Bluff: Poems
Danez Smith is a well-recognized poet from Minnesota. After two years of “artistic silence,” Smith comes out with Bluff, a collection of over 50 poems. With family roots in Mississippi and Georgia, Smith boldly claims in the first poem, perhaps as a prefatory note to the book: “there is no poem in the north/poems only live south of something.”
The poet experienced the murder of George Floyd in a city “filled with bees and rabbits and police everywhere you look.” For connoisseurs of poetry, knowing any poet is a gamble, a leap of faith, sheer aftertaste, so Smith warns: “you don’t even know me, i’m hanging from a dream.” Or is it “a tree”? Readers will promptly appreciate a candid admission stitched throughout the text “they keep killing me, every time/ I’m back by summer.” The mood of the poems varies but within the black box of “words in the light, /with shadows.”
Smith writes both figurative and figure poems. Creating visuals with words is figurative poetry, and using figures, such as black squares and black rectangles, to supplement the text or placing the text on the page in a way that resembles an egg or eagle is figure (pattern) poetry—an ancient practice developed by the Greeks. “they shot a man while he was/ a. handcuffed/b. walking away/ c. already dead” is as visual as seeing the knee on the neck of a dead man on the TV screen. Smith’s poem “more hope” is a beautiful figure poem where the verses rise from or descend into a heap stacked with two words, “I add.” Smith is much more effective at figurative poetry; his word-pixels create captivating pictures, but his figure poetry mostly appears contrived and manufactured.
Page after page, Smith writes protest poetry drenched with illuminating angst. The word nigga, capturing seemingly eternal black-white-white-black-black encounters, appears in quite a few poems, expressing fearful affection for the vulnerable communities in Minneapolis, Saint Paul, and elsewhere. “It happened again. This time, they did it with a knee.” But then there is guarding of Target, the store on fire, which “doesn’t have a body.” The white people, themselves “an unmemorable meal” of capitalism, are “flocking to defend the brands.” The brawl is life versus brands.
Mindful of how cops shoot black women, Smith turns to wishful prayers: “I wish a world where Black women are safe” and “my prayer: may the world be a Black girl’s cake.” These simple hopes are innocent and pessimistic. “Ask not what your country can do for you/ask if your country is your country (it’s not).” Protest poetry without sarcasm is inherently imperfect: “We buried my grandpa with an Obama button/Pinned to his lapel. Finally free. . . .”
Extending his protest poetry, Smith turns to Palestinians, listing how birds, fish, mice, cattle, wolves, horses, bats, geckos, ants, and other animals are shouting “Free Palestine,” and nature responds” “I hear your prayer.” Smith lists these and other animals because “he called them animals” and can relate to it because “having been ape, been dog/ been mongrel, cattled & culled, i knew who was my brother.” In forging this animal-to animal solidarity, “let my language be clear and dangerous as water.”
The readers smell God in Bluff, “sweet Jesus, if you God/be God.” But for Smith, God is not just Jesus. “Christ, name I was raised to pray to. / Allah, sweet lord of my father.” Perhaps imagining Somali Muslims of Minneapolis, Smith notices “men falling to their knees, heads to floor for God.”
The nature of God, however, runs into worldly complications: “I sang for my enemy, who was my God.” If God is there, prayers follow. The word “prayer” often blesses Smith’s poems, “like a first prayer or the last/prayer before the rest of your life.” When time is God, “i pray to time/ to deal with now. no, i pray for time” when God is the lord of time. Bringing out the irony of praying to God, Smith observes they fight on opposite sides, each “begging Him for victory . . . the prayers split Him” into fractions. Smith is anti-guns and anti-war, but then, what else can be the religion of poetry?
Smith also writes poetry about poetry. Questioning the valuable limits of writing poetry, poets wonder if they live productive lives. Perhaps in such a mood of self-doubt, Smith announces, “There is no poem greater than feeding someone.” Smith also ponders whether poetry engages in anthropomorphic reductionism: “the problem with poetry is humans/write it, not birds, the birds/are fascists, the fish say.” Humans love the eagle climbing down in the air, not the fish that fear for life.
The audience is poetry’s cruelest enemy when the poet withholds words to meet the audience’s expectations. Every writer experiences the readers’ tyranny, as does Smith: “this poem was so happy/before it knew it was a poem & knew/immediately the weight of audience.”
Smith realizes that protest poetry must not overwhelm the poet: “what I’m sorry for: making poetry/into a house of rebuttals.” However, the poets of vulnerable communities write from a radically different existential distress: “it doesn’t feel like a time to write/when all my muses are begging/for their lives.”
Bluff is not bookish, metaphysical, academic, or pidgin poetry. You will not need to look up words or phrases in a standard or slang dictionary. Smith writes simply with words taken from everyday speech, regular speech, from the people’s tongues, occasionally foul, often unexpected, always authentic—“my work/so undangerous, they untapped my phone/found no threat.” Poetry without splendor may not be ugly, but poetry without surprise is boring. Smith constantly stuns the reader with the way he thinks. Take this: “the children are on their way to kill us. / & we must feed the children.” Or this: “they were/so amazed & with Trump the opportunity/ for us to “finally write political poems” & it was/ like they were just now opening their eyes.”