Patricia Smith is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is the author of nine books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Feb 2023); Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children’s book Janna and the Kings; and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir.
Patricia Smith’s The Intentions of Thunder is the distillation of around thirty five years of writing because “it is contrary to kill.” While Smith grew up imbibing a taste for the whiter, seemingly more dazzling parts of Detroit, her mentor Gwendolyn Brooks taught her to see the incredible marvel that was Motown (a portmanteau of motor and town, and nickname of Detroit, Michigan as well as the name of the most successful soul music label) in crafting her own voice—filled with the rhyme, alliteration and meter of African-American soul. In the following decades, Smith has become an American icon, bringing poetry to schools, nursery homes, jails, and public housing meetings. There, she breathed courage and comfort to the survivors of American catastrophes (Hurricane Katrina, Emmett Till, the Tulsa Race Massacre, mass school shootings, and the detention of immigrant children) in order to “craft a new front for everyone just once.” That new front is both American and uniquely Smith’s, who was inspired by her father (“Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah”) braiding her hair, wishing to name her “a name so odd and hot even a boy could claim it.” A trickster and wordsmith, Smith “lie[s] about magic.” “But it’s not really lying,” is it?, since the possibilities of a better world she constructs past loneliness and grief and doomed love is a real place, brimming despite the scars.
Tiffany Troy: In your last poem, “Scars Poetica,” you write that “I write because it is contrary to kill,” a sentiment echoed in “Scribe,” where you write, “And I must admit, as a fellow poet, I envy my son, this being necessary. Think about it. Which of us would refuse to try on the first face of a killer, our life teetering on every line? Wouldn’t we want to craft a new front for everyone just once, to rewrite one moment of a life story, to beg for mercy on behalf of someone who has never known life on his knees?” Looking back at your oeuvre, why do you write? What do you hope to achieve as a poet?
Patricia Smith: Writing is like a second throat. Writing is grace and permission. I write because it is becoming increasingly difficult to walk through this world without running or hiding. Writing is another landscape for language, a landscape where you can find the words to describe the impossible moment, the impossible feeling. It’s not a pastime, it’s a lifeline.
That’s how I feel now. But going through every poem I’ve ever written in order to put this book together, I found that I wrote for different reasons at different times. At first, I wrote to compete, to entertain, to take the stage and convince an audience that every outmoded idea they had about poetry was wrong.
Then I realized that there was a responsibility in the writing—that there were people outside the reach of poetry who could find solace and strength and unexpected music in the words. So I wanted to help get poetry everywhere—schools, nursery homes, jails, public housing meetings.
That eventually led to the discovery that I needed poetry even more than I loved it. The hardest thing for a poet to do is to look—really look—inward and see that poetry is the key to surviving loneliness and grief and doomed love and those times when the spirit seems to dim and disappear. If I never faced another audience or never again had anyone read something I’d written, I would still be writing and reading poetry. It’s an integral part of how I walk through the world.
For instance, consider the catastrophe this country, and everyone in it, is in right now. Poetry allows you to dream, but it doesn’t sugarcoat reality. I really don’t know how to live without it.
TT: Poetry as an imperative, as a place where dreams can take root, while also facing (rather than sugarcoating) the tough times really resonates with me. Because ultimately I feel like it’s true that poetry is necessary for life, even more than our passion for it, as fish needs water. As you mentioned, Intentions of Thunder gathers poems spanning from your debut poetry collection, Life According to Motown (1991), to new poems from 2025. Could you speak to the title and how you select the poems?
PS: Selecting the poems was perhaps one of the most difficult creative endeavors I’ve ever worked through. It’s hard to re-enter a poem and not re-enter the time and reason it was written. There was a lot of emotional rollercoastering. And I felt that my poetry improved through the years, especially after I studied prosody and form, but I had to let some weaker earlier poems stay in the mix because—well, because that’s who I was then.
In the end, I chose more poems that I should have chosen. But I have a very skilled and understanding editor who helped me see how tightly I was holding on to some pieces for purely sentimental reasons.
The title? I’m awful at titling my poems—Often I wait until just before a poem’s going to be published before I’m forced to slap a title on it. I truly envy people who come up with textured, resounding titles. And I wish I could say that months of thought went into the title for this book. But it popped right up. I used to be part of a blues band called Bop Thunderous, which I always thought would make a great title for a book. Maybe this came from that. Just what are the intentions of thunder? To frighten. To make you seek shelter. To announce violence before a cleansing rain.
TT: Your earlier poems often refer to Gwendolyn Brooks as a character and poems like the “Motown Crown” play homage to The Temps, Marvin Gaye, Smokey, Stevie Wonder and other “moons we wished upon.” Who are your literary influences over the years in the writing of socially-engaged poetry with verve and swerve?
PS: You got it right. Motown. Besides my daddy, Motown was my earliest rhyme, my earliest music, my earliest example of storytelling. I used to go to bed with that little transistor radio under the covers, with that one little earplug crammed in my ear, and I listened to WVON, Chicago’s one black station, until it signed off at night. Those songs crafted a whole world for me. It was a world of romance and downbeat, sure, but it was also a world of rhyme and alliteration and meter. I didn’t know that then, but I know it now.
