To anyone uncertain whether 2020’s summer of rupture had really come to an end, the 2024 United States presidential election produced a properly dramatic answer. As an increasingly ambitious and organized white supremacist political reorganization continues full steam ahead, the cravenness of familiar foes is once again taking center stage.
In the US literary world, which has largely ignored its own complicity during the prolonged genocide in Palestine, self-reflection is woefully scarce. Over the next four years, I want to better articulate my own failures. I want to scrutinize the motivations of my politically aligned peers with the same intention and intensity with which I’ve pathologized the architects of suffering. I hope this conversation is a model. Poet Danez Smith, from St. Paul, Minnesota, has been a cultural cornerstone during the global Black Lives Matter movements. Over the past decade, Smith has published four collections including Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), a National Book Award finalist. Their YouTube videos have amassed over a million views, making Smith arguably one of the most widely recognized Black poets of their generation.
Their newest collection of poems, Bluff, is self-possessed, politically precise, and endlessly inventive. In what feels like a critical departure from the ecstatic and elegiac work Smith is most known for, the poems that comprise Bluff were forged on the other side of a revolution that never arrived and the pandemic that did.
Bluff features some of the most formally inventive, polyvocal, and emotionally honest poems of Smith’s certain and flourishing career. Take for example, this stanza in their poem “Less Hope”:
they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore.
we wanted to stop being killed, and they thanked me for beauty
& pitifully, i loved them. i thanked them.
i took the awards and cashed the checks.
The day before Donald Trump was re-elected to the US presidency, I spoke with Danez about propaganda, family, desire, Afropessimism, their career to date, and their novel in progress.
— Jon Jon Moore Palacios, New York–based writer and poet
Jon Jon Moore Palacios: You’re thinking about a lot in this collection, including the expectations readers have of poetry and your evolving relationship with your own work. And several of the poems in the collection are about place and family. I got excited in these moments where—be it through a confessional form, narrative form, surrealism, or images—I felt like we were charting not just how we got here but how you got here, in a kind of meta way. I want to start with a specific poem from Bluff. Can you tell me a bit about “The Joke”? Is it an ars poetica?1
Danez Smith: This question clarifies for me something I didn’t even realize I was trying to do. I talk about my family ad nauseam. It is wild, I think, that that violent, complicated relationship is all of our first understandings of love—or not-love, depending on how you look at it. And here is where I learned all of what I know about being human and being American and all this other shit.
So much of my work is about the role of violence in our lives and the logics you convince yourself of in order to continue to move and exist within intimate systems predicated on violence. That could be having to make something of the place you live in or the nation you are a part of, or the schools, or the fields, or the family you are a part of.
My grandparents’ relationship was at some points filled with much care; they definitely loved their descendants. And they also suffered from living in the scripts of love and relationships that they were given, both of them coming from violent homes and repeating that. I think “The Joke” is an ars poetica because I am thinking about how to make peace with all these different froms (from America, from Minnesota, from Blackness, from this family) and with one’s own duty within a community. There’s something about my relation to my family that I’m picking up on in my role as a poet.
Jon Jon: If anyone can disappear something, I feel like it's a writer.— But if anyone can surface something—especially desire—maybe it’s also a writer. Can we talk more about the desire in your poems? One poem in Bluff that’s received much attention is “Less Hope.” This is also a poem I take really seriously. In June you told the novelist Alexander Chee how you’ve come to this understanding that not all your readers are your niggas or coconspirators.2 I think “Less Hope” is really heavy for me because the speaker is holding themselves accountable for their use of language:
snuck an ode into the elegy,
forced the dead to smile & juke,
implied America, said destroy but offered nary step nor tool.
Was there one particular moment that made you more skeptical or suspicious of the politics of your past work?
Danez: My career was sprung into another stratosphere with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Poems like “not an elegy for Mike Brown” and “Dear White America” became very important to people. In 2014 I won the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, and the McKnight Foundation Fellowship. I had more money than I’d ever had in my young, poor, Black, queer life, and it allowed me to quit my job and try to do the artist thing full time. I started touring, and I’m getting requests to perform “Dear White America” again and again. Sometimes it’s making the right people angry, but often it’s just like doing that thing where white people really need to feel bad about themselves. And I was like, “Oh, I can’t do this poem anymore.” It had been stripped of its disruptive and sort of frustrated possibilities and taken on another life of allowing white people a safe four-minute space to feel horrible about the thing done in their name. And there I was, performing anger, frustration, and fugitivity for them in a way that did not feel good. When I think about “force the dead to smile and juke, ” that’s really thinking, who is the audience? That’s the seed for “Less Hope”.
Some of the more lyrical, loving, seeking-something-soft work that I’ve done—particularly in Don’t Call Us Dead and its opening poem, “summer, somewhere”—is meant to be medicinal and, you know, a place for the Black reader. But if it’s not just Black readers buying these books, am I just putting Trayvon Martin somewhere soft and wonderful so white people can feel better about what was done to him? Something can simultaneously be medicinal and a capitalistic opportunity—maybe even without intention, but that’s going to be what it becomes.
