Clint Smith on His New Poetry Collection “Above Ground”

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: As we’ve just seen, one of the driving forces behind the support of the Good Friday Agreement was parents wanting a better life for their children. Parenthood evokes powerful emotions, from fear to joy. It can be a tricky experience to navigate. The writer, Clint Smith, took these overflowing feelings and channel them into poetry, the poignant pieces he’s done are all in his new book, “Above Ground.” And here he is talking about it with Michel Martin.

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MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Clint Smith, thanks so much for talking with us once again. It’s so fun to see you.

CLINT SMITH, AUTHOR, “ABOVE GROUND”: It’s so good to be back with you.

MARTIN: You know, a lot of people, I think know, your work from your — you know, your essays, your journalism, your reported work. I know, you know, your recent book was about the importance of memory. What would you say this book does, like this particular book as a as a parent? Myself, it’s just — there are times it just broke me. I was just devastated by it, thinking about, you know, the beauty, the terror, you know, the bigness of the all the feelings about being a parent. But there are also a lot of ideas about history and how all that fits together. Like what do you think this book does? How did it come to you?

SMITH: I think you described it perfectly, because part of what it’s trying to describe is the messiness and the inconsistency in the complexity of parenthood. How parenthood is this thing that is filled with so much love and levity and silliness and joy, and it’s also incredibly scary. It’s also incredibly difficult. It’s also incredibly anxiety (INAUDIBLE). And I’m interested in how we hold all of those realities together. How parenthood is this thing that shows you the parts of yourself that you are proud of and also, the thing that shows you the parts of yourself that you’re not so proud of. The parts of yourself that, frankly, you might be ashamed of that hadn’t been revealed to you until you became a parent. And so, you know, this book is really thinking about the simultaneity of the human experience, holding the love and the joy and the sense of wonder alongside the sense of despair and fear and what it means to be human amid the backdrop of ecological, social and political catastrophe.

MARTIN: I get the sense that you started this book when you first learned that your wife was pregnant. Is that right?

SMITH: Yes. That’s absolutely right. You know, as I write about in the book, it was not guaranteed that my wife and I would be able to have children. We were given a less than 1 percent chance by our doctors. And so, we had in an emotionally rocky fertility journey. And we did conceive. When my wife did conceive, it felt so miraculous but also so fragile. So amazing and also, it’s so precarious. And so probably, what I wanted to do is use poems as a way to mark moments in time to track how I was experiencing and how I was processing within myself, these moments that felt, again, both exciting and scary all at once. And I just kind of kept going as my, you know, child went from being an embryo to being a baby to being a toddler to being, you know, this little human that runs around and bumps their head on the walls everywhere. And so, it — for me, poetry is the act of paying attention. And part of what, I think, it does is allow me to pay attention to my children, pay attention to the world around my children, pay attention to the way that I’ve changed as my children have come into the world, how they’ve recalibrated my sense of the world. And I think, for me, that poetry is a really helpful means of creating time capsules within your life, almost sort of archiving the different parts of your life so that you have these breadcrumbs that you can use to trace who you’ve been and how you thought about your life at different periods of time.

MARTIN: So, I would love it if you would read a poem that speaks to kind of that early part of hoping and just the idea that this person might not get here. I loved, “By Chance.” Do you want to read that one?

SMITH: I’d be happy to. “By Chance.” The doctor said you were impossible and you arrived anyway. Does it mean they were wrong? What does it mean? You defied science. What is the difference between science and a miracle other than discovering new language or something we don’t understand? Today, we brought you home. I stayed up all night and watched you sleep in your bassinet because I was afraid if I close my eyes you’d vanished. Once, a long time ago, your grandmother escaped a war and your great grandfather fought in one. You come from good fortune. You come from a history that is arbitrary and cloaked in luck. You come from a land mine that was two feet to the left. You come from children who shared their bread when they didn’t have to. You come from the parachute that didn’t open.

MARTIN: I — when I say that you broke me, this is one of the ones that broke me. I thought, you know, you’re so right. I mean, I’m not trying to sort of turn your art into journalism, but your experience describes that of so many people, the — all the what ifs, all the what ifs. But it also, you know, does something else, which is you’re talking about things that some people experience and other people, frankly, don’t have to. And I’m thinking here about, it’s all in your head. If you could talk about a little bit of it. Like your wife’s experience, your experience as a family in an emergency room when she was pregnant with your son and had a health complication. Your — her feet were burning. So, you wound up going to the emergency room. Doctors kind of said, you know, kind of was dismissive. You went home. The pain increased. And then she wasn’t having it. So, if I could get you to pick up where, he walked out of the room and told the nurse to send us home. Can I get you to pick up there?

