Poetry of Clint Smith in "Counting Descent"

Before Clint Smith III was staff writer for The Atlantic, best-selling author, and go-to guest for public affairs media, he was a poet and a teacher. So he started his collection Counting Descent (Los Angeles: Write Bloody, 2016) with a poem titled "Something You Should Know," a teacher's clue that what follows is the key to everything else.

Smith wants us to know something he learned about himself as a kid cleaning cages in a pet shop. He identified with the hermit crab that would outgrow its skin and scurry to find another shell for protection. He learned not to depend on "anything beyond myself" ("Something You Should Know" 2).

He adds "Perhaps"

...that is why, even now, I want so desperately
to show you all my skin, but am more afraid
of meeting you, exposed, in open water.

While Smith often exposes tender skin in this collection, sometimes his subject is the shell: Words, novels, and poetry. Remembering how he won spelling-bees by outlining the letters in air with his fingers, he reflects that "words were the only / way I ever knew how to fight" against "those who would rather / make an outline out of me" ("How to Fight" 33). Does he mean a chalk outline of a body on pavement? Or does he mean those who instantly make assumptions when they see his skin?

He means both. Allusions to dead black bodies rise up in some poems on innocent subjects. Before he gets to a truly joyous celebration of girls at play, the poet promises "jumping rope" will not become "a metaphor / for dodging bullets," ("No More Elegies Today" 56). A toddler on a slide raising his hands in glee brings to mind raising hands under arrest ("Playground Elegy" 26). A fire hydrant, personified, cautions a black boy to remember how hydrants were weaponized in Birmingham, and how other people "open us / spilling" on the street ("what the fire hydrant said to the black boy" 20). Warnings mix with comfort in what other ordinary things "say" to a black boy: the ocean (10), cicadas (18), and a cathedral (69). Being pulled over by the police reminds him of swimming because "I don't remember the last time police / sirens didn't feel like gasping for air." ("For the Boys Who Never Learned How to Swim" 40, published four years before "I can't breathe" became a national slogan.) For Smith, at least, who was teaching where kids did come to class talking of shootings in their neighborhoods, a sense of the contingency of life is very close to the surface; because I rarely have that sense, it's something a reader like me needs to know to understand him.

How he can feel "outlined" by others' expectations comes out in "Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class."

If you are successful
it is because of affirmative action.
If you fail it is because
you were destined to. (27)

The kid will be expected to be an expert on Black History, a "hip hop lyricologist" and "presumed athlete."

Smith talks trash about his own athletic prowess when he writes "My jump shot be / all elbow and no wrist," "hard to look at," and "getting picked last by the other jump shots" ("My Jump Shot" 15). Smith has taught teens and inmates, and I'll remember fondly how this poem taught my seventh graders a lesson. When, reading aloud, we reached the lines, "My jump shot be / spending too much time in the library" and "getting asked to speak on behalf of the other jump shots," they knew we weren't in a gym anymore. A student smiled, "At the start the jump shot is about basketball, but by the end it's about what makes him him."

Smith's tenderness shows, with humor, in many poems of joy. He describes a young athlete's cleats digging in soil, "black / streaks airborne / cascading into the jubilant wake / of the child" ("The Boy and His Ball" 12). An elderly couple dances after dinner, even after the music stops ("When Maze and Frankie Beverly Come on in My House" 31). At an art museum, the poet's attention slips from an "impossibly beautiful" object to how in the morning he'll make pancakes for his impossibly beautiful partner still in bed -- "but maybe I'm getting / ahead of myself" and he snaps back to attention, not for long ("An Evening at the Louvre" 57). Even in a prison's classroom behind phalanxes of metal, concrete, mechanical doors and coils of barbed wire -- human guards subsumed in his description of the machinery of the place -- Smith describes the men with loving individual details and tells how each word they write for their families "provides the sort of freedom a parole board can never grant" ("Beyond This Place" 41).

Poems in this collection rarely look alike on the page. A block of print, a set of short stanzas, a dialogue of call-and-response, a numbered list: he's trying things out. Smith helped me to teach the kids that how you write enhances what you write.

Their favorite was "Chaos Theory." It's about the "butterfly effect," known to geeky fans of time-travel fiction as the premise that altering history changes everything that follows, even if it's just a change in the flight of a butterfly. The poet asks, "do you think / we would have met" (54)? He speculates, "maybe you would have been a tortoise and I would be a raspberry." That line broke down the kids' reserve. A student volunteered, "I know this is weird, but, I think it's a love poem." Yes! Once someone said that, all the other students were jumping in to show how everything else in the poem, even its breathless nonstop meandering form, added to the effect.

Smith's afraid of being profiled as a poet, too, afraid people reading him will "roll their eyes" at "another black poem" ("Queries of Unrest" 68). But his poems give this reader a wide range of experiences and feelings, some of which strike me as familiar and fun to recognize, and some of which are new to me; it's a good mix of what I love to know in a new way and what I should know.

I responded to Clint Smith's second collection of poetry, Above Ground. See My Dinner with Clint Smith.

Read my response to an article by Clint Smith, Bringing "That Slavery Thing" Out of the Archives (02/2021).