In Bluff, I’m trying to think about complacency. Another question behind this book is: is being an artist enough? Maybe you actually need to be an activist and a revolutionary. Is it enough that I do the readings and the workshops and the protests? Why haven’t I gone to DC and chained myself to a gate somewhere? What is stopping me from doing that? Why have I not met the destructive qualities of capitalism and neo-colonialism with the destruction of my own habits and comfort?
Jon Jon: Well, you’re a writer, of course. [Laughs]
Danez: It brings us back to “The Joke.” It was my first job to make us laugh about this, and I was employed to help us make it normal. Now I’m trying to trouble the onlooker’s desire for the artist to make it normal. I want to help you see the vivid strangeness that is “normal” so that we can move against it.
I’m thinking about the work of Solmaz Sharif and her call to disturb the reader instead of comfort them. Her first collection, Look, is not interested in helping the reader arrive at a remedy, which I do think I was doing in past work, intentionally and unintentionally. When I used to think about the emotional arc of my books, I always wanted people to leave feeling hopeful or possible in some way.
In Bluff, there is no remedy here. The only remedy is the action that the poems point to, and they don’t know where the action is going to lead, but … they believe in it, I think. I want to move away from this capitalist urge to comfort the reader. I think some people deserve comfort, but not everybody. So maybe that means nobody does. [Laughs]
Jon Jon: Disturbing the reader—is this possible without disturbing yourself?
Danez: No. I think I have to disturb myself. I think writing, at its best, starts with the author surprising theirself … getting underneath what you know in order to see what is possible. You are seeking rupture, right? You are seeking to divorce yourself from what you once knew to go towards what you are coming to know, want to know, or are seeking to understand and will never know.
Jon Jon: Are there desires that you have right now as a writer that trouble you, or that you are trying to trouble?
Danez: Some art exists for art’s sake, but I really believe in writing shit that moves folks to a different position, moves them to do something in the world. This energizes and frustrates me.
I believe art is necessary to inspire and to be the catalyst, or something. I don’t think art in itself is change but I think it can be fuel for change. And fuel is a valuable resource. Maybe I’m a little more impatient and pessimistic now, though still optimistic. If I didn’t have optimism, I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. But I am so fucking frustrated with the world. I am so fucking frustrated with the vast cruelty and stupidity that are rampant in this world. And I expect to make art that helps change all that, you know? I’m like, Well, fuck it. Do I really want to make art, then? Do I need to go and do some absolute other shit?
I think I’m fine writing propaganda for the world I believe in, but there is a part of me that enjoys poetry, the art, that I need to let live. But that impulse, that pleasure, can also lead to places that obscure the very real spiritual and material hopes that I have for the art. How do I let those two things harmonize as much as possible and conflict where necessary? At the end of the day, I am trying to let that propagandist voice—the one who has the real hopes for what art can do in the world—speak a little bit louder than the voice that’s like, “Look at this cool shit I wrote!”
Jon Jon: This tension is reminding me of Fargo Tbakhi’s “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.”3 Fargo cites Look and a craft lecture Sharif gave at Hugo House in 2017,4 and toward the end of the essay he writes, “Craft is a machine to elide and foreclose political thought. This must be our constant betrayal, to know now that the lyric is not as valuable as the polemic.”
The word that comes to mind here for me is “vigilance.” How can you play with yourself knowing how scary good you are at disappearing things?
Danez: And there are aspects of craft that will let you do what my family wanted me to do in “The Joke”: to make it pretty. To try and find beauty in a space where there is none. Around the same time Bluff came together, I became a rigorous journal keeper. I realized that I needed to have a personal writing practice unrelated to publication. I think when you’re not a reflective person and you’re reflecting, it feels like violence [Laughs].
I think journaling is helping me stay vigilant. And you have to remain vigilant because you’re always changing as a person, hopefully. I hope that in ten years I’m either having more nuanced, advanced thoughts than I’m having now, or that I’ve moved on to some other shit. You never know who you might be a few years around the corner from now, right? What are the things I will agree to do or not do in order to have folks allow me to be human as much as possible?
Jon Jon: The word “Afropessimism” has been used in relation to Bluff, mostly, I think, because it is a principled observation of the present. But really it’s a school of thought resisting the really pervasive idea that antiblackness is just one form of racism among many and not a material and psychic foundation upon which the modern world is built. Zooming out: who—poets and non-poets—contributes to your thinking on Blackness right now?
Danez: I peruse the periphery of discussions on Afropessimism and find the analysis instructive or clarifying to things I also think about.
