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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm really happy you're with us today. On today's show, we'll talk about the off-Broadway musical Titanique, which was recently extended through September.

If you've been wondering about the rise in popularity of Formula One racing in the US, we have an explainer. Everything you ever wanted to know about F1 racing is coming up next hour. That's our plan, so let's get this started with Clint Smith.

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Our next guest, writer Clint Smith's new poetry collection opens with a piece called All at Once, a meditation on the concurrency of joy, conflict, small moments, and big issues. Clint, would you read it for us?

Clint Smith: Absolutely. All at Once. The redwoods are on fire in California. A flood submerges a neighborhood that sat quiet on the coast for three centuries. A child takes their first steps and tumbles into a father's arms. Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow. A forest of seeds are planted in new soil. A glacier melts into the ocean and the sea climbs closer to the land.

A man comes home from war and holds his son for the first time. A man is killed by a drone that thinks his jug of water is a bomb. Your best friend relapses and isn't picking up the phone. Your son's teacher calls to say he stood up for another boy in class. A country below the equator ends a 20-year civil war. A soldier across the Atlantic fires the shot that begins another.

The scientists find a vaccine that will save millions of people's lives. Your mother's cancer has returned, and doctors say there is nothing else they can do. There is a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.

Alison Stewart: All at Once could also describe the spirit of this new book of poems titled Above Ground. It is about family, past and present. He writes about the power of the doublewide stroller and the praise heaped on fathers for doing what is simply expected of mothers. Smith's take on fatherhood is deeply romantic and knowing, and he and we, his readers, experience these moments. Smith also asked us to consider the darker corners of culture and history, gun violence, marginalization, the long legacies of institutionalized brutality. As a writer, he performs a balancing act.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His 2021 book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. He will be in conversation with fellow poet, Sarah Kay, tonight at 8:00 PM at the 92nd Street Y. Tickets are available. Clint is in studio right now. So nice to see you in person.

Clint Smith: So good to be here.

Alison Stewart: When did you know you were going to write about fatherhood?

Clint Smith: I think when, as I write in the book, fatherhood, there was a moment where I felt really uncertain. My wife and I were having fertility issues. There's a poem that I have in the book where I talk about how the doctors told us we only had a 1% chance or less than 1% chance. I'd always imagined that I would be a father over the course of my life, but there was a moment where it felt really precarious and really uncertain. Then when we did conceive, poetry for me is the act of paying attention. It's the act of creating these time capsules, these poetic archives that allow me to hold on to moments and feelings and ideas.

I wanted to use poems as a way to track the experience of feeling the excitement, the uncertainty, the nervousness of going from conception to now having an almost six-year-old and a four-year-old. I've been writing these poems over the course of the past several years.

Alison Stewart: Some of the poems are about the quotidian events of the day. One is titled Zoom School with a Toddler. One is Yesterday Afternoon, I Took You To The Park, Ode To Those First 15 Minutes After The Kids Are Finally Asleep. [laughs]

There's recognition I'm sure for many of our listeners. This is an odd question but these things are things that happen every day. You do them every day. Sometimes they lose their sparkle because you have to do them every day. When and how do you find the poetry and the daily tasks of caring for a little one?

Clint Smith: I think that poetry is everywhere, and I think that inspiration is everywhere. I think that as I said, poetry for me is the act of paying attention. It's almost like when if there's a tree in front of your house, and you walk past that tree every day, and you see it every day, and if somebody asks you to describe it, you could describe it generally the contours, the colors, but then there might be a day when you really stop and look at that tree and don't just walk past it on your commute. Don't just walk past it on your way to pick your kids up.

You look at it, maybe you have a camera and you zoom in on it, and you zoom in on a particular leaf. You see that that leaf actually has three different shades of grey. You see that it's turning yellow at the edge because the seasons are changing, and that near the stem there's a hole where a caterpillar took a bite. It allows you to see-- you're seeing the same tree you always saw, but you're seeing it with a different level of specificity, granularity intentionality. For me, that is what poetry does. Poetry forces me to stop and to excavate things with more intentionality, with more purposefulness.

