Clint Smith’s “Above Ground” illuminates the delicate balance of fatherhood

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Kat Johnson: Hi there. I'm Kat Johnson and I'm an editor here at Audible. Today I'm delighted to be talking to the poet, educator, and journalist Clint Smith. Clint is the author of How the Word Is Passed, a number-one New York Times bestseller, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and one of Audible's best audiobooks of 2021, among many other honors. He's here today to talk about his new poetry collection, Above Ground, and I am so pleased to welcome him to Audible. Thank you so much for being here, Clint.

Clint Smith: It's such a pleasure to be here with you all.

KJ: As a little treat for our listeners, would you open us up with a reading from your new collection?

CS: I'd be happy to. This is the first poem in the book, and it's called “All at Once”:

The redwoods are on fire in California. A flood submerges a neighborhood that sat quiet on the coast for three centuries. A child takes their first steps and tumbles into a father's arms. Two people in New Orleans fall in love under an oak tree whose branches bend like sorrow. A forest of seeds are planted in new soil. A glacier melts into the ocean and the sea climbs closer to the land. A man comes home from war and holds his son for the first time. A man is killed by a drone that thinks his jug of water is a bomb. Your best friend relapses and isn't picking up the phone. Your son's teacher calls to say he stood up for another boy in class. A country below the equator ends a twenty-year civil war. A soldier across the Atlantic fires the shot that begins another. The scientists find a vaccine that will save millions of people's lives. Your mother's cancer has returned and the doctors say there is nothing else they can do. There is a funeral procession in the morning and a wedding in the afternoon. The river that gives us water to drink is the same one that might wash us away.

KJ: Thank you so much. That's beautiful. I mean, it kind of says it all, because you're really holding a lot in this collection. There's a lot of joy, there's a lot of despair. There is kind of everything. So, I want to ask you, this is your second collection of poetry, but I imagine that you have a lot of new fans who know you from How the Word Is Passed. That work is very poetic in its own right. But I'm curious how you might describe Above Ground to those folks who might not be as familiar with your poetry.

CS: Yeah, I think that the poem “All at Once” does capture a lot of what I'm trying to hold within this collection. So much of this book is a meditation on fatherhood. I have a five-year-old and a four-year-old, and the book in some ways traces the journey of becoming a father and watching these two small humans who you've helped bring into the world discover the world for the first time. And so part of it is thinking about what it means to watch with joy and wonder and awe as your children help you discover the world anew, and what it means to raise children in this moment amid a larger backdrop of geopolitical, ecological, and social tumult and catastrophe, and how one holds the complexities and multiplicities of our lives at once. The sort of interpersonal joys amid the larger backdrop of despair, but also the sort of whiplash of what it means to be a human, that you're often carrying these feelings in the same body, in the same bones. That you get the call about your mother's diagnosis while you're pushing your child in the swing at the park. That is in so many ways what all of our lives look like, is figuring out how to manage and navigate and hold all of those things together.

"For me, poetry is the act of paying attention."

KJ: That line about “your mother's cancer has returned” is a gut punch. And I think what you're saying is very heavy, but also your work can be so light and so funny. And so I really love that juxtaposition, and I want to talk to you a little bit about that. But I also wanted to ask you about the title, because I think all of your books have incredible titles. I know this one, the eponymous poem in this collection is about cicadas. I think they're the brood X cicadas that come out once every 17 years. So, I'm curious what it is about this concept of “above ground” that you wanted to talk about.

CS: Cicadas are a recurring feature of much of my work. Part of why I'm drawn to the idea of the cicada is the unique nature of its life cycle. This type of cicada lives underground for 17 years, and then it comes up, it mates, and then it dies. And it's such a unique life cycle in the natural world. I'm endlessly fascinated by it. I mean, I'm also the person that, like, I will binge a David Attenborough nature documentary every day of the week. If it was up to me, that's all me and my wife would watch. She has other plans. But I am so drawn to the natural world and what it can show us and what it can tell us, and what it can remind us of.

