WBUR Spotlights Poet Clint Smith

Inspired by the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, Clint Smith began writing poetry in 2008. He began studying education as a graduate student at Harvard the same week that Michael Brown died in Ferguson. In this recent conversation with Robin Young on WBUR's Here and Now, Smith reads from his debut poetry collection, published this fall, Counting Descent, and discusses the challenge of raising black children and the role of poetry in his life. From their conversation:

Interview Highlights

On what sparked his interest in writing poetry

"I've been writing poetry seriously since about 2008, 2009. I had a summer internship in New York City, and I went to the [Nuyorican Poets Cafe], which is a famous poetry cafe on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And so I went there and was just incredibly blown away by so much of the work that I saw, and had never been so viscerally moved by art as I had that evening. And I left, and I was kinda like, 'I don't know what this is, but I want to do it.' And so I've been writing since then.

"And then I started graduate school the same week that Mike Brown was killed [in Ferguson, Missouri]. So it was impossible for me to sort of disentangle everything that I was learning of U.S. inequality — and specifically through the lens of race — and then seeing sort of the current manifestations and residue of that history served as catalysts to write this collection. I think for me it was a means of sort of processing and humanizing and seeking to grapple with what we were seeing at that time."

On how his collection explores black parenting

"I think part of what I've been thinking a lot about — and it's reflected in this collection — is what I call the 'pedagogy of black parenting,' and what does it mean for black parents to raise their children in a world that is often taught to fear them, and how does one navigate what is the sort of marathon of cognitive dissonance that it is to grow up in a home in which you feel loved, affirmed and celebrated, and then going out into a world that has been taught to fear you, as a result of nothing that you have done to deserve it."

Listen to Clint Smith's conversation with Robin Young in its entirety at Here and Now.