Danez Smith has won and been nominated for a lot of big prizes for their poetry, including the UK’s Forward Prize, the National Book Critic Circle Award and the National Book Award. But in 2020, Smith stopped writing. In the depths of the pandemic, after the death of George Floyd in Smith’s hometown of Minneapolis, poetry began to feel less powerful as a place for social change.
Smith joined poet Diannely Antigua, author of two poetry collections including “Good Monster,” for a conversation with OPB’s Jenn Chavez at the 2024 Portland Book Festival to talk about the role of poetry in our fractured society and our fractured lives.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: Danez Smith stopped writing poetry in 2020. They had already published three books of poetry to great acclaim, but after the murder of George Floyd in their hometown of Minneapolis, Smith had less use for words. When Smith finally found their way back to writing, the result was the book “Bluff,” which wrestles with the purpose of poetry itself and the role that words can play in our collective healing.
Diannely Antigua is also working on words as a place of healing. Her poetry collection is called “Good Monster.” In it, she writes to her own monsters and gives love to her younger self.
Antigua and Smith joined OPB’s Jenn Chávez on stage at the 2024 Portland Book Festival. The conversation began with a poem from Danez Smith.
Danez Smith:
“anti poetica”
there is no poem greater than feeding someone
there is no poem wiser than kindness
there is no poem more important than being good to children
there is no poem outside love’s violent potential for cruelty
there is no poem that ends grief but nurses it toward light
there is no poem that isn’t jealous of song or murals or wings
there is no poem free from money’s ruin
no poem in the capital nor the court
most policy rewords a devil’s script
there is no poem in the law
there is no poem in the west
there is no poem in the north
poems only live south of something
meaning beneath & darkened & hot
there is no poem in the winter nor in whiteness
nor are there poems in the landlord’s name
no poem to admonish the state
no poem with a key to the locks
no poem to free you
Jenn Chávez: You chose this as the first poem in your collection. It’s kind of a twist on Ars Poetica, which is the art of poetry. These are called anti-poetica. What have you been working through lately in terms of the limits of poetry as a medium?
Smith: Well, I didn’t write for about two or three years after my last collection, “Homie,” during which time George Floyd was murdered in the city I was born and raised and live in, Minneapolis. And everything had first come to a halt because of COVID, but I already felt a distance from poetry just because I think so much of my praxis comes from being amongst people and so the extreme isolation of COVID was already really suffocating. On top of just not writing, I was just kind of done. I’d written five books, or three books in five years. Oh, never do that again! Especially once the uprising started in Minneapolis, it really felt like language had very little utility for me. There was action to do. There was mutual aid to attend to. There were futures to dismantle and build. So I really had no use for poetry until a couple of years later when I started to rehab my own practice and come back to it. These were the questions on my mind about what does it mean to be writing poems that call towards liberation and the only thing you’re given for it is acclaim, is applause, right?
I could give a damn about a career. I want my people free. I want a world where we actually respect other people as human and do not interrupt and disrupt their lives with counterarguments against that fact. I think for me it was also just like a commitment ceremony, right? I’ve been in this long relationship with the art. I’ve been writing poetry in earnest since I was 14. And at this stage in my life it cannot be the same thing that keeps me writing that little 14 year old Danez, you know, had this space of catharsis.
I think it was a lot of me just really needing to thrush and exfoliate and shed old expectations about the power of poetry that are flowery or nice. But I don’t want nice poetry. I want art that shifts something in the world because I believe the world must shift. I would like to bring about a world where June Jordan’s poems feel less relevant; where my own poems feel like they have exhausted themselves out of use. I don’t want to write the things I write, right? So, I had to do something with all that frustration and I think poetry, capital P poetry, is a big enough entity for me to be able to punch a little bit, and figure out its new usefulness for me, and how I’m gonna carry it forward. Because it couldn’t be the same as it was before.
Chávez: Diannely, I kinda wanna ask you a somewhat similar question. Your book starts with an epigraph that’s from a poem that is called “Ars Poetica.” It includes the lines “Goodness is not the point anymore. Holding on to things, now that’s the point.” Since you started your book with this, and it is from a poem that’s also about the poetic method, I wonder what you’ve been thinking about in terms of your relationship to writing poetry. What it is capable of communicating and not capable?