And so the poems in this book are sort of this meditation on fatherhood. And I remember when the cicadas came out, this must have been a year ago, a year and a half ago, and my son was four and my daughter was two. And I remember having this moment where I was watching them sort of mosey around our lawn. And in our back yard there were cicada shells everywhere. And I remember so distinctly this hum of the cicadas that for weeks surrounded us and was there every day you woke up. But I remember watching them collect these cicada shells almost as if they were treasure, and [I was] looking at them and realizing that the next time the cicadas came, they would be 21 and 19. And it, for me, just felt like this reflection of how fleeting these moments are. It's the most cliche thing in the world, what people say: The days are long, but the years are short. And I can't even imagine my kids as a 21-year-old and 19-year-old. It feels unfathomable to me to think of that iteration of them, and yet that hopefully is what they will grow to be.

I realized how special it was to have this moment with them when the cicadas elicited so much wonder, in ways that are very specific and probably singular to this occurrence, because that will look different when they're adults. And so, yeah, so much of this collection is trying to hold onto these moments. And the poems almost acting as the practice of being present, and excavating these moments and holding fast to them.

KJ: That's incredible. And now I'm going to have to skip ahead because I had questions exactly on that line of thinking. Because I do think, like you said, the days are long, but the years are short. Parenting young kids is so exhausting and so repetitive. Some days, it's endless. And then you get those moments where you're like really, truly in the present, and you realize how precious and fleeting that it is. And I feel like your poems really capture that. I'm just curious, is your writing kind of inspired by those moments, or does it help you find them? Like, when you're writing, you're actually helping to savor it more?

CS: Yeah, I really appreciate that question. It's a little bit of both. I think what's true is that for me, poems are both the creation of art, but also the mechanism through which I do my best thinking. And part of what I mean by that is that for me, poetry is the act of paying attention. When I write a poem about a moment, about an idea, about an occurrence, about something my child said, something that made me feel, it pushes me to home in on that moment, to sort of dig into it, to excavate it, to explore it in all of its granularity and specificity. And I think what it does is it makes me more fully appreciative of those moments in some way, because what I am doing is doing something that makes me pay attention to it.

It's almost like you might walk by the same tree in front of your house every single day, right? You walk by it and you see the tree, and if somebody asks you to describe that tree, you would be able to describe it. You see it every day. But there's something different when you stop—instead of driving by the tree or walking by the tree—when you stop and really look at the tree. And maybe you're a photographer, maybe you take a photo of the tree or you zoom in on the particular leaf. If you're a poet, you look at a particular leaf on the tree and you see actually it's three different shades of green. And you see the way that the tip of the leaf is becoming yellow as the season changes, or you see a hole at the edge of the leaf where a caterpillar took a bite. Like, you see it in a different way. And so then when you zoom out and look at the tree, you see the tree more intimately and understand it differently than you did before, because you've paid a different level of attention to it. And I think that these poems do a similar sort of thing, right?

When I write the poem about the dance party that we have in the kitchen, when I write the poem about pretending to be a brachiosaurus with my kid, when I write the poem about the first hiccup, or I write a poem about any manner of things—some of them that occur once, like the first time they walk or the first time they talk, and some of them, as you said, are very repetitive, and that if I don't try to be intentional, I can lose sight of even how the repetitive moments that are exhausting, that are tiring, are also really special and really fleeting at the same time.

So, it's almost like a way of holding me accountable to a recognition of the moment, you know? And some of those moments are full of levity and laughter and silliness, and some of them are full of heavier subject matter. But part of what I want to do is have these poems serve as time capsules, almost as poetic archives that help me hold onto these things that I can look back on in 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 years, and remember with specificity how it made me feel.

KJ: Yeah. And your kids too, I'm sure they will love to look back on these. I absolutely love that. I do agree. I find that a lot of your poems are, the parenting ones especially, you can start with something really ordinary. “The Ode to the Electric Baby Swing,” I really love. But you kind of take that and you get into this territory where it becomes really meaningful. One of the things that, and you kind of touched on this, that makes it so powerful is you do weave between these joyful, silly moments and cozy moments against these very real anxieties that we all feel around climate change and school shootings and the horrors of racism and the legacy of slavery, which you've addressed in your other work. I'm curious if that's something that really happens organically when you're writing, or is this a conscious juxtaposition that you were honing as you put the collection together?

