This Collection of Poems Is Skeptical About Poetry’s Value. Or Is It?

BLUFF: Poems, by Danez Smith

The intent seems clear from the very first words: “anti poetica.” This is the title of the opening poem in Danez Smith’s “Bluff,” and it’s a title that recurs twice more in the collection. Smith’s commanding litany draws us through a run of negatives — there is “no poem wiser than kindness”; “no poem free from money’s ruin”; “no poem in the winter nor in whiteness” — stopping at:

So, renunciation. Here, it seems, is poetry against poetry, against any of its claims of art for art’s sake or real-world application. The next poem, “ars america (in the hold),” hones renunciation into war cry, declaring that “if the stars gave birth” to the cruelty of the slave ships and beyond, then “kill the stars … kill all reason … kill god.” (An Amiri Baraka epigraph follows: “Warriors are poets and poems.”)

So, war. Next come the charges, which are personal, savage, self-excoriating. From “less hope”:

“Someday” refers to Smith’s long (award-winning) poem “summer, somewhere,” which creates — in, yes, elegiac, beautiful verse — a paradise for murdered Black boys. The “one about the boy” could refer to pretty much any poem from Smith’s three previous books.

“Bluff,” then, represents the anti poetica to those books. It posits Smith at a turning point, as in a poem pointedly titled “volta”: “i need a new bravery. i don’t want to live/a coward’s peace. where’s my mission?/what world comes if i use my hands?” These are the same hands that have — in a fertile phrase — “tendered violence” — for the white gaze, for coin and clout, for politics.

Smith confesses to having been “a slave to slavery, it makes me a/salary, i wanted freedom and they gave me/a name.” Few things are more important in Smith’s poetics than naming. But what happens when the names you call yourself — Black, say, or queer — are put to a different use by “them”? Are yours the only hands on the binds of identity? How can you tell? (“You (you & me) are agent & enemy,” Smith writes.) There’s a startling image in “on knowledge” of a black box with its border stitched in white “I”s; a visual enactment of how Smith — who uses lowercase “i”s — “helped patent/my chain, penned my pen.”

Time, then, not for ego but for action. For less boy and less joy; time to “move my mind/deeper into the dark/question of its use.” The last word in “on knowledge” is action — and it floats completely free from its black square, that icon used so potently by Kazimir Malevich to symbolize artistic rebirth.