Diannely Antigua: Should I read the first poem in my book too?
Chávez: Oh sure, yeah, yeah, go ahead, go ahead.
Antigua: Alright. I just wanna give a content warning for suicidal ideation, self harm. And some of the poems I’ll be reading later: domestic violence, abuse, and sexual assault. So this is quite a heavy, heavy little book.
“Someday I’ll Stop Killing”
This isn’t an apology but rather a confession:
I loved your body before I was born.
I counted your future fingers and toes, touched
your hands before they ever touched another’s, my left
in your right, and we slept in the womb that exists
before wombs, mouth pressed over mouth,
a position I’d learn to crave.
I loved your body before I was born and
hated your body after my first gasp of rusted air, after
hearing your shriek match my own. Perhaps I hated your body
because of what you could do to another body—
opened it, not a wound but a portal—
and the permission you took
I then took, 16 years waiting, took a steak knife
to your wrists, drew striped doors,
and the red entered the room.
Once I opened all the pill bottles,
left them on the dresser, watched you—
one, two, three pills at a time—
swallow them in front of the mirror,
reflection slipping into bed after,
into the little trap I’d set. Only twenty minutes
had passed when they found you, strapped
your arms to the gurney,
and I hid under the sheets where I’d held you
moments before, told you the story of Little Red Riding Hood,
as you closed your eyes. I’d like to say
I stopped there. A year later I tried it again, ritual
of pills and mirror and bed, and now the story
of the brown babies, all lost before they were lost.
And you wept as I held you once more, understood
this was my task all along, to kill. And what a love to give
into my violence, your breath weaker, diaphragm
lulled to sleep. How could I not pity you, dear one,
how could I not wipe the spittle from your lips, dial
three numbers. They saved
you again. And you didn’t blame me when asked, called
your assassin a name you’d read once in a book about death,
and I thanked you in time,
and in time, I hope to stop trying,
or in time I imagine you’ll grow strong,
grab me by the throat, close
a portal perhaps, and I’ll forgive you.
Chávez: Yes, I’m so glad you read that before answering my question, but yeah, I have like 10 questions based on all of your poems. But what I brought up before, that part of the epigraph “Goodness is not the point anymore. Holding on to things, now that’s the point.” How are you thinking about that in relation to this first poem you’ve just read?
Antigua: I think about it too, in relation to the title of the book. It’s called “Good Monster;” not just a monster or a bad monster, but a good monster. Which comes from one of the lines in my poem called “Diary Entry Number 31: Epigenetics” where I’m talking about a previous situation of abuse, talking about my abuser. Did he make me a good monster or a bad one?
And that’s something that I feel like I’ve had to reckon with. What is goodness? What is it to become monstrous, too? Especially when you know… I’ll say I am the speaker of my poems for the most part, so I think I’m just gonna talk in terms of my own experiences instead of hiding behind the speaker. Just thinking about the things that I’ve experienced in my life, the different forms of abuse ‒ religious abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault ‒ and how all of these different things have done monstrous things to me and left me feeling quite monstrous. Especially thinking of the coping mechanisms that are left as a result of these monstrous things that have occurred to me. And I’ve had to think over the years, thinking about, you know I didn’t ask to be a monster, but I was made into one, and was that the purpose of it all along? Would that make me a good one? One that appeases the abuser and then would the bad monster be the one that then enacts this violence on others. Was that the good kind of monster?
So that’s something that I feel like I’m wrestling with a lot in my personal life but also in poetry. What is a good poem? What is a bad poem and does that even matter? You know, thinking about the art of poetry, I don’t care about good poems. I don’t want to write good poems. I just want to write them, and I think about the epigraph that comes from “Ars Poetica”, from Dottie Lasky’s poem: “Goodness is not the point anymore. Holding on to things, now that’s the point.” That’s what poetry is about; it’s about holding on to things. It’s about that container in which we put all of our experiences and that in itself holds all of those memories and I don’t give a [bleep] if it’s good or not. I really don’t, because that’s not why I came to poetry in the first place. I came to poetry because I was dying and I needed a place to find refuge.
Having grown up in a really religious system, I wasn’t allowed to seek therapy. And medication was an absolute… like, no way. So I had absolutely no one to turn to other than my journals or the even books that I was reading.That was my safe place. And that’s when I started writing poems.
