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A list of Patricia Smith’s achievements in poetry could take up much of this interview. A poet, playwright, essayist, educator and mentor, she’s deservedly won nearly every accolade and award, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, and earlier this year she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Yet what is of equal importance is how Smith continues to combine a variety of forms, themes, and muses to create content that is singular and always significant.
Unshuttered is inspired by Smith’s collection of 19th-century portraits of Black Americans. Similar to Smith’s performative poetry, which is at the nexus of sound, language and live engagement, the pieces in Unshuttered are ekphrastic, but equally an act of revivification, providing voice for those who might have otherwise been erased from history. As ever, Smith expands our definitions of what poetry is, masterfully incorporating multiple senses and perspectives. This invocation across time is at the heart of a collection by a poet at the height of her abilities.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Mandana Chaffa
Patricia, this is an incredible project: it’s a multidimensional collaboration, almost a conjuring. Did you contemplate this undertaking when you first started compiling these photos years ago or was there a moment, a critical mass, that made it come to life for you?
Patricia Smith
At first I was simply drawn to the process of seeking out the photos—I love flea markets, estate sales, antique shops, and the hunt was intoxicating. Sometimes I’d find dozens of cabinet cards just tossed into a cardboard box in somebody’s garage; sometimes I’d find an entire album, its pages water-scarred, its velvet cover shredding, crammed with military photos or what was clearly a single family. If there were names penciled on the back of the images or beneath the frame, I became a detective, trying to trace backwards for descendants. The dream would be to return one of those albums to someone who’d been searching, or—better yet—surprise someone who didn’t even know such a family record existed.
I’ll admit that I was obsessed. I collected them everywhere I could, including eBay and antique photography sites. I eventually learned how to cull my collection, holding on to the rarer images of people with animals, with tools, people in military uniforms or religious garments, postmortem pictures, and, because I realized how few I was finding, images of African Americans.
Of course, writers—poets in particular—are often driven wild by visuals. I know I am. I couldn’t help picturing the subjects of the images breathing, sweating, loving and grieving through the time they lived in. But I didn’t realize the value of the images as a teaching tool, didn’t fully comprehend their tremendous poetic potential, until I became a faculty member at Cave Canem.
The moment everything crystallized was the moment I saw the wide range of creative responses from poets like Roger Reeves, Antoinette Brim, and others. I asked them to live with the images until they were no longer static—and I will never forget the tender, unpredictable, electric, soul-charged work that resulted. Cave Canem is continually the place that conjures miracles.
From that summer, I knew the pictures could be more than they were.
Mandana Chaffa
How did the process of each poem begin for you? Was there only one distinct narrative for each photograph?
Patricia Smith
In Unshuttered, the narratives are attached to the images—but, then again, they’re not. There is absolutely no way I could say “Here’s exactly what this person sounded like, and here’s exactly what they would say.” Instead, I thought about ways their 19th-century lives paralleled ours—the ways they grieved, professed love, wrestled with sexuality, confronted or succumbed to injustice. Other situations, linked inextricably to the era just after slavery, were distinctly different from anything we’ve experienced.
Though some of the more visually arresting images—the tintype of the two stiffly standing women, the seated mammy figure with the mustachioed white man arcing over her, the shadow-eyed servant clutching a white infant—insisted on their own narrative, the majority of poems didn’t arrive as readily. While it’s been said—quite often, actually—that the images “spoke” to me, that’s not entirely true. Each poem conjured a current—a mood, an atmosphere, a message—and that current conjured a face. I looked through the images until I found the face that came closest. Then that person lives alongside the story, and hopefully they complement each other.
Mandana Chaffa
The temporality of these poems is powerful, the feeling that by viewing these photos, we’re reaching across time. In your introduction, you call them ghosts, and I couldn’t help thinking about how many more people they represent, those who never had photographs taken, the ghosts we will never meet.
Patricia Smith
I think about this often, especially now that we’re fighting the eradication of Black history. On Goodreads, one review said “My singular complaint is that it became repetitive. I personally prefer darker work, so the consistent melancholy and trauma and bits of rage worked for me.” I realize that unrelenting trauma sells—I realize how many people will open Unshuttered expecting rage and scar and chain and bended back and screech and misery and succumbing. But for every life that was pulled apart, there was a life coming together. There were common ordinary days. There were people whose lives clicked into a regular rhythm. My God, there was laughter. So many Black folks went unheralded, unnoticed, unheard. For every one whose image was mirrored on paper, tin or glass, there were multitudes in the shadows.
I’m working on a production at Princeton about the thousands of Black women and children who simply disappeared from this country, and I’ve been feeling the same way about that project. I gaze at one woman and see hundreds.
Mandana Chaffa
I also appreciate the sharp contract of black and white photography and how this medium captures the spirit, literally and metaphysically. So too, your words reveal complex inner selves: accomplished, sexual, rageful, proud, frightened, joyful, and always, fascinating and beautiful. I’ve already asked about how the narratives came to you, but I’m also interested if you’re also a photographer? Has this altered or unleashed your own visual work?