I think that part of what parenthood is, it's this cliche, the days are long and the years are fast. I feel that. I watched my kindergartener bump into elementary school. I remember when I didn't think that he could talk or walk, and now he's 5 and will be 10, 15. I tried to use the poems to remind me how special and fleeting those daily quotidian moments are. Whether it be a dance party in the kitchen or making French toast with your kids, or watching them go down the slide of the park, that only is with you for a short amount of time. The poems serve as almost a reminder to me to be present for these moments as much as I can.

Alison Stewart: The shortest longest time as they say. Which brings me to the title Above Ground, and at first, people don't really know what that means, but as we read the poem, we understand that it refers to the cicadas emerging. It's an exercise in thinking about the passage in time, that was for me as a reader. It's because we have these little ones, and the next time the cicadas come out, they won't be little anymore. Why did you want to single out that poem for the name of the collection?

Clint Smith: I think it really speaks to the idea. It takes this thing, cicadas coming in, I live in Maryland, in the DMV area, and when this cicadas come, I remember this was maybe a year, a year and a half ago, and they're so loud, and their carcasses were everywhere. It was annoying, frankly. The humming and the buzz and the stepping on cicada exoskeletons everywhere you go. Then you have this moment where I was watching my kids as they walked around our lawn and at first they were scared of the cicadas because they're frightening-looking little bugs with their orange eyes.

Then they realized that they don't bite, and they started collecting the cicadas in buckets like they were treasure. It was this moment where it took this thing that I think it's so easy to just be annoyed by the hum of the cicadas, the mess they make. It took them and allowed me to see my kids interacting with them in this moment, interacting with the natural world. Then to your point, these cicadas only come above ground every 17 years. I had a moment where I realized, man, the next time these cicadas come, my kids are going to be 21 and 19. This is such a singular moment.

I will never see my children collecting cicadas and putting them in buckets again. Maybe they'll do that when they're 21 and 19 but it will be a different dynamic. Again, it's one of those things that it is an attempt to remind myself that these moments that we might otherwise not sit with, these moments that we might otherwise not even think about after they happen, that those are the moments that make parenthood what it is. It's not so much the big events. There's graduations, and there's parties and birthdays and all that. Those matter, but I think what people hold on to the most, the memories that stick with me as a kid aren't necessarily those big moments.

It's like when me and my dad went to fly kites by the lake. It's when my mom was making biscuits and let me put my hand in the dough. Those small moments. I just tried to use this collection as a way to archive them and hold onto them.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Clint Smith, the name of the book of poetry is Above Ground. Yes, it's interesting this idea of kids discovering things, and then we rediscover things by watching them discover things, or we take time to question something that we've gone past or like, oh, there's a giraffe. What are the name of the things on top of the giraffe's head? That is one of the poems. They're called ossicones. Would you read ossicones, and we can talk about it on the other side?

Clint Smith: I'd be happy to. Ossicones. My son tells me his favorite animal is the giraffe. Yesterday, it was the hippopotamus. The day before, it was the zebra. Last week, it was the beluga whale, but today, it is the giraffe. We watch videos of this tall, gangly creature, with its long neck, black eyes, and horns, unlike any horns we have seen before. My son asked, " Why the giraffe has horns?" I tell him, "I don't actually know." When I was his age, I thought that the giraffes must have had just an extra pair of ears. My son says, "Giraffes don't have four ears, daddy, that would make them aliens," and of course, he is correct. Of course, these could not be ears.

Of course, the idea of a four-year creature is reserved for extraterrestrials we imagined when we look up at the stars, but on the giraffe, they're called ossicones, that we decide to call them horns anyway. It turns out they don't do much of anything but exist as an heirloom passed down from ancestors who had more use for these protrusions of cartilage than their long-neck descendants. I look at my son and think of all the things I might try to give him that he will one day have no need for, the things that serve no function, other than being ornaments of a time that came before. The things that continue to make us who we are, long after they have served their purpose.