So poetry has been a saving grace to me and I truly believe in the power of poetry to do so many things, not just for people personally but also I’m thinking about society as a whole, and what is the role of the artist? What can we do to enact social change? For me, sharing my story through poetry is one of the ways in which I feel like I’m enacting social change. De-stigmatizing mental illness, which was something that I think about when I was younger. Like, if I would have been able to tell just one person, just one person, how my life would have been so different. I’m hoping that talking about mental illness gives us the opportunity to save people from themselves.
Smith: But it’s not just talking. It’s the way you do it because even the first lines in that poem, this isn’t an apology. This is confession. That opens up the door to so much, right? And if you start with apology… which apology always bows to some idea of goodness, right? I’m apologizing because I was not good. So leaving it at the space of confession, where confession, the only allegiance is to honesty at that point, opens a portal, right?
Because how many times do we talk about mental illness, but we talk about it in a way that is still so riddled with shame, which is still so riddled with I am apologizing to my old self. I can’t believe I did this to myself, da da da. And the fact that you start with not apology but confession and then go into a wildly tender poem from the perspective of the self or embodied suicidal ideation, whatever is going on in there, it is…. I have students that I wanna show this book. Not right now because some of them are struggling. But I’m… “When you’re 2% better, I’m gonna give you this, because there is such an exhale, and not having to hold on to goodness in your work, which to me makes it good.”
Antigua: Well thank you.
Chávez: You know, I do wanna dig into that idea of your monster a little bit more because it did feel to me, as a reader, that this poem was from the point… was it from the point of view of your monster?
Antigua: Yes.
Chávez: So I’ve read you talk a little bit in interviews about your experience with internal family systems, which I also have experience with. And it’s this idea of identifying different parts of yourself and how they team up or how they work against each other. For example, one for me is my inner critic, and so it’s almost like there’s different little people inside you kind of hashing it out in a room together. And I kind of sense this in your work.This idea of different parts of yourself in communication with one another, and I was wondering how that comes through for you when you’re writing.
Antigua: Sure. Going back to the title of the book “Good Monster,” I do do this type of therapy called Internal Family Systems. I’ve been doing that therapy for 12 years now, at this point, since I first started therapy in my early twenties. As Jenn mentioned, you name these parts of yourself. So my monster is my anxiety and depression and my boundless need, and they’re like neighbors they hang out together.
Chávez: They do! They love to hang out together. Mine too!
Antigua: It’s almost like a domino effect. The depression starts acting up, and then the anxiety, and then the need, or it just depends. It’s a little cycle. And I’ve identified that over the years as my monster. And you know in therapy, I’ll be like, oh my monster’s acting up again, you know. She’s doing that thing. And at the beginning, when I was starting therapy and identifying these parts of myself, I hated this monster. I was like, this monster’s wreaking havoc in my life. She’s doing all sorts of things and I don’t want her to be doing that. I’m sick and tired of this monster effing everything up. It wasn’t until I came to the realization that I had to love this monster… And I don’t wanna say that like a hokey like oh loving yourself. It’s like no, you have to love yourself. You have to love yourself, truly. And that means wanting the best for yourself and accepting who you are, but not just accepting it and being like… “I’m done.” But accepting and taking steps to move forward into healing.That’s the loving portion of it. And I didn’t want my monster to be burdened with this role anymore, because my monster has been holding this for so long.
Thinking about the poem I just read, my monster was born when I was born, truly, considering what I was born into, an abusive household. I really didn’t stand a chance, you know. I was… a monster going to happen regardless. So, I’ve had to learn to love this monster, and take care of her. I’m hoping that with this love and attention, that the monster will kind of relinquish some of that hold that it has on me, and kind of just let me live for and on behalf of the monster the life that she wasn’t able to live. Somewhere safe; somewhere that there’s always food on the table; that someone’s not gonna be harming her. I want to provide that for her. And I know that with that type of work that she will get what she needs, as long as I’m there for her.
Chávez: Yeah. And Danez [Smith] mentions the tenderness of your poem. I just noticed that in the acknowledgments of your book you thank your monster and say that this is for you, little one. And I just thought it was so, so tender, that line. So I want to get to another reading. But I first wanna ask you Denez, like, do you have a monster like that?