Patricia Smith
Funny you should ask. I’ve had professional photographers compliment my eye, and I can drive myself crazy “framing” a scene or staring audaciously at the face of a stranger, intrigued by the play of light in their eyes. My husband bought me a fancy camera, light fixings and a tripod, which have remained, treasured but untouched for years. Why? First of all, writing prods me relentlessly, and whenever I’m not writing or teaching writing everything else feels pointless. Photography is its own kind of poetry, and I’m obsessed with every way there is to reach story. I find ekphrastic work is particularly thrilling, and love teaching it. Maybe when I’m more organized (ha), I’ll become the renaissance woman I picture in my head. I’d love to write poetry with my eyes.
Mandana Chaffa
I love how this project so lyrically entwines language with visual documentation, the way poetry slams connect words to performance and music. How has your video work, your performative pieces, influenced you in this creation?
Patricia Smith
This year has been particularly rewarding for me—I’ve spent a lot of time looking back at where things started, particularly my roots as a performer and poetry slammer. It was the slam that taught me both the advantages and downfalls of persona, how powerful it could be when used at the right time. I think the early days of performance and poetry competitions, particularly in the hotbed of Chicago, just nixed any pesky boundaries when it came to creation. We were experimenting with music, with video, with movement, way before most folks on the performance poetry scene. The goal was to disappear ourselves so that there was no wall between the poet and the audience. In Unshuttered, I’m trying desperately not to be there. I’m hoping the poems will draw readers directly into another time and keep them there until the last poem cuts them loose. And when they’re done, I hope they’re bewildered for a minute, stepping gingerly out of the world the book has crafted and back into their lives.
Mandana Chaffa
Have you thought about also making this into an art exhibit? I remember the magnificent Jacob Lawrence Migration Series at MoMA a number of years ago, how the work was on the wall of a large square room, so the participants could walk in an unending loop around the art and the detailed notes beneath.
Patricia Smith
This book was initially supposed to be released right around the presidential election, which almost everyone thought was an outrageous idea. Not only was Covid on the rampage, but the volatility of the political landscape gave us pause—who’d have time for poetry if we were furiously fighting the downfall of democracy? My publisher had ideas about a reading/exhibition at the Schomburg [Center for Research in Black Culture], which I thought was perfect. But maybe there was no follow-through, or maybe it was an impossibility, but it didn’t happen. I’m now working furiously to do just that, hopefully in my hometown of Chicago. And hey! I just thought of a famous photographer I know with a hookup at a ChiTown gallery! Thanks!
Mandana Chaffa
That would be outstanding!
On another note, the stylized photography of that time—the way the individuals face the camera or each other—makes me think of all the posed photos of that era. It almost suggests traditional poetic forms like sonnets and ballads and how they have been used as a friction, a hidden language, a way to express what society doesn’t allow one to do so in a straightforward manner. Within that structure there is a kind of freedom, it seems.
Patricia Smith
Initially, Unshuttered had an entirely different form. I wanted to reflect that stillness, that rigidity I saw in so many of the photos, by writing all strictly formal sonnets. And because I absolutely love form and love to challenge myself, I decided to write a massive sonnet crown. I finished that first draft of the project in residence at Civitella—but when I gave a reading of the crown, I realized that adhering to the form had drawn me into some unwanted directions, and that all the breath had been drawn from the work. So I compromised, freeing the poems by varying their forms, but hopefully still conjuring that creative friction by using the first lines of all the poems to create the concluding piece.
Mandana Chaffa
In one sense, the connection you have with these individuals and their narratives must have been thrilling, but I wonder if it were also exhausting, both for the responsibility and for the emotional wherewithal it would take to channel them so deeply.
Patricia Smith
The process wasn’t exhausting, it was exhilarating. In order to understand why, you have to glimpse a bit of my past. My mother, who moved from Aliceville, Alabama, to Chicago during the Great Migration, was utterly ashamed of being from the South. She had her sights set on being a city girl—so later, when I asked what her life was like there, she’d say, “Girl, why you wanna know about all that country stuff? We’re better than that now.” And she proceeded to shut the door on all that history, all those relatives I’d never met, all those parts of me I needed in order to know who I was. So the images I collected filled the hollow of family. I couldn’t point at lineage, but I could dream one. Sitting with all those faces spread before me, I saw that I had come from somewhere. It was less than likely that the people in the images were my actual forebears, but they surrounded me the way family would.
Mandana Chaffa
You’re an educator, a scholar, a multimedia artist, an essayist, and of course, a poet. Do you typically work on more than one project or one medium at the same time? If so, what else are you working on now?
Patricia Smith
During the pandemic, I resurrected an idea for a novel and took several online classes—only to discover that poetry is spectacular grounding for fiction! So I’m trying to carve out time for another type of writing practice, one that calls for another type of discipline. The novel is inspired by the true story of a woman who lost her two young sons during Hurricane Sandy. She screamed for help, but was ignored because she was African American and the neighborhood’s white residents assumed her screaming was simply a ploy to gain entry to their homes in order to do—well, in their minds, the bad bad things Black people are known for. The form’s hybrid and I’m stomping on quite a few rules.
I’m inspired in the wake of other poets who have written exciting, unpredictable and devastating novels and novels-in-verse—Ocean Vuong, Pia Juul, Anne Carson, Fatima Asghar, Jason Reynolds, Mahogany Browne, Vikram Seth, Elizabeth Acevedo, Robin Robertson.
POETRY
Unshuttered
By Patricia Smith
TriQuarterly Books
Published February 15, 2023
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