The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away. There is a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. Your mother's cancer has returned, and doctors say there is nothing else they can do. (Reading) The scientists find a vaccine that will save millions of people's lives. A soldier across the Atlantic fires the shot that begins another. A country below the equator ends a 20-year civil war. Your son's teacher calls to say he stood up for another boy in class. Your best friend relapses and isn't picking up the phone. A man is killed by a drone that thinks his jug of water is a bomb. (Reading) A man comes home from war and holds his son for the first time. A glacier melts into the ocean and the sea climbs closer to the land. A forest of seeds are planted in new soil. Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow. A child takes their first steps and tumbles into a father's arms. A flood submerges a neighborhood that sat quiet on the coast for three centuries. (Reading) "All At Once." The redwoods are on fire in California. GROSS: And you have the ability to put it all in words that really perfect the thought, clarify the thought. And so I'm thinking about the simultaneity of our lives both in a macro context, in a geopolitical context, in an ecological context, but also in the specific granular details of our own lives. And a lot of what I'm thinking about in this collection are - is that idea in a sort of - in the context of the larger human experience, but also through the prism of parenthood and how parenthood is both the thing that shows you parts of yourself that you have never experienced before in ways that you are incredibly proud of, and also in ways that you're ashamed of - how being with your kids is, you know, full of joy and levity and laughter, and also that parenthood is one of the most exhausting, difficult and fear-inducing experiences in the world. And with regard to this first poem, so much of what I've been thinking about over the last several years is what you've kind of alluded to, the simultaneity of the human experience, which is to say, how do we move through our lives holding wonder, joy, awe alongside fear, despair, a sense of catastrophe. It's always a pleasure to be on this program. Well, it's so good to be back with you, Terry. Your book opens with a prose poem about something I've been thinking about a lot, and I know a lot of other people think about this, too, and that is how do you hold two opposing thoughts in your head at the same time - gratitude for the things that are right in your life and anger or fear about everything that's wrong in your life or in politics or in the larger world or with the Earth itself? What were you trying to reconcile when you wrote this? What was happening in your life?ĬLINT SMITH: Yeah. It's really a treat to have you back on the show. Some are really funny.Ĭlint Smith, welcome back to FRESH AIR. The poems are also about fatherhood and the joy and anxiety surrounding it, especially as a Black father. Smith is also an award-winning poet, and I'm happy to say he has a new collection called "Above Ground." It deals with the legacy of slavery in a more personal way, through poems addressed to his young children about what their grandparents endured and escaped. For that book, he visited eight places central to the history of slavery in America to better understand the distortions in the way the history of slavery was taught to him and to most children, and the ways many Americans deceive themselves about that history. It was also on The New York Times Book Reviews list of the 10 Best Books of 2021. His nonfiction book "How The Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With The History Of Slavery Across America" won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and reached No. With some fiction and nonfiction books about Black history banned in some schools, it's a particularly good time to talk with my guest, Clint Smith.
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