Danez Smith’s ‘Bluff’ Examines Violence, Pessimism, and Possibility in Modern-Day America

All of my collections come from whatever I’m writing. I don’t really go into it with a goal of writing anything in particular. Rather, at some point after I’ve been in a deep creative process, I try to gather everything, and just look at what’s going on in the work. I looked back at my writing, and I had been processing everything that happened in 2020. Being in Minneapolis in particular — this is where I was born and raised, here in the Twin Cities. Even processing that time required me to also think a lot about our past. And to think about my own personal history, our collective history in these Twin Cities, and our futures as well. I think [Bluff] is about 10 years since my first book, so I think I also had a lot of feelings in the book, because my career or my work — which is at times intertangled with my career — really took off in relation to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. I had a lot of feelings [about that] — some I process in therapy, and some in the poems. There’s a beauty in people finding truth, possibility, and a mirror for their anger and their grief and their joys in my work, but it was also something I needed to shed. So there was just a lot for me to investigate about my own relationship to art making and to poetry.

I love visual art. I think visual artists and cinematographers are sort of the closest cousins, artistically, to what poets do. So I try to visit the homes of my cousins often … One of my favorite things about bookmaking is saying, how are we going to adorn these words, and whose visual art can help propel us or can help invite the reader in? It’s really a collaboration in that way. This time, though, I didn’t have anything necessarily picked out. My one request — and this is maybe the most bookish nerd thing about me — [that] Mary Austin Speaker do the book design because she is an incredible book designer. I have always just wanted a Mary Austin Speaker-designed book. She has a brilliant eye for how to adorn books, so I really left it in Mary’s hands because I trust her so much. She was the one who actually sent me like 10 different covers that she was imagining. The middle three were all covers by Devan. I had seen his work in the wild before, but I hadn’t thought about the book as living in that sort of surreal, impossible, and textured world that Devan creates in. I was thinking something much darker, much more stark and shocking, but [Mary] saw something in my work that she saw echoed in or resonating with Devan. I’m really appreciative because I think her doing that made me see my own poems in a new way.

That was a suggestion, actually, of my editor, Jeff Shotts [executive editor and director of poetry] at Graywolf Press, and I’m grateful for his partnership and his vision and helping bring the work into the world. What it does is sets the conditions of the book really well. I think it’d be flat to say that the whole book is sort of an anti-poetry thing, because I wrote freaking 130-some pages of poetry! But I love that “anti poetica” acts as a throwing down of the gauntlet to say poetry is not art for art’s sake, but let us continue, right? There is no poem greater than feeding a child or greater than kindness. Those things are saying, sure, poetry — but how are we in each other’s lives and being there for each other?

And then “ars america,” if we take that thing, “ars” — what is the art of America? For me, it could only be an art of violence, an art of colonization, and an art of slavery. Because of the concerns of my book, that poem locates its art in the art of the slave ship, the art of slavery as a way to understand the conditions of the America the rest of the poems are speaking to. So reading those two poems, I hope, you understand what this book is about to be about — that we’re about to really wrestle with language, that we’re about to wrestle with history, that the concerns and the dreams of this book are towards the liberation of Black people, that we’re going to talk about violence, and we are going to talk about our own accountability.

I have no control. No artist has control. We can try to set whatever parameters we want, but ultimately, we have no say in who sees what in our work. And that comes with a possibility of being misrepresented, so that’s just part of the deal. I think you try to make your work as bold and as exacting as possible, so that it cannot be misused. I think Bluff is my most cutting collection. And I think with that tonality and with what my language is doing in the book, you really can’t misuse it. It’s a hard one to misconstrue. I love that poetry offers us to play around with mystery — there is such delicious slipperiness that happens in language. That’s not the project I was too interested in this time. The book is very much looking upon what has been of my career and saying maybe I could have learned a lesson from something I did. Let me ratify and solidify and transfigure how I am within this language and within this work.

And it’s not even about others, too, right? Because the poem this question comes out of it starts and ends with how Black people treat each other. The “same niggas I write poems for call me faggot and my utopia shrinks.” A lot of the guts of the poem are about these other relationships, but at the end of the day — and even in the middle of the poem — I don’t know all the Black people. And, actually, there’s some Black people I think are pretty shitty, or don’t want in my version of utopia. [laughs] I don’t think that Negro gets to come!

