Clinton Smith is an avid reader and writer with a cheerful personality. While transitioning from teacher to a student, he still makes spoken word the balance in his life. He is currently getting his PhD. in Education at Harvard University. Blavity’s newest series in partnership with Button Poetry focuses on learning about the spoken word artist behind the mic.  We pick a poem and then reach out to the creator to hear the story behind it.

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How did you get interested in Spoken Word?

In the summer of 2008, before my junior year of college, I had an internship in New York City working for a publishing company in Manhattan. One Friday night, one of my work colleagues invited some of us to see her friend perform at a poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poetry Café. I had never heard of a poetry slam or of this Nuyorican place, and at that point in my life didn’t consider myself much of a connoisseur of the arts, so I was a bit reluctant. Ultimately, I decided to attend and it ended up being one of the most transformative evenings of my life. Firstly, there’s this sort of ineffable magic that permeates the atmosphere of the Nuyorican. You step inside and you’re immediately consumed with the feeling that you’re coming home to see old friends. It’s certainly a testament to Mo Browne as host and curator, and the culture of love, honesty, and vulnerability that she has fostered in that space over the years. As soon as they started off the slam by playing Bel Biv Devoe’s Poison I knew it was a wrap!

The poetry I heard that evening moved me in a way that no other art form ever had. It elicited this visceral emotional response that I had never experienced. It’s an incredible feeling, I think, to step into a room thinking about the world in one way, and to leave that same evening having your thinking transformed – to now imagine something beyond the context of your own reality in a way you didn’t know was possible. I think that’s the role of art, honestly – to push us beyond what we know, or even beyond the possibilities of what we thought we knew.

So at that point my world was shaken up and although I had never performed a poem before in my life, I knew that this was something I wanted to do and be a part of. So I went home that night and started writing.

How was your writing when you first started?

Pretty awful! Well, to be fair, I’ve always loved writing. My home was full of books, and my mom had a particular affinity for encyclopedias. Whenever I had a question about something, she would point to the bookshelf and say “Look it up, honey.” So I think in some way reading and writing have always been associated with the notion of discovery – of engaging in the constant process of learning things about yourself and the world. All that to say, when I was younger I used to write as a means of asking questions about the world around me. Journal entries, short stories, poems. In fact in third grade, I wrote in our yearbook that I wanted to grow up to be a Newberry Award Winning author.

My introduction to the stage was a slow and by no means smooth process. I’m a pretty awkward guy, and public speaking has never been my forte. So the idea of standing in front of a group of people and talking about some of the deepest and most vulnerable parts of myself was pretty disconcerting. I was also trying to find my own voice, and struggled at first with presenting my most authentic self, rather than this myopic idea of what performance poetry was supposed to look or sound like. But I was fortunate to attend a small, liberal arts college where my peers and professors encouraged us to explore new frontiers of ourselves, so I was constantly reminded that it was okay not to be very good at first and just to enjoy to process of immersing myself in something that completely new and unfamiliar.

Do you still get nervous when you perform?

Oh, every time! But that reminds me that I’m still so excited to do this work. I’d be concerned if I wasn’t getting nervous. It means that I’m still creating work that feels honest and urgent.

What topics are you passionate about performing?

I don’t necessarily know that there’s a topic I’m particularly passionate about per se. I think I try to write poems about identity, justice, family, education, love and what it means to keep our shared humanity at the center of those conversations. Whether I’m talking about the implications of immigration policy on my students, or about how wonderful, and frightening, and difficult it is to be in love with another person. The writer Jonathan Franzen has this quote where he says, “Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are.” I think if I wanted my work to have a thesis statement that would be it. I want a deep sense of empathy and love for our shared humanity to be at the center the work I create.  The question I always ask myself is how can I create work that will constantly push both me and my audience to think of the world beyond ourselves? Because ultimately that’s what empathy is.

What kind of creative patterns, routines or rituals do you have when creating a new poem?

There really isn’t a consistent process. Each poem experiences its own unique conception. Some of them start on napkins, in iPhone notes, or in the margins of my statistics homework. Some start as a concept, some start as a single line, some start as a question. That’s not to say, however, that I don’t believe in creating a time and space for structured writing time, I think that’s hugely important. I also think having accountability partners is helpful. I have a collective of poets, who are also some of my best friends, and we stay on top of one another to make sure that we’re pushing each other to write consistently.

If you had to pick a poem of yours, that’s your favorite- which would it be?

I think the poem I feel closest to is My Father is an Oyster. My dad has struggled with chronic kidney disease for the past decade, experiencing the slow, daily torment of dialysis and having undergone two kidney transplants. When he was in the hospital after his second transplant, there was a period when things weren’t looking great, and I wanted a way to explore and reflect on my relationship with him. As I mentioned before, writing is a way to explore the unknown parts of myself and ask the questions that don’t always have easy answers. I ended up creating this piece that uses what ended up being an unexpected extended metaphor to dive into the man my father has been to me for the past quarter century. The first time I read it, was in the hospital room with my dad, mom, brother, and sister.  That was the hardest reading of a poem I’ve ever done in my life, but it was certainly the most meaningful.

Who is your favorite poet that we wouldn’t have heard about? What is your favorite work by them?

That’s a really tough question. I think the person that played the most important role in my decision to become a poet was Terrance Hayes, who just actually won a Macarthur Genius Fellowship, which is an amazing tribute to his body of work. I was introduced to his writing in college and it pushed me to reimagine what black masculinity looked like in literary spaces, which was something I had been struggling with as I was trying to find my own voice. Lines like this one from Cocktails with Orpheus illustrate his brilliance:

I want to be a human above the body, uprooted and right, a fold

of pleas released, but I am a black wound, what’s left of the deed.

What are your plans five years from now?

I hope to be finishing up my Ph.D. here at Harvard and transitioning into whatever comes next. Ultimately, I just wanted to continue to grow – to be a better writer, a better performer, a better scholar, a better friend, a better partner, a better brother, a better son.

What advice do you have for up-and-coming artists?

Read, read, read.

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