CS: All of the books are certainly in conversation with one another in ways that I'm conscious of, and certainly in ways that I'm also unconscious of. So, in How the Word Is Passed, part of what I'm exploring is how the history of slavery manifests itself in different historical sites across the country, and to what extent these places are actively reckoning with that history, and to what extent these places are evading their responsibility to talk about this history with more honesty and transparency. And I think what happened is that I started this book in earnest when I saw the Confederate statues come down in New Orleans in 2017, statues of P.G.T. Beauregard, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee. And I was watching those statues come down and thinking about what it meant that I grew up in a majority Black city in which there were more homages to enslavers than there were to enslaved people. And that was the sort of catalyst to the How the Word Is Passed project. And in that same month, May of 2017, my son was born. And so I spent four years traveling across the country to try to wrestle with these questions of how this country tells the story of its past. And I became a father at the same time. And so fatherhood was animating how I was experiencing so many of these sites.

An example of that is I think I thought about slavery for the majority of my life largely through the prism of this spectacle of physical brutality, right? The beatings and the whippings and the physical torture, which was certainly a huge part of it, but I hadn't fully accounted for in my own life the violence of family separation. And I remember this one moment standing in a cabin at Whitney Plantation, and I wrote a poem toward the end of this collection about this, where I remember standing in that cabin where enslaved people had once lived and closing my eyes and imagining what it would be like if I put my kids to bed one night and then I woke up and my children were gone. And I had no idea where they went. I had no idea who had taken them. I had no idea if I would ever see them again. It's a sort of unfathomable type of cruelty and horror to have to even conceptualize. And then you have the moment where you realize that, “Oh, this was the omnipresent threat that millions of enslaved people lived under every single day of their lives. That at any moment you could be taken from the people you love for no reason at all.”

"I wanted to write into the expansiveness of Black childhood, of Black parenthood that is made possible by many of the themes that I was exploring in the previous collection."

And I was thinking a lot about those themes, in part, because I had become a parent. My understanding of the stakes of what was going on were different because I had to imagine that possibility for my own children. And I say all that because I think part of why I wanted to write Above Ground was to remind myself of how to be a Black parent, [which] in this country has for so long been animated by fear, been animated by a desire to protect your children from violence. The history of violence and oppression is a huge part of what it means to be Black in this country, but it is not the only part. And I think about how my life is only possible, how my children's lives are only possible, because of generations of people who fought for something they knew they might never see, but they fought for it anyway, because they knew that someday someone would. And that me being able to have a dance party with my kids in the kitchen, that me being able to sing in the car with my kids, that me being able to give my kids a bath, that me being able to watch my kid run through a field and smell the flowers, that that is only possible because of all of these people and what they made possible for us. And so I wanted to sort of write into the expansiveness of Black childhood, of Black parenthood that is made possible by many of the themes that I was exploring in the previous collection.

KJ: That's beautiful. And I think that must also give you hope to go on, because we're far from having these issues solved, they're still very much alive. And if you know that your ancestors could fight for this, and even if they couldn't see it, I think it helps us want to fight for a better world, even if we may not see it. So I think that's really powerful.

You spoke about Black fatherhood and Black parenting. One thing I really love about this collection is how firmly in the realm of the domestic that it can be in ways that we don't always expect from men. And in the poem “Gold Stars,” you talk about this and you say, "I'm praised for the sorts of things no one ever thanks my wife for. I am adorned in a garland of gold stars for simply being in this body." Can you talk to us a little bit about how you might be hoping to evolve this conversation through your work?

CS: Yeah. Many of the things that I write about in this book, many things that I experience with my kids, as you said, I am praised for. People say, "Wow, you're such a good dad. Wow, look at how attentive you are." I mean, it really is kind of remarkable. Like, I even just a couple weeks ago, I was walking down the street with my kids, I think we were walking from the park. I think I was carrying my daughter on my shoulders, holding my son's hand. And somebody rolled down their window and they were like, "Father of the year out here. I see you, man. You're doing an amazing job. Father of the year." And it's not that I don't appreciate the sentiment, right?

KJ: Sure. Yeah.

CS: And I'm also cognizant of the fact that that image serves as a juxtaposition of so much of the pathology that surrounds decades of ideas of what Black fatherhood is or the way that's presented in the media, even if those are distorted and misguided. We have the social science to demonstrate how much more involved Black men are in their children's lives than they are given credit for in our larger public discourse. And so I'm cognizant that the image of me walking with my children to the park or pushing a stroller, that that is meaningful, particularly to Black people, in a way that is really reaffirming. And I also have to name that my wife never gets stopped in that way. When she's walking them or pushing them in the stroller, nobody ever rolls their window down to say “mother of the year.” When she's changing a diaper, nobody's ever talking about how impressed they are. When she stays with the kids while I'm traveling, no one ever says how great it is that she's willing to babysit the kid, like “babysit,” using that language of babysit your kid. People be like, "Oh, man, look at you babysitting your kids for a whole weekend."

