smith in the face, roll your eyes and say, “Gurl this poem ate.” In “big head”:
“& i got a woman
hanging on each lash.
if you love them
unnoose them from my stare”
and
“a bullet to the skull
couldn’t tickle my dreams”
I want to say to them: “Sheesh. Your language humbles me. It stunts my ego, makes me recheck my audience, the applause, you make me remember why we wrote it.” What we need is to be shaken up, rattled by our dumbness, by our privilege, by our tools. Smith is a writer for the writers and is who a lot of us owe our creative freedom to. Don’t bluff yourself when reading this book, and if you do, Smith will do what all great Aunties do when you’re heartbroken: remind you of your place.
***
Diya Abbas is a first-generation Pakistani poet from the Midwest. Her poems are featured or forthcoming in RHINO, Foglifter, Adroit, diode, The Offing, and others. She is currently studying English and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison through the First Wave program. Find more of their work at diyabbas.com.
References:
- AAWW This Is Not the Dawn: Poetry of Partition
- Henry Dumas: Afro-Surreal Expressionist, Amiri Baraka
- “Ars Poetica,” by Archibald Macleish
- THE TECHNIQUE OF ANTIPOETRY, Nincanor Parra