Smith: Ha! Don’t we all? I mean, y’all have seen Inside Out. We all have these little things. What a brilliant movie. I teach from it all the time now actually because I think poems are the point of [the first] Inside Out, where you know the emotions try to separate themselves and it’s not until Riley starts to experience complex emotions that she’s able to evolve. And I think poems are exactly that, that they’re these little balls of complex emotions that we store. A little brief humanities.
But yeah, of course I got a monster. I got a little addiction monster in there. I got a little sad, depressed monster. There’s the monster that comes and says we should kill ourselves every once in a while. So yeah, I got the monsters in there. But you know, I think life is exactly like learning how to, not banish them, but embrace them and figure out what they need, because they are just little chaotic children who are acting out because they are scared and because they need things. So yeah, you just gotta learn to, I don’t know, pat them on the head.
Or get married. I love my husband because now I’m not in charge of taking care of myself. Seriously! I didn’t believe in marriage before, but it’s like getting an assistant manager. It’s awesome! Freaking love it! And so now I got this guy that I can go and be like, hey, this monster’s going wild. Can you talk to me? And also therapy.
Antigua: Applications are open for my assistant manager.
Chávez: Chaotic little children is such an accurate description of what we are talking about.
Miller: This is Danez Smith introducing “Last Black American Poem.”
Smith: I think this poem people tend to think and maybe it does reference “My President,” which is the first poem from “Homie,” but in truth, I’m thinking about a lot of the like pro thank-God-Obama-is-president-now poems that I wrote in 2008 and 2009 when I was in college, and everything was like, will you please write a poem about Obama for us? And I was like, gladly. What a mistake. I was such a Democrat back then.
What do you need to know about this poem? It’s about Obama, obviously. There in the final sweep of images it mentions Bascom Hill, and dancing at Lincoln’s feet. Where I went to school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, there’s an iconic hill there called Bascom Hill and at the top of it sits a statue of Abraham Lincoln. So that’s where that image is going.
“Last Black American Poem”
Voted for the negro twice, twice my captor
Wore my face. Admit it, Danez, you loved
Your master in your shade. Yes, I loved
Knowing the color at the end of my chain
Matched mine. ((Wrong river. It wasn’t chains
It was water when one of us helmed the boat.
Water for our eyes, water raised to the lips
Of cargo. Still cargo. In summer
We turned down that Jeezy, learning a new one’s
Slain name. The helm and still. The boat, still
Headed to Carolina shores.)) My president was Black
When mothers got millions in exchange for sons.
Michelle’s perm was perfect as bombs dropped
In the middle of childhoods.
We buried my grandpa with an Obama button
Pinned to his lapel. Finally free, we sent him to heaven
American. When he won, we sprinted Bascom Hill
& danced like happy slaves at Lincoln’s feet.
We were happy ass slaves, happy to vote
Happy to be able to protest the killing
We couldn’t end, happy for healthcare
That killed us slower, happy the gays could marry
In the country where trans women vanished
Like snow in warm winters
Happy our wars were only of the mind
Only elsewhere.
Forgive me, I wrote odes to presidents.
Chávez: Diannely, I would love to turn to another reading from you. “Diary Poem 13, Being Sick is a Romantic Idea.”
Antigua: Please, before I read this poem, I wanna just talk, ever so briefly, about the diary entry series within my book. So the diary entry poems are written using diaries. I started writing when I was nine years old, and since then I’ve filled over 40 journals. I use those to write poems. I write collage poems using lines and language that I’ve collected from them and they are numbered based off what number journal it is. So “Diary Entry Number 13” comes from my 13th journal, and it’s called:
“Being Sick is a Romantic Idea”
It was the summer of pain, the summer
of becoming the rhythm
of spasms down my cervical spine,
calling it a reunion of ache. I remember
the unbuttoned shirt felt like a grave,
and the grave like practicing the Bible
in a basement, or like being Achilles
in reverse. I was strong
from the ankles down, from my shallow
baptism in the Atlantic. As a child,
I’d heard a story about an angel so beautiful
she was evicted from heaven by the others,
made to live out her days trapped in flesh, as she lay
confined to a hospital bed. I’d like to pretend
God called on the phone every day—
a worried Father—or perhaps
disguised as a nurse, brought her water
and pills. To say I’m not afraid of dying
is to admit I want to be stared at
like something to lose. I thought I could
leave with the dignity any breaking woman
would want. I haven’t been sleeping,
or walking, or kissing the people that I love.