I agree that we are markedly non-human, fugitive, alien, mongrel in some type of way—in the way that the world relates itself to us. When I see a Black Republican, I see somebody who is trying to convince other people that they are human, and therefore willing to puppet and parrot self- and collective-destroying things in order to be allowed into humanness, however briefly or minimally.
If I completely submit to the tenets of Afropessimism, I ain’t gonna get out of bed in the morning, bro. I’m just not gonna survive if I don’t have something like hope. And maybe that’s me hanging onto Christianity in some way. But I got to. There’s gotta be a tomorrow where something is better. I’m also down for the fact that I might not see that tomorrow, but I gotta believe that it exists somewhere out there, or else I’ll be a doomsday prepper in my basement cellar, waiting it out.
Patricia Smith helps me see, leads me into that work. I don’t know if she considers herself an Afropessimist, but I definitely see what she does within Black storytelling that way. Dawn Lundy Martin has been instructive. Ross Gay brings me into the pessimism, but also like, trying to find some optimism, right? He has become a poet laureate of hope in a lot of ways, but that hope is informed, right? It’s not blind hope. It is hope informed by the doom of the world.
Dionne Brand. Saidiya Hartman. Christina Sharpe is a scholar who I feel very in tune with. I find her concept of wake work to be really instructive. If we will forever be living, on this side of history, in the aftermath of slavery, I think wake work is the idea that there’s still work to be done within that inevitability. It could be instructive for how to unlock ourselves from those inevitabilities of an anti-Black world and the end of the world and to move towards something that feels actionable and drivable. I feel like I can do something with my hands when I get in there.
I love Afropessimism because it helps me understand the world, but it doesn’t help me. I need more actionable or optimistic frameworks in which to maneuver around there and not feel stunted where I am. It doesn’t help me do, it helps me see.
Jon Jon: That’s right. It pours the cup—“your integration will not be successful, your vote is a joke”—but it doesn’t help you swallow it or spit it out. It doesn’t offer you a protocol for what to do with the information it provides. When I was in graduate school, I still thought I could live it which is crazy because the first idea, to me, is: you didn’t survive the creation of this iteration of the world, silly. And you won’t survive the end of it. But you will experience … this.
Danez: Back to the emotional arcs that are present in this collection—it would be so easy for me to write poems that are about witnessing the horror of the world. But I don’t want myself, my thinking, nor my readers, to be stuck there. Maybe where I’ve settled is, like, afroambivalence.
Jon Jon: That’s funny because I told a friend that reading Bluff felt like reading a time capsule of your present. These speakers are so fucking ambivalent, but their ambivalence is not the performative kind—like saying “I’m going to vote for genocide but not because I want to,” which conceals a commitment to party and nation and antiblackness and fill-in-the-blank—but rather this personal ambivalence of, “If it’s me with the gun, am I shooting back? If it’s me in the White House, am I letting my people out?”
Danez: If the world’s got to end, it’s going to end. But I’m down to not end it if y’all down, too. [Laughs]
Jon Jon: I know what you want your poems to do, and I know that you’re still writing them. You’re working on a novel right now. What kind of novel is interesting to you? What’s tea?
Danez: I am luxuriating. I’m taking my time and allowing myself to be indulgent and tangential. It’s exciting to lose the focus that poems require. It’s so nice to be able to turn things over again and again.
I’m less interested in a novel with a juicy plot. I just love seeing how people are. I think that’s where my novel, as it stands, is most delighting to me. How is this person? How did they become this way? How does it make them relate to the world and the time and the people happening around them? It’s exciting to think a mother’s thoughts or a father’s or a grandfather’s thoughts… It’s making me more empathetic. When you have to embody the mind of somebody violent, it’s not so simple as making them relish in the evil of it all. I have to find the part of them that is human.
Jon Jon: When you say human, is this the same as finding the part of them that is a part of you?
Danez: So far, no—it’s finding what in them is still malleable, you know? I think when people show up in our lives, they feel so concrete because of how we experience them, but they’re just as wobbly and unsure as we are. Especially if someone is a force of violence in your life—in my experience, that feels so concrete. But I think for all of us, our hardest actions are born in some soft part of us. Maybe not. But this process is really forcing me to be human in these ways that I am not … so these characters can feel real, at the end of the day.
Jon Jon: Thank you for this book.
Danez: Thank you for being so insightful. Love ya.
Jon Jon: Love ya.
1. An ars poetica is a poem or text that uses the form and techniques of poetry to examine the “art of poetry,” the role of poets themselves as subjects, their relationships to the poem, and/or the act of writing.
2. Danez Smith, “Danez Smith by Alexander Chee,” interview by Alexander Chee, BOMB, June 14, 2024, bombmagazine.org.
3. Fargo Tbakhi, “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” Protean Magazine, April 13, 2024, proteanmag.com.
4. Hugo House, “Hugo Literary Series: Meghan Daum, Solmaz Sharif, Sonora Jha, and Joy Mills,” YouTube, September 27, 2017.