Alison Stewart: That's Ossicones from Clint Smith. First of all, I love giraffes, too. I collect giraffes.

Clint Smith: They're amazing animals.

Alison Stewart: They're amazing. I have, Oh boy, so many giraffe things. They also just fun fact, for later you need to pull this out for your kid, they only sleep about 30 minutes at a time and a total of about four hours.

Clint Smith: Really?

Alison Stewart: Yes.

Clint Smith: Huh, just a lot of naps.

Alison Stewart: Just a lot of naps. [chuckles] That could be useful to you, Clint.

Clint Smith: Got to learn that lesson.

Alison Stewart: Giraffes take their naps, dear child.

Clint Smith: There you go.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting because your son asked a question. Why do you think we as adults stop asking these kinds of questions?

Clint Smith: It's really unfortunate. I think we are made to feel as if we should have the answers. I think especially as parents, part of what parenthood does for I think so many of us, certainly what it's done for me, is it is incredibly humbling because you become a parent, and you're like, "Oh." Like my parents, I had no idea what they were doing, that everybody is just out here winging it.

I remember the moment they like, you go to the hospital, you have the baby. Then they give you the baby, and they say goodbye, and you put the baby in the car seat and go. I was like, "Is this it?" Like, "I don't get a book? Is there tutorials?" You figure it out. You use your community, you use a village, you use whatever resources are at your disposal. I think to your point, one of the things that I've appreciated most about having kids is that they ask the questions that adults forget we can ask, or even that we don't always give ourselves permission to ask.

There's so many things that my kids asked me, my son or my daughter, they'll ask me a question about something, like how something works. The other day, they were like how does the garbage disposal work? I was like, "Well, you press this button, and then it spins and it chops." They were like, "But how does it go from the button to the thing?" You're like, "Well, electricity--," and then they're like, "Well, how does electricity--," and then you're like, "Well, I think I can explain electricity," and then you're like, "We should look this up." It can be really refreshing I think.

Alison Stewart: Freeing.

Clint Smith: Freeing, to say like, there are so many things to ask questions about. That is I think part of what makes life what it is, the constant ability to learn about the world around you.

Alison Stewart: You're in a cohort that hopefully, knock wood, never has to have a toddler and a small child during a pandemic. You wrote a poem called Zoom School with a Toddler, which you capture this scene. What was it like for you to see your kids spend the first few years of their life living like that?

Clint Smith: When lockdown started, we had a two-year-old, and had just turned one-year-old. It was hard. It was really hard. I also have a poem in here about, Ode to the Double Stroller. That stroller, I call it Ode Reliable, just because most of the early days of the pandemic was me putting my kids in the stroller, and we would go on these like two, three, four-hour-long walks. I played a Lion King soundtrack on repeat on my phone, and we'd go, and we'd skip rocks, and we go to the park. Oh, we didn't even go to the park, because the parks were close too. We walked around-

Alison Stewart: In motion.

Clint Smith: --and played in the fields and pretended to be wizards and all sorts of things. It was tough. In those early days, they were still trying to sustain preschool on Zoom. Everybody's experience obviously is different, but it just became clear that that was a futile project for a cohort of two-year-olds. I think all the time about-- My son's in kindergarten now.

This was the reality of millions of people who had kids who were starting school, who would beginning their elementary education on a computer. Obviously, that could look a lot of different ways, but I can't imagine my son being a kindergartener on the computer all day. I have a lot of gratitude for the teachers who worked so hard to make those lessons engaging, for teachers who taught those kids how to read over Zoom.

Alison Stewart: I'm also wondering, excuse me, a thought just popped in my head, is that maybe you have such an appreciation for some of these details, because there weren't outside influences during this time of your children being very, very young, that you were in a capsule in a way. You have the opportunity to really think about bath time this way or to really think about the stroller as the zone of defense.

Clint Smith: Yes, no, that is interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way, but I think it's almost undoubtedly true. Like so many families, I think we have this moment where we realized that this is probably the most sustained time we will ever spend together for the rest of our lives. We were in the house for a month, a year and a half. In my work, I often travel, and I can imagine that.