Sometimes my lips will graze an ear,
a freshly shaved neck.
Chávez: That line about not saying you’re not afraid to die, meaning wanting to be looked at like something to lose, just shook me reading this collection, so thank you. I do have a couple questions, but I want to get to… it seems like the body is something that’s so, so present in your work. In this poem, your body is carrying pain and sickness, chronic pain, and others, as the aftermath of abuse and others is generational trauma. How are you thinking, in this collection, about the weight that you carry with your physical body? How does your physical body show up in your work?
Antigua: Yes, absolutely. I don’t know if you all have heard of the book The Body Keeps the Score. Yes. Indeed it does. And for me, as a result of all of this abuse and violence that I’ve experienced, it has left a mark on my body. When I was 16 years old, I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, chronic pain. And no one really knew what was going on with me. I woke up one morning with a headache and my shoulders were hurting and my neck was hurting. I had MRIs of my brain and constant appointments, but there was nothing wrong with me.
I’ve never lived in an adult body without chronic pain. I’m in pain 24 hours a day. And that’s something that I carry not only physically, but also in my poetry. I talk about the body in those ways and especially in this poem, thinking about that summer when I was 16 and I could feel the fire in my spine, so much so that I couldn’t even put a shirt on. The feeling of the fabric up against my skin felt like I was being singed.
Luckily, throughout the years I’ve tried several different medications that have been helpful, but it doesn’t take away all of the pain. I’m thinking about how that relates to mentally too. I can go to therapy and work through this trauma but the trauma will always remain. It’s always going to be there. It’s just a matter of managing it more. I really feel like it’s important to talk about not only the traumas that happened but what are the repercussions? What does it look like to be a survivor? What does the aftermath of that look like? I think there are a lot of poems about the act of violence, but what happens afterward? How do you survive? How do you cope? How do you continue to be a human in this world, a body in this world. Especially in a world that my body is one that is often targeted. As a queer Woman of Color, I carry a lot in this body. It’s not just the physical pain of the trauma, so I think it’s so important to explore that in my work.
Chávez: You know, with the diary entries poems ‒ and you explained a little bit about that ‒ you’re using these lines from your past diaries, past points in your life. You call it a collage. So these poems are not necessarily written from the perspective of you in that time. You’re kind of in communication with that time and that era of yourself. I think that’s something you both brought up today. Your work being in conversation with your past selves and I wonder what are you trying to say to your past selves. That’s a question for either of you.
Antigua: Yeah, I’ll touch ever so briefly to you about the experience of writing these journals and how it’s very much like a reclamation of taking up space, and just allowing myself to play with language, especially considering that I’m writing about some very heavy topics. It allows me the opportunity to think about the poem at the level of the language as opposed to thematically what I’m talking about. That feels like a healthy distance for me when I’m exploring some of these these topics and when I’m going back and rereading these journals where I’m talking about these events that happened in my life. And it really allows me to play with language and create strange juxtapositions and have fun and enjoy it, because at the core of it that’s what poetry is for me. I love language and I don’t wanna hate it because I’m writing about something traumatic. I wanna at least give myself that tool to be able to explore it in a way that feels healthy for me.
But it definitely feels like a reclamation of being able to say the things that I wasn’t able to say when I was younger. And just also thinking more about the emotional truth of something as opposed to necessarily the factual truth within the diary entry series, I would say that the speaker of those poems, I haven’t necessarily experienced every single thing exactly like the speaker of those poems. However, it’s very much an adjacent experience so the emotional truth of that remains very, very close to what I’m doing.
Smith: That was such a good answer. Because I was wondering what it was like. Because I, as a recent journaler, I had to start journaling just to have a private writing practice that wasn’t edging towards publication at some point. I was just like, oh man, I don’t know if I could share these [bleep] but… Oh there’s the cussing. But yeah, it’s such a cool way to be in dialogue with these past selves, so thank you for talking a little bit about those poems.