Gwendolyn Brooks was the consummate Chicago colored girl. While I was looking over the tops of the buildings and streets in my neighborhood to the glitzy white downtown where I thought I wanted to be. She taught me that the place I needed to be in was where I already was—with the preachers, the grocery store baggers, the pump jockeys, the gang members, etc.
She taught me to see. To recognize and love the people who surrounded, nurtured and loved me.
TT: That listening—even before knowing the formal qualities that make Motown click—and seeing what’s surrounding you all along really comes across in this collection.
The collection showcases your mastery in poetic forms, from prose poems to received forms like sestinas and sonnet crowns, and more-recently created forms like the golden shovel. Do your poems find their way to a form or vice versa? In what way do poetry forms allow you to “take a deep breath” and “lie about magic. But it’s not really lying, because–” “– the teahouse is a real place.”
PS: Forms are magic. When a poem of mine is in a particular form, it’s for a reason. It’s because particular forms bolster particular topics. If I want to leave a reader breathless, I hold back on punctuation and stanza breaks. If I want to emphasize beauty, I write in couplets so the reader can absorb the lyricism after every second line. Poets should know how much power they wield simply by how the poem appears on the page. My poems ask me for what they need to be their strongest, to tell the story they need to tell. I choose the form that answers them.
TT: In “Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, 2012” you begin: “Her students always start their writing with I feel or I need or I think or I want or I see and she tells them to wait, wait, go out and get your hearts smashed and shattered... then come back and write the “I”.” What is the lyrical I to you? In what ways is Patricia Smith the poet “terrified but she is writing and she is not blinking”? How is it in some ways similar to the father figure singing in “Daddy Braids My Hair, 1962”?
PS: The “lyrical I” is a manic storyteller. It screams out its existence until it finds someone who will listen. That’s what my students are doing—spewing details of their lives, looking for acceptance, solace, agreement, another human who understands. We never stop believing in what the “I” has to say. But what we hear changes as we move deeper into our lives—as we experience loss and bone-numbing pain, as we betray and are betrayed, as our lofty dreams whimper shut. “Writing and not blinking” means writing through those life changes, writing when you desperately don’t want yourself out loud on the page. Writing because you have to live your live wholly, in parallel with other lives.
TT: In contrast with poems where the speaker is clearly a version of yourself, there are other poems that are clearly persona poems. The “Olive Oyl” series of poems, for instance, problematizes and humanizes the female other/muse Olive Oyl, in painting her childhood and desire between Bruno and Popeye as the cartoon replays itself. In “Mammy Two-Shoes, Rightful Owner of Tom, Addresses the Lady of the House,” you similarly turn the stereotype “I’m only simpleminded” on its head with “on cue.”
Incendiary Art, 2017 contains recurring poems titled “Emmett Till: Choose Your Own Adventure” and “Incendiary Art.” In it, “The gun said, I just had an accident” and though the videotape shows otherwise, you write, “If a blade’s not in his hand, it’s / in this hand.”
Is the performance of poetry similar in some way to the writing of persona poems, or the way in which characters in an animated film follow a designated script? What is the persona poem to you?
PS: The persona poem is one of the most exciting and unpredictable devices in the genre. It’s inherently powerful because it pushes the actual poet out of the way and unveils the voice of the poem’s subject. It’s a particularly muscular poem to perform because it strengthens the link between poet and audience.
The key to an effective performance poem is to trust in your subject’s voice and to let it lead you. Let your subject TELL YOU what he or she wants to be, see, say and believe. The answers may scare you. You may want to go in a different direction. Eventually, THE PERSONA CEASES TO BELONG TO YOU. So, no. No scripting.
TT: In “Thief of Tongues” you write: “My mother/ has never been/ on a boat.” “But fifty years ago, merely a million of her, / clutching strapped cases. Jet’s Emmett Till issue.” How do you meld the personal with the sociopolitical issues of the day and with history?
PS: There’s no deliberate way or intention to meld the two things. Writing the personal in a way that works automatically brings issues of culture and politics to the surface. It’s reminds me of this simple things I always say to my writing students. “Don’t write about the war, write about a particular war. Write about a particular battle, a particular day in that battle. A particular moment, a particular soldier. Write about the soldier, and I will know how you feel about the war.”
TT: Do you have any advice for emerging poets who “write because/ it’s contrary to kill”?
PS: I absolutely love what that line does. Nowadays I think that absolutely everyone on earth is on the verge of a blood-curdling scream. Thank God for the page. Thank God for a place to ink those screams into being. You can bring your anger, your despair, your confusion to the page. It’s much safer than actual murder. And murdering someone occurs to me several times an hour.
TT: What are you working on today?
PS: I’m working on a memoir and a novel. Actually, at this moment I’m in New Orleans at Bouchercon, a crimewriting conference, getting ideas for my very very VERY unconventional novel plot.
TT: Do you have closing thoughts for your readers of the world?
PS: Look to the news for the news. Look to poetry for the truth.