Danez Smith’s poetry collection, Don’t Call Us Dead, finds itself at the junction of poetic genres: spoken word, “literary”, and a sprinkling of Instagram poetry. Even listing these supposedly separate categories betrays a certain bias on my part, of course, but I do think there are different ‘modes’ throughout the collection, some more successful than others.
I appreciate that the most Instagrammable poetry is the smallest portion of the collection, as I think it’s Smith’s weakest work as presented here. There’s a poem, for example, that lists circumstances in which a white boy says the n-word for a few lines and then the other half of the poem is the n-word repeated. The poem “fear of needles” reads in its entirety: “instead of getting tested / you take a blade to your palm / hold your ear to the wound” (40). The fact that the three lines are centre-justified don’t do it any favours. There are a spattering more, but the worst offender is -” a love story -”: “he came/over // & then he left // but he stayed” (43). Those poems feel like incomplete brainstorming to me. I know there’s a market out there for short pithy phrases with line breaks, but to me these are underdeveloped.
Luckily, the number of performance-based pieces and “literary” pieces significantly outnumber the Instapoems. Thematically, there are essentially two or three core ideas. Many of the poems revolve around the murder of Black boys at the hands of racist white people, and especially police. Others revolve around sex—especially in relation to current technology and apps—and then by extension Smith’s experiences contracting HIV. The best poems in the collection are able to bring issues together in an intersectional way that feels lacking in the collection overall. In :every day is a funeral & a miracle”, for example, Smith refers to both police violence and the poet’s HIV positive status. After a longer depressing piece, somewhat contradictorily, Smith writes, “look, i’m not going to manufacture / any more sadness. it happened. / it’s happening” (66). The poem continues: “America might kill me before i get the chance. / my blood is in cahoots with the law. / but today i’m alive, which is to say // i survived yesterday, spent it / ducking bullets, some / flying toward me & some / trying to rip their way out” (66). It’s one of the passages that brings together the interior and the exterior threats to Smith’s life, which gives it greater weight than the single-issue poems.
There are poems in the collection that paint an effective scene. The multi-part poem “seroconversion”, for example, develops extended metaphors in highlighting peoples’ relationships, with varying success. For whatever reason, I think Smith’s poems about sexuality and online behaviour are the most troubling and therefore most compelling. For example, “elegy with pixels & cum” is about a deceased gay porn star. It’s a disturbing piece that highlights the sexualization and dehumanization of Javier “Kid Chocolate” Brown. The piece makes me squirm in its balance of mourning and sexualization, in delving into the subject’s legacy. For instance, these lines are just brutally uncomfortable: “your mother watches you choke a man into pleasure, can’t look away, just misses her kid. / men gather in front of screens to jerk & mourn” (48). Smith tries to resist the easy judgments we might make and casts aspersions on systems designed for erasure: “i bet they had a pastor who didn’t know you do your eulogy, kid. / they turn our funerals into lessons, kid” (48). The fact that Smith continually refers to him as a kid is a further turn of the screw, offering an innocence many would see as a disconnect from his job.
In a more personal piece, Smith co-opts dating app interactions into a poem (oh, what glorious source material for found poetry!). The piece ends up a tender reflection of the loneliness and insecurities in all of us. For example, they write of “the three men who say they weigh more than 250 pounds / fill their profiles with pictures of landscapes, sunsets / write lovely sonnets about their lonely & good tongues” (32) —again a blend of the tender and the sordid. The poem juxtaposes that sweet sadness with “men with abs between their abs [who] write ask or probably not interested in you” (32) in their profiles. Smith’s speaker’s tenderheartedness is evident partway through the poem: “the boy down the street won’t stop messaging me, i keep not responding / i thought about blocking him, but i don’t want him to think i am dead” (32). That gutting consideration of others, despite such a demonstrably impersonal medium, is a beautiful kind of sadness. The poem has a sociological focus, too, where Smith documents profiles that say “No Fats, No Fems, No Blacks” —the latter even appearing on profiles of Black men. It’s a poem for a particular historical moment; it may not be one we read 500 years from now, but it is one that is is a great representation of critical conversations of today.
Stylistically, there is a mix of literary and spoken-word influences. In the poem “1 in 2”, which is a reference to the fact that the CDC estimated in 2016 that 1 in 2 black men who have sex with men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime, there’s a list-poem format often seen in spoken word, but the items are elevated by their literary quality. It reads as follows: “you went in for a routine test & they told you what you were made of: // -honey spoiled into mead / -lemon mold / -broken proofs / -traffic tickets / -unidentifiedshard / -a shy, red moon / -a book of antonyms / -the book of job / -a lost child unaware of its name” (61). I really appreciate the mixture of images here that helps to create a picture—to form an experience.
Throughout the collection, there are some oft-used tropes from performance poetry and beyond. Smith, for instance, evokes the sermon-like approach of naming newsworthy (who decides that, exactly, anyway?) murdered black boys. There are images of leather boots to connote cops and murderous oceans to connote slavery. Once in a while, Smith pulls off an incredible turn. For instance, in “dear white america”, Smith subverts claims to antiracism with a haunting turn of phrase: “i am equal parts sick of your go back to Africa & i just don’t see race. neither did the poplar tree” (25). That short sentence is such a brutal allusion that offers the perfect critique of the “i just don’t see race” line racists like to hide behind. It’s the dramatic equivalent of Trevor Noah’s gibe at Tomi Lahren’s claim that she doesn’t see colour: “What do you do at a traffic light?” In that same poem, Smith paints a scene at a black boy’s funeral: “i tried, white people. I tried to love you, but you spent my brother’s funeral masking plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones” (25). Those masterful juxtapositions are one of the highlights of Smith’s style.
At the core of Don’t Call Us Dead is somewhat of a contradiction. The title is celebratory in nature, yet the subject matter places death at the forefront. While the poems gesture toward joy, the tone is nonetheless elegiac (even though one poem is called “not an elegy”). The collection as a whole is then a little muddled tonally, despite its streamlined and focused content. It’d be nice, actually, to see more diversity in the content of the pieces, though I understand the political and sociological impulse of the work.
Ultimately, Don’t Call Us Dead has some real gems and some truly powerful moments. It also has some pieces that do not yet have a distinctive voice. It’s a bit of a mixed result and remains subject to the same challenge, sometimes, as film scripts: the words on the page need the performer to bring them to life. Seeing Smith perform would likely be the way to elevate this collection to the next level.
No comments:
Post a Comment