SMITH: He walked out of the room and told the nurse to send us home. But the next day, the heat in your mother’s legs grew into a blaze. We drove to the hospital and asked to see a different doctor. The nurse said that wouldn’t be possible. Your mother’s restraint fractured. She has never allowed someone to tell her the ground isn’t there when she feels its soil beneath her feet. She leaned over the depths. I’m not asking you. I am telling you, I need to see a different doctor. The nurse, now anxious, disappeared into the hall. We were called to see a different doctor. And that doctor ran the test that your mother asked for. What they found the curves in one out of 1,000 pregnancies. She told us you needed to be delivered early. That waiting too long might mean you extinguish in a womb of poison blood. I keep thinking of what could have happened, of what almost did.

MARTIN: It’s just — it was remarkable to me to read this because, you know, I obviously didn’t know this story, you know. And here again, you know, not to turn your art into journalism, but I think people now have become aware that the maternal mortality rate for black women is many times that of white women. You know, the death rate of black infants is many times that of white infants. And, frankly, it doesn’t really matter if you have insurance or don’t, if you are of means or not. And I was just wondering, you know, how all that came into play when you were thinking about this, or did it, or was it just — was it this moment, like with your wife, trying to save her life and your child’s or did all that kind of history come back in?

SMITH: You know, you keep saying you don’t want to turn the poems into journalism, but I think what is the common denominator between the two is that both are the process of documentation. You know, both the journalism and the poem are the process of paying attention to a moment, to a feeling, to an idea, to a phenomenon and marking it and naming and excavating it. And so, in this sense, you know, it’s a sort of personal journalism, a sort of personal excavation because it felt really — you know, this was written in the midst of, as you’ve alluded, this moment where we have many black women who are coming to the fore. You know, Serena Williams, perhaps most notably, talking about their experience of the difficulties of their experience in childbirth and the way that they weren’t believed when they talked about what was happening to their own bodies during their pregnancy from medical authorities. And so — and then, we have all of this research that comes out, NPR and “New York Times,” so many different places that demonstrates the way that no matter what your socioeconomic status is, no matter what your educational status is black women consistently are not believed by doctors and nurses and other parts of the medical infrastructure when it comes to naming and talking about what they are experiencing, what they feel like they need and what sort of medical interventions are necessary in order to prevent something from happening to the mother or happening to the baby. And so, I watched this. I was reading all of this in the news and then, also, watching it happen to the person I love most in the world, and it felt important to write a poem from the perspective of the partner as well, to watch — to describe the sense of anger, the sense of anxiety, the sense of helplessness that one feels when you see this person that you care so much about, and you know that they are carrying your child and you see them dismissed over and over and over again knowing that they wouldn’t — this isn’t something that they were making up, right? This isn’t something that was, as the doctor would say, psychosomatic. Like this was something that I that my wife knows her body, knows what’s going on. And I think this is an experience that black women, you know, over the course of generations, and still today, experience over and over and over again. And so, I wanted to just sort of dig into that moment, to explore it, to excavate it and to name what was an experience that it wasn’t simply an abstraction, it wasn’t something that exists in the context of medical journals, but it was something that was happening right in front of me.

MARTIN: Do you think that poetry allows you to say things that your journalism, your other writing does not?

SMITH: I think what poetry does is poetry allows you to wrestle with a question and not have to come up with an answer. It is something that — and you can begin the poem with one question and end the poem with a handful of new questions, and I think that it is this space that’s different than, you know, writing an op-ed or writing an essay or sometimes when I’m trying to make an argument or when I’m trying to make an assertion. I think that sometimes in poetry, it is simply the act of reflection. The act of meditation. The act of asking questions of a world that’s full of them. And I appreciate the space to wrestle with these questions and not feel pressure to opine, not feel a need to present myself as an authority figure or as if I have a specific set of ideas or opinions when, really, the poem is the space where I’m trying to make sense of those ideas and questions for myself.

MARTIN: I think your children are four and five now, if I have that, right? When they read this book 20 years from now, what do you hope they’ll take from it?

SMITH: I hope they know how much I love them. I hope they know that I think that they were hilarious, that they were fun, and that it was scary and it was hard and it was exhausting. You know, I think I want my kids to understand the fullness and complexity of the world and I want them to understand the fullness and complexity of their parents, that we are two humans. We’re doing our best. And we want them to be safe and to be loved and to be cherished. And that, you know, we are also imperfect people in an imperfect world. And I hope that they both feel loved and also feel generous and extend us a sort of grace that we try to extend to others.

MARTIN: Clint Smith, your latest book is “Above Ground.” Cliff, thanks so much for talking with us once again.

SMITH: Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.