Don't Call Us Dead

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This is one of my favorite collections for reasons I will celebrate below. It was satiating, and a testament perhaps to the leftover hunger I didn’t realize I had just consuming Instapoetry on a regular basis.

 

Danez Smith’s collection started with 2 epigraphs from a peculiar pairing of artists: one a 21st century rapper, Drake, and the other an older poet, Sonia Sanchez. Both were powerful statements about death, setting up the book titled “Don’t Call Us Dead” intriguingly.

 

The collection was made up of almost entirely couplets, and when Smith did deviate from this form, it made his words that much more powerful. I also noted that his work was entirely in lowercase letters, and that he leverages repetition of particular words and phrases to drive the acceleration of his poems, and their impact. In fact, there’s a poem where Smith uses “hands” or references to a hand 16 times.

 

The very first poem was several stanzas long, and it built to a sense of maddening anger through short repetitive phrases, and an increasingly accusatory tone. Having several stanzas like such notably allows poets to achieve such build in one poem.

 

At the start of the book. I did make peace with the fact that I wouldn’t be able to understand some poems without the help of reading 3rd party analyses. In fact, this unilateral negotiation began from the first poem. Some stanzas below:

 

“in the air & stay there. boys become new

moons, gum-dark on all sides, beg bruise

 

-blue water to fly, at least tide, at least

spit back a father or two. i won’t get started.”

 

I can’t say I understand the lines cohesively, although I’m able to extract meaning from lines themselves. Note: I now understand book clubs.

 

Smith spends a lot of time in this collection writing letters to people and things that cannot write back. There’s a poem where he presumably addresses Trayvon Martin in a letter, and later addresses lawn sprinklers. There’s another poem in which he addresses the African American community in a past lifetime, another where he writes to someone in a grave, another to his “most distant love,” and one to a ghost. There is something incredibly moving - poetic, dare i say - about writing a letter to someone, something, that can never write back. His insistence on posing rhetorical questions made it all the more devastating.

 

The power of these poems being bound in a book is that the reader can assume that several of these poems are about the same person, my hunch being Trayvon Martin for many.  

 

As I’m reading, I also start to realize that many of these poems had incredibly powerful first stanzas, and could actually stand alone as one stanza and guise as Instapoetry:

“how old am i? today, i’m today.

i’m as old as whatever light touches me.”

 

“when i want to kiss you

i kiss the ground”

 

“do you know what it’s like to live

on land who loves you back?”

 

However, Smith’s work is held to an expectation of several stanzas, and he’s thus able to pull on the hints of these words in different directions. He can create more meaning, be more productive, within a single poem.

 

Smith’s creative license went as far as to innovate his own words that, while requiring no definition, made enough sense to enhance the poem altogether.

• Unfuneral

• Gum-dark

• Wet naps

• Bloodwedding

• Bloodfuneral

 

At one point, Smith’s consistency of length comes to a halt, and you look at a near-blank page featuring a poem comprised of 1 stanza of 3 lines:

 

A love story

“he came/over

& then he left

but he stayed”

 

A surprising twist, with the similar sense of irony and brevity that I’m used to gleaning from Instapoetry. However, with “A love story” being surrounded by powerful poems about death, it creates a second layer of meaning, a more mortifying aspect of “he stayed.” My theory: how the presence of someone dead remains.

 

The beauty of this collection is that the entire collection centers on 1 topic: death. It grapples with the taking of it, the acceleration of it through AIDS, the rebirth of it, the gruesome and the beautiful sides of it. He centers on this topic so much so that on page 67, he writes,

 

“i am sick of writing this poem. / but bring the boy. his new name. / his same old body, ordinary, / black dead thing.”

 

Finally, “litany with blood all over” is a poem that will stick with me for the rest of my poetic career. Smith writes about his experience being diagnosed with HIV, and uses characters on a page to quite literally paint the intertwining of two lovers’ blood. Link here: https://lithub.com/three-new-poems-by-danez-smith/