Our lives became very routinized, and I think it did, to your point, reveal certain things, the routinization of our lives, the repetitive nature of things made me perhaps see them in ways I might not have seen them otherwise. In that way, you try to find silver linings of COVID anywhere you can, and I think that is certainly one of them.

Alison Stewart: The name of the collection is Above Ground. It is from Clint Smith. We'll have more with Clint. Well, here's more poetry after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour is Clint Smith. His new book of poetry is called Above Ground. Before we leave the area of your nuclear family, we learned a lot about your wife Ariel, through your poetry, her strength as a partner, how she could have become one of the Black women who were victims of maternal mortality, had she not spoken up for herself and demanded good care. When does she get to read these poems?

Clint Smith: I read her many of them as I write them. She hears all the bad drafts. What's true is that this book has maybe 70-something poems in it, but I write hundreds of poems to get to the 70. There's a thing that poets do sometimes called the 30 for 30, where we try to write a poem a day, every day of the month. If you successfully write 30 poems, for me, three or four of them might be good. I tell that to young writers all the time because it's so important to know that like not everything you write is going to be ready for prime time, and even those three or four, require a lot of revisions.

I say that because she hears all of them. She hears the ones that are in this book. She hears the one that should never be in this book. Then there are ones that are meant just for us, are meant just for our family, are meant just for me and my wife, are meant just in the private context of our own lives. She has helped to shepherd this book, and all of my books into existence, how the word is passed. We were editing it in those early days of COVID, and she read every single page and was an incredible first reader. Yes, I don't know what my life as a writer would look like without her.

Alison Stewart: Another theme that appears throughout the book is ancestors and lineage and roots. The poem is addressed to your son. It's about his great-grandfather. Your life is only possible because of his ability to have walked through this country on fire without turning to ash. Across generations, you touch on inherited trauma, and write, "When I speak to my son, I carry the echoes of generations of men attempting to unlearn the anger of their father's tongues in the heat of their hands."

How is writing this down and creating poems around these important issues helped you decide what you need to give to your son to take on and what can be ended? What maybe should be ended?

Clint Smith: I think all the time. I spent several years working on and writing a book about the history of slavery in this country, and how different historical sites reckon with or fail to reckon with their relationship to the history of slavery. I think all the time in my work about how the necessity of taking seriously the intergenerational violence and oppression that Black people have experienced over the course of our time in this country. That's something I talk to my children about. We have conversations about history of slavery.

Their grandmother, my wife's mother is Nigerian, so we talk about history of colonialism. We talk about the roles that those histories played in shaping what our family looks like, and shaping what the world looks like. Obviously, you do it in a developmentally appropriate way, like you do it in a way that a five-year-old and a four-year-old can make sense of. In our library, we have the books about Harriet Tubman and the books about Frederick Douglass and the books about Coretta Scott King, and Ida B. Wells.

We also have the books about the little Black boy who wants to grow up and be an engineer, and the little Black girl who wants to grow up and be a scientist, and the little Black child who wants to grow up and be a [unintelligible 00:21:53]. Because what I want for my kids is to understand the history from which they come, the history that shapes the world we live in today. Also to remember that their lives are not singularly defined.

Their histories are not singularly defined by a history of violence and oppression. That their lives are only limited by their own imaginations. I want those imaginations to feel vast and robust and limitless. I think that the thing that Black parents do, but all parents do in some ways, is to try to figure out what that balance is between giving your child the tools with which to understand the world around them. Also giving your child the wings with which to fly beyond the current confines of our world today.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to read another poem, and you've chosen, which one did we say right before the break?

Clint Smith: When People Say, “We Have Made It Through Worse Before".

When People Say, “We Have Made It Through Worse Before".

all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones

of those who did not make it, those who did not

survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who

did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.

I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms

meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to

convey that all everything ends up fine in the end. But there is no

solace in rearranging language to make a different word

tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe

does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.