KJ: [laughs]

CS: It's like, "These are my children. What do you mean?" You know? So, I think it's a both/and, right? It's like I recognize that positive images of Black fatherhood are very important to many people, especially in the Black community. And I am happy to be a part of that. It's not about saying Black dads should not be complimented for doing what they do, even if it's things that they're supposed to do. It's also saying, "Well, why don't we extend that same affirmation to mothers?"

So yeah, it's just something that my wife and I, we've had many conversations about it over the years. It's something that I try to be cognizant of all the time and think about all the time, because the world will make you feel like you're somehow a superhero for doing things that you're supposed to do, for just trying to be an equitable co-parent. It just felt important for me to include a recognition of that within this sort of larger collection.

KJ: Well, I appreciated that for sure. Gold stars for the moms and the dads. Absolutely. I want to talk to you a little bit about the audio format, of course, because that's so near and dear to us here at Audible. This is your third time narrating your work in the audio format. Your reading is incredible. I imagine that sound and delivery is very integral to your work, if that's fair to say. Is the spoken word in mind for you as you're writing?

CS: Absolutely. For those who are less familiar with my work, I kind of came into writing via an oral tradition, so my first engagement with literature as a writer myself was through the spoken word and slam poetry scene in college; in Johannesburg, South Africa, where I lived after I graduated; in New Orleans, where it's really robust; in Washington, DC, where I lived and was a high school English teacher. So, my first editors, so to speak, were the audiences at poetry slams who would give me a score based on the poem that I read on stage.

I remember these nights when I was a kid living in New York City in the summers between college and going to places like the Nuyorican Poets Cafe or the Bowery Poetry Club, and being so moved by the way literature existed in people's bodies and how you could create a different sort of texture to the writing by the way that you raise your voice, or how quickly you spoke, or how you moved your hands, or what volume at which you spoke. The performance poetry space is its own form, right? In the same way that when you write a sestina or a sonnet you are thinking about the way that a line or a meter can be used to communicate the meaning of the poem in additional complementary ways. And it's the same thing when you're behind the mic, that your body becomes the mechanism through which you shape an audience's understanding of line, of meter, of breath.

"I am like an audiobook evangelist—I mean, I'm out here telling people that it would be impossible for me to read half of the books that I do without the audiobook format."

And so I feel very lucky to be part of a sort of cohort of writers who came up in the spoken word and slam poetry scene, who have now moved into other genres and other mediums. I'm thinking of dear friends like Hanif Abdurraqib, Eve Ewing, Tunez Smith, Nate Marshall, Safia Elhillo, Elizabeth Acevedo. The list goes on and on. Me and Liz were on the same slam poetry team that won the National Poetry Slam in 2014, and now she's a National Book Award-winning novelist.

KJ: Oh wow, I didn't know that. That's fantastic.

CS: That's my homegirl. I mean, we've been in it for so long. I've known her for so long, and it's been amazing to be part of one another's journeys in that way. So, I say all that to say that the auditory experience, the music of language is something that is forever a part of any writing that I do. Even How the Word Is Passed. It's a 300-page book of nonfiction, but I read every line to make sure that it felt right. Part of how I edit myself is by understanding how the word falls off of your tongue, by understanding what it sounds like when it hits the air. That's how I learned to love literature and that's what sustains my understanding of what shape my own writing should take.

KJ: That's amazing. I can't imagine anyone else reading your work, so I'm very glad that you got to read that one. And obviously your poetry has to be read by you. I'm curious if you yourself listen to poetry as opposed to just reading or attending live readings? Do you listen to poetry in audio in any way?

CS: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I really love getting the audiobook and the book. It's interesting because when many of us were first writing, we'd write these chapbooks, it's like the mixtape before the album, right? It's like basically a small EP version that we'd all go to Staples or Office Depot and put a little book together that we would sell for $5 after our open mic events. There's something so specific about the experience of hearing someone read their work and then getting the book and reading their work on the page, because when I'm reading it, I hear the person's voice in a different way. It creates a different sort of sensory experience. And so that's something I still love to do. I'm not attending open mics every night of the week like I used to in my early 20s. When I listen to the work of a poet, when I get their audiobook or listen to it on YouTube, it just adds to the experience.