For myself, I think the poet… I think besides Kahlil Gibran and maybe like Sharon Olds, no poet should be a prophet. Prophets, their knowledge is so certain, when they offer it to you in language, right? Where for me, I think as a human poet and not Kahlil Gibran or Sharon Olds, it is easier for me, better for me to show a map through a thought which requires showing how thoughts change at some point in time, right?
So in writing these poems that are very much in dialogue with older selves and older poems, yeah. I think it’s not interesting for somebody to show up in a room and say, “I am so smart,” but rather it’s more intriguing for somebody to walk into a room and say, “I am thinking and here’s where I’m at within that river.” Even just thinking about the poem, one of the most necessary tools in the making of poems is the volta, right? Which comes to us most directly in the sonnet, but I really don’t think that there’s any poem that is devoid of a volta, without some type of turn or transformation or broadening or epiphany. And so talking to past selves for me is a way to enact the volta that happens over time. The fact that I have made it to someplace new, that I am turning and have arrived on the other side of some act of transformation, right?
So yeah, this is a way, I think, to physicalize that temporally. To say that I have moved to a new position and because of everything I have experienced since the last time, I have new thoughts. It’s boring to be stagnant. You know people who have thought the same way since the ‘80s. You hate them. It’s stale, right? And so for myself, I wanna be able to physicalize for the reader the fact that humans have new thoughts.
Antigua: I love that you talked about the volta, because I have La Volta tattooed on my wrist for that very reason. Thinking about the shifts and the turns that we make in life and how we can continue to have volta after volta after volta. It’s an opportunity for regeneration. I’m so glad that you mentioned that, you know.
Chávez: Those are both amazing answers. I am having the sinking feeling of knowing that I wrote enough questions for eight hours to talk to you both, and none of us have time for that. So I do want to leave some time for both of you to leave us with the readings of the last poems in your book since we started with the first poems. Danez, if we could start off with you. The last poem in your collection is called “Craft.”
Smith: Alright, here we are talking about poetry again. I promise I talk about other [bleep] in this book. Cool. No, this is a feet on the floor poem. It’s called “Craft.” It has an epigraph from the fantastic poet Marlon M. Jenkins and his new poem “Glint.” I heard it last year, his poem “Glint.” Which is, I can’t stop building monuments to the chaos.
“Craft”
this is what my devils looked like.
this is how i loved them.
this is what almost killed me.
so beautiful, i couldn’t look away.
or so horrid, it scarred my sight
had to find beauty if i had to keep it.
what saved me, there’s no poem.
too busy in love to write.
only when love was sleeping
& i was restless could i attend
to Ecstasy’s latest report, what
was rapidly drying into memory
or the prayers almost called
into my hand & mark the air
with what i found in Time & Love.
but the world is happening
& demands its memorials
to the bees & the trees & the water
& the oil in the water in the sea
& the oil pulled across the land
in the water in the land
& the poison in the land
in the air in the town
& the country they’re building
for cops & the crops
& the fishes & birds
& the border & what happens
at it & inside of it & the fact
of it exporting its cruelties to either side
& the murder & the rape
& the prison & the money
made from prisons & the children
they are dead they are dead they are dead they are dead they are dead
& we keep on with Tuesday
& the whole fucking thing
& i want to kill, like actually kill
the people engineering this brutal today
until there is a watered & peach-filled tomorrow
(but whose bloody yesterday would i be
if i don’t plan to kill the children too?)
but i don’t kill anyone when i should
i write & try to hide the world
in a sonnet so no one will kill us
no one will kill us if we’re locked inside
a beautiful thing, but Time
rips us open, Time the virus
that turns children into these men
these women, these geniuses
of a future where everything is dead
Time, not a mother, but a father
driving us to the bridge where
he’ll abort us all these years after
Time gives a fuck about a poem
& that’s all i lay at his feet
asking for anything besides all i have
& a tomorrow where evil
isn’t so well funded & scaffolded
writing these little warnings
to the future to run
i write i try i try to assist witness
until love, mine, shifts
in the bed & snores a little louder
& i turn the poem to him. in the middle
of hell, such water, this reminder:
amen, how much i love.
ashe, how long i’ll fight.
let me map you to oasis.
let me show you where
the weapons are.
Chávez: Thank you. I love how you talk about love in this poem and throughout your book. And here, you tie it to what you fight for. Why did you choose this poem to leave your readers with?