Sometimes it bends in ways we don't expect & there are

people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,

do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future

to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not

live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies

that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left

standing after the war has ended. Some of us have

become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.

Alison Stewart: That is Clint Smith reading from his new book of Poetry Above Ground. There are poems in this book about big historic events. There's a poem about Katrina, The Aftermath of Katrina. There's a poem about George Floyd in a car with his child called, I'm Looking At A Photo. When did you know that you were going to juxtapose these really personal stories about you and your family, and bedtime against some of these important moments in history?

Clint Smith: I'm really interested as the first poem in the book, All at Once, in many ways serves as the thesis statement of the book. I'm really fascinated by the simultaneity of the human experience, how we march through every day carrying joy and wonder and awe alongside a sense of despair, sometimes hopelessness, catastrophe, and what it means to carry those dialectic realities together in our bodies, in our bones, in our marrow. Thinking a lot about that through the prism of parenthood.

Parenthood is this thing that shows you parts of yourself that you're really proud of. It also shows you, parts of yourself, that you might not be proud of. That frankly you might be ashamed of. In all my projects, I'm interested in holding seemingly dichotomous realities together and how the word has passed the book that came before this.

Part of what I'm thinking about is how America is a place that provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their ancestors could have never imagined, but it has also done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed. Both of those things are the story of America. It's not one over here and one over there. You get to pick this one and not pick that one.

They're both true. Part of what it means to be a citizen of this country is to recognize and to hold the complexity and totality of it. In this collection, I wanted to do that, thinking about parenthood, but also just thinking about what it means to be a person. How you can be pushing your kid in a swing at the park on a beautiful sunny day. Then get a call from someone about how a family member has a terminal illness.

How you can be sitting together with your family around the dinner table, laughing and joking and having a full meal, while there's another family halfway across the world who's spending their evening in a bomb shelter, or underground, just hoping they're going to make it to the next morning. Thinking about the personal amid the backdrop of the geopolitical or the ecological or the social is reflective of how all of us live our lives and try to make sense of having a good day. That we open our phone, and there's some catastrophic news, and how do we hold that?

Alison Stewart: You take us all the way back to Pangea when North America, Africa, South America, and Europe, we're all big one continent, and the poem asks us, or ask me. I thought to think about what if we just all stayed as one. If we didn't separate, would that be better? The voice in this poem, how does the voice of this poem feel about that idea?

Clint Smith: I think the voice in the poem is interested in the exercise of wondering how proximity shapes our empathy, and if we were more proximate to one another. If we weren't separated by oceans, if we weren't separated by borders that are just lines that people made up and drew in the sand, how would that change the way we make sense of tragedy? Why is it that?

Again, like an arbitrary line that a group of men many decades or centuries ago drew in the dirt is what determines how sad we feel for someone who has been killed or how proximate we feel to that. I'm endlessly interested in those questions of what serve as our catalysts empathy and what are the things that serve as blockades to that empathy.

Alison Stewart: In our last moment. Would you read the last poem in the book? We heard from the first, let's hear the last.

Clint Smith: I'd be happy to. Look At That Pond. Look at the fish swimming under its silver surface. Look how the surface shimmers like sound. Look how the fish follow one another, how their bodies bend like strings of harp. Look how the stone skips staccato across the surface and disappears with a whisper. Look at how the ripples in the water never seem to stop. Look at the way the colors of the fish's scales change as the sun slides across the sky. Look at the way the plants surround the pond as if they were trying to keep it safe.

One day this pond will become a swamp, and this swamp will become a marsh, and this marsh will become a forest. Maybe one day my children's children's children will walk around in this forest and find the stone we skipped. A single fish can lay over 1 million eggs in a single year, tiny plankton in bodies of water like this one produce over half the oxygen on earth. My life is made possible by trillions of tiny mysteries. I exist because of so many things that I'll never see.

Alison Stewart: Clint Smith will be at the 92nd Street Y tonight. The name of the poetry collection is Above Ground. Clint, thanks for being with us.

Clint Smith: Thank you so much.

 

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