I'm a former high school English teacher, and I think it's really such an incredible resource for teachers also. Part of what I think teachers are trying to communicate, necessarily so, to students now is that literature is not something that only exists in a text-based format. And our students know this because they're on social media and TikTok and everything all day. The way they consume content, the way they consume writing is not simply through a book, a bound book.

KJ: Right.

CS: And so I've had teachers who reach out and say they play my audiobook in the class while the students are reading the poems, that they show YouTube videos of the poems. And I just think that there's so much possibility that exists with putting the auditory experience and the textual experience alongside one another.

KJ: I think that's such a great point, because I had the same experience, actually, with your book, because the publisher had sent me early audio and they were just all these little files that I was listening to. Then I got the print book and I was so surprised to see how that first poem is written as a paragraph. It's so different than I was expecting, and I really loved it both ways. And just having those side by side, I think that's not done enough.

CS: Yeah. It's not always the case that I do it side by side. I am like an audiobook evangelist—I mean, I'm out here telling people that it would be impossible for me to read half of the books that I do without the audiobook format. I listen to audiobooks while I do the dishes, while I fold the clothes, while I sweep the floor. It almost has made the daily ritual of evening tasks like making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches this really pleasant thing because I'm listening to, like, a new novel by Jhumpa Lahiri while I'm putting mangoes in my kids' lunch.

When you become a parent, the greatest currency you have and the greatest currency you lose is time. And so an audiobook, what it does is afford you an opportunity to spend time with these books that you, at a different time in your life, maybe would've sat down to read. But I know that now when I sit down to read, and if it's after 8:00 and I sit down with the book, I'm falling asleep after two pages.

KJ: [Laughs].

CS: But if I'm standing and moving my hands, I'm so grateful. And there's something so special about the moments where you hear a writer read their own work. And also these audiobook narrators are so talented now. Like, it's incredible. I listened to Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ book The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois on audiobook. And it's a thick book, but it's like listening to a one-person play. They use so many different voices. It's remarkable. It's incredible.

KJ: Yeah. That book has a trio of incredible performers. That's a great one. Do you have any other favorites you'd like to recommend to listeners?

CS: I just listened to Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow. I really loved that.

KJ: Oh, cool.

CS: I listened to Invisible Child by Andrea Elliot. Remarkable, remarkable book. Won the Pulitzer Prize. So good. I listened to Inciting Joy by Ross Gay. Ross is one of my favorite poets.

KJ: I love Ross Gay.

CS: I love listening to that audiobook, because there are moments where Ross starts laughing when he's reading and they just kept it in the book. And I was so pleased by that because his laugh is so infectious and I was like, "I'm so glad this didn't get edited out because he's laughing and then I start laughing." And you're laughing with Ross Gay as you walk down the street. It's a delight.

Another one that I loved—I could go on and on—but Anne Patchett's Dutch House, because it was narrated by—

KJ: Oh, yeah.

CS: —Tom Hanks, and who doesn't want Tom Hanks in their earphones? It was so delightful, the whole thing. I wish Tom Hanks could narrate everything in my life.

KJ: Thank you for those, those are great recommendations. I just have one question left for you on my list. Is there anything you're working on these days or anything you're really excited about that you want to tell us about? I'm basically looking for what is the electric baby swing in your life that you want to give a shout-out to?

CS: I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic, and it's been wonderful to be at a place that gives me so much sort of creative freedom to select what sort of stories I'm interested in. And I recently published a story with them that was the cover story of our December issue about how Germany memorializes the Holocaust, building on—.

KJ: It's a great piece.

CS: Thank you so much. Building on many of the themes that I was thinking about in How the Word Is Passed, but extending it to a sort of global context, thinking about a different moment in our collective global history. And I'm interested in doing more of that. And I have some more places that I will be visiting across the world to try to get a sense of how we remember different parts of our world history. What is the sort of predominant American perspective of that moment in time and how it's remembered, and does that align or not align with how it's remembered in these other parts of the world? I'm endlessly fascinated by memory and how different groups of people remember history differently, and I'm excited to continue doing more in that space.

KJ: That's so cool. Well, I'm excited to read, hear whatever is next from you, hopefully before the next cicadas come along.

CS: [Laughs] I hope so.

KJ: It's been really, really fabulous talking to you. Thank you so much for being here. And listeners, you can check out Above Ground on Audible now. Thank you, Clint.

CS: Thank you so much.