Despite a seemingly endless string of awards and achievements, and despite the visceral and dark content of many of her poems, Patricia Smith is funny. To begin her Q&A session at Muhlenberg College this week, she got up on stage, threw her arms out to the side, and wryly declared “I am your living writer.” The statement referred to her presence there as part of Muhlenberg’s Living Writers class, but it also described the basic conditions she has met that qualify her for the event: She is living, and she is a writer.
It was also the shortest statement Smith made in either of her appearances at Muhlenberg on Monday. At the Q&A, each question was answered with a narrative that wound its way around an answer, illuminating her ideas rather than simply pointing at them. At the public reading that evening, every poem— and even the process of selecting the poems— was prefaced by an equally elucidating story. And through each of these, her audience was enthralled.
It would be an understatement to say that Smith is interested in narrative. In Patricia Smith’s world, everything is a story waiting to be told. Life is not just lived, but witnessed and then honored for its humanity. Listening to the self-described storyteller, the audience was lulled into her worldview. Even the most simplistic of questions was answered with grace and care, bringing more in its response than the question had begged. This, Smith seemed to say between her words, was the power of story.
The way she tells it, her interest in story began with what she calls the “tradition of the back porch”: her father coming home each day, sitting out on the back porch and weaving stories about all of the people in his life. Smith grew up in a house where story was the main mode of communication, and she took this form with her into her career as not just a poet, but a storyteller.
As a slam poet, Smith often took on the personas of the narrative voice of her poems. This was perhaps most shocking in her poem “Skinhead,” in which she takes on the perspective of a racist white man. Even in “Skinhead,” though, there is kindness and understanding. Smith refuses to simply demonize the persona; rather, she seeks to understand it.
The concept of persona pushes itself into her written work as well. In "Blood Dazzler," Smith tells the story of Hurricane Katrina through the eyes of the people of New Orleans, American media coverage, and Katrina herself. The personification of Katrina may at first seem jarring, but according to Smith “It never occurred to [her] to tell the story without personifying the storm.” The poems in which Katrina is given a voice display need and reason and want in justifiable ways, humanizing the chaos of the storm.
By sharing all of these voices and their stories, Smith highlights just a few of the many voices that are usually left unheard. To hear her tell it, these voices are everywhere-- whispering to each other on the back of the bus, seeping out from behind the story told in a newspaper, or waiting patiently in a dusty corner you never thought to look at before. By bringing these voices into her writing, Smith seeks to flesh out the human story and expose the multitudes contained within it.
The most powerful part of Patricia Smith's storytelling, though, is the way that she sucks her audience right into it. Listening to her, it is easy to slip into her worldview. Suddenly, it makes sense that everything is being told as a narrative. She responds quickly to questions and answers them fully, giving the audience as a whole more than it had asked for. This is true in her books, too, where the language is rhythmic, chaotic, and nearly lyrical-- beautiful to experience but also densely meaningful.
When Patricia Smith talked about "Blood Dazzler," she was able to distill it into one line in "5 p.m., Tuesday, August 23, 2005" that kept coming back to her: "every woman begins as weather." If this is true, then Patricia Smith must have begun as a piercing, sunny day herself, one that peeked into corners and exposed what she found. She must have begun as light that filtered through cracks and landed on something no one had ever seen before. She must have never wanted to stop.