There’s also the need for necessary solidarities. It just can’t be about our race or gender — that is the thing that ties our Black liberation to the liberation of Palestinians. That is what ties our Black American liberation to the liberation of our brothers and sisters in Africa. That is what makes the American Negro or the American Black person understand something about the lies and violence that the Haitian community is going through right now. We are truly one. It’s what creates these solidarities between straight people and queer people, between queer people and trans people. So, we got to suss it out. There’s a lot of nuance that I think the book is trying to get to. And it’s not just about, like, let me make this for the Black people because at the end of the day, the true liberation will have to be the liberation of us all. It’s not going to happen in part. It needs to happen in tandem.

Thank you. I think one of my favorite things about writing — which has maybe become one of my favorite things about thinking — is our ability to hold two things, to hold multiple truths at once. You know, my mind is going to the movies, the Inside Out movie series — oh, [they’re] the best movies! Saw them twice and cried both times. But what’s so wonderful in those movies is when the emotions realize they have to become complex — joy and sadness can live inside of the same moment, that anxiety and joy sometimes hold hands. I think that’s what poetry, and by extension all writing, does at its best for me. So I thank you for what you said about reading “My Beautiful End of the World.” Because I think that that piece, as well as many others in the book, seeks to hold two things at once. Oh, this immense beauty, oh this immense grief, oh this immense rage, oh this immense fear. I hold all at the same time.

It was important for me to ground the collection in Minneapolis because I know no other places intimately. George Floyd’s murder was a tragedy — what Derek Chauvin and his comrades did should never happen to anyone of any color, creed, or citizenship. And what grew out of that was, I hope, a sea change that we are still in the midst of actualizing. But the language here in Minneapolis changed. Even if you think about what happened online during those times, the word “abolition” was Googled more than it ever was. People are dreaming and thinking about the future in a different way. Look at the massively different way Americans are talking about the occupation and genocide of Palestinian people compared to 10, 15, 20 years ago. Partly because of social media, which I think was a big part of the uprising in George Floyd’s memory. It also had a lot to do with the fact that it was COVID. For me, it also re-energized and reconnected me in a very deep way to Minneapolis.

We talk a lot about changing the world, right? And one thing people will often tell you is that changing the world starts with where you’re at, changing the community around you. I don’t know how to change the world. I know how to stand in solidarity with the world that knows change must happen, and I can speak a little bit more intelligently and tangibly in ways to change what I know best, which is here.

I think optimism and pessimism are both very alive in the collection and in my heart. Pessimism, I would call my sense of reality. And optimism being what can get me out of bed in order to live the day and trust that there will be something worth having in the future. My pessimism tells me that unless we do something and many different somethings across many different interventions that are necessary, The Big Apocalypse will happen sooner rather than later. I’m talking about the big one because there are little apocalypses happening all over the world. Even as me and you sit on this phone and talk about poems, somebody in Lebanon and Palestine and in the Congo is living an apocalypse. Maybe even right around the corner — we don’t know what’s happening in our neighbors’ homes. Somebody’s in their own apocalypse.

On the other hand, I think we can be of consequence in each other’s lives for the better and not just for the negative. I must be a cheerleader for that which feels like hope. I must make sure that in my own work and in my own life, I am trying to be of good consequence in the lives of the people around me. Knowing that a butterfly flaps his wings, somewhere becomes a tornado — may I not flap my little wing somewhere and cause chaos in somebody’s life, you know?

I’m not trying to say be good, as in respectability politics — that’s, I think, actually the opposite. How do we make good trouble, and how do we make good things happen in the lives of others, recognizing that we’re not always going to get it right? Part of our charge as humans, when we’re living our best life, is to make that positive stuff happen. Even if there’s certain things we can’t stop or end, we can still attend to each other …. If I only think like an American, I will only dream towards doom. So let me try to dream a little bigger, still recognizing that I’m in this death machine called America and still trying to sound a way for all of us out.