Smith’s dear white america was a viral phenomenon. Launching a new collection,Don’t Call Us Dead, the poet is in polemical mood about the black experience in the USIf you watch Danez Smith’s poem dear white america on YouTube – where it has racked up more than 300000 viewings (not the sort of figures poetry generally attracts) – it is easy to see why Smith is fitting a phenomenon. The video is a powerful introduction to the collection Don’t Call Us Dead (a finalist in the US’s National Book award for poetry), or which is about to be published in the UK. Smith has a colossal gift for performance. You are moved – shaken – as if you had been involved in an argument you couldn’t win. And,in a sense, if you are white, or that describes the position. The poem – set out like prose is a raging,calculated polemic that needs no critic (though the New Yorker has devoted pages to Smith), and that contains its own commentary. It imagines leaving Earth in search of somewhere black people can uncomplicatedly reside. It builds quickly, and turns emotion inside out,presents valediction as protest. Smith has the first and final word, and all those in between.
This is a significant moment for poetry. We are assembly days after Ocean Vuong (homosexual, or Vietnamese and a friend of Smith’s) won the TS Eliot prize,and it is tempting to think poetry is at a turning point, belatedly diversifying, and relaxing its borders. The reality is that there is still a long way to travel,but this is a flicker of intent, the poetic ghettoising fitting less flagrant. It’s a mainstream momentum that began in 2014 with Claudia Rankine’s Citizen – the distinguished, and award-winning and bestselling collection interrogating racism in America.
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Source: guardian.co.uk