Smith: I think I wanted to make a circle. “Let me show you where the weapons are,” hopefully should bring you back to the first poem thinking about what poetry can’t do. And hopefully in the middle of the book, you get some examples of what else works. I think love is everything. I think there is nothing that will survive this world without love, and so I want to point people most intimately to the fact that we are each other’s business. In the words of Gwendolyn Brooks, we are each other’s magnitude and bond. So, while I’m all rah rah revolution, we need to really get a new day going. The only fuel that will sustain that movement is love. That’s what I wanted show.
Chávez: Thank you. And Diannely, I definitely wanna have you read your poem as well, but I have to say before one of my favorite lines in your whole book is at the end of another poem “About an Ex, But It’s Really About Me.” You write, “I find something to love like I find air in a room. I just walk in.” And I think that is so beautiful. How does love come through in this collection of yours?
Antigua: Oh that’s a conversation we could have. Love to me is so important in my work. Family, partners, love of the self, the love for strangers that you meet on the street or even on the internet. There’s so much love there. And I love that you quoted that poem. “I find something to love like I find air in the room. I just walk in.” I feel like that’s how I try to approach the world, especially considering all of the [bleep] of the world. How do we find some gratitude? How do we find something to love amidst all of that? You just have to walk in the room and find it. It’s there if you’re looking for it, and that’s how I try to approach the world.
I feel like that leads right into thinking about this last poem, which is called “I Buy My Monster Roses.” I wrote this poem in April of 2022. I was doing a writer’s residency actually, right here in Portland for Portland Community College. And it was during that time that the 10th anniversary of my grandmother’s passing was going to happen April 25th. I was gonna be away from family. I was gonna be away from my community, and my loved ones. My grandmother was a very important person to me in my life, and I knew that when I woke up that morning I would want something that reminded me of her. Her name was Rosa, which is Rose in Spanish. I was like, I would love to have a bouquet of roses here that morning when I wake up, but also, I’m a poor poet and roses be expensive. So I went to the internet and I remember, I posted on Instagram and Twitter, at the time when it was still Twitter, And I was like, “Hey, I wanna buy this bouquet to commemorate my grandmother. Here’s my Venmo, if you wanna send $1, whatever blah blah blah. Please. That would be so helpful.” And the internet answered the call. And I remember looking at my Venmo account and there was enough money to buy the most beautiful bouquet of roses that I have ever seen in my life, wrapped in burlap with beautiful ribbons. It was the perfect way to be able to honor her, and to love her, and also for me to feel love from the community, and to feel like I was not alone. And when I ordered these flowers, I also wrote a little message for my monster, and I said, for my monster. You deserve love too.
And so here is:
“I Buy My Monster Roses”
Though the people on the internet help too.
They send money by pressing a small button
on their screens. It would be disingenuous
to claim all the credit — we can’t heal
or hurt alone. I sniff the tops of the rose heads
like a newborn’s scalp — fresh skin and hair
only a few days picked. I try to arrange the flowers
on my bed, create a romantic scene
like all the 90s rom-coms I still watch. I’m stuck
in the past, I know. I’m stuck in the present,
I know that too. I thought the roses
could be a cure, and maybe in a small way
they were, each petal I plucked so gently
from the stems gave in to me.
Chávez: And in our 90 seconds left together, why did you choose to leave your readers with that poem as the end of your collection?
Antigua: Well, like I said, it’s a heavy little book and I really wanted to leave the readers with that small little bit of hope that there is light if we’re looking for it. Again, there’s love and strangers on the internet, and I think that community to me has been so helpful in the darkest moments of my life and I wanted to make sure that I honored that, especially in the last poem because we cannot heal or hurt alone. We need each other. Healing is relational. We don’t do it in a vacuum.We need each other. We do, truly. Especially during these times, we do. And I wanted to make sure that I left readers with that sentiment.
Chávez: Diannelly and Danez, what an honor to talk to you both today. I know that’s something that people say, but I am truly so honored to be here today. Thank you both so much for being here.
Smith: Thank you, Jenn, for this incredible talk.
Antigua: Thank you, Jenn. Thank you, Danez.
Miller: That was Danez Smith and Diannelly Antigua talking to Jenn Chávez at the 2024 Portland Book Festival from Literary Arts.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.