Patricia Smith, a Chicago poet 'who writes screams'

Patricia Smith

     A great poet forges a world, then invites you in. Open "Leaves of Grass," and Walt Whitman grabs you by the shirt front and draws you down beside him in the sawdust of some 1850s lumberyard. Robert Frost puts you in his sleigh, pausing in a wintry New England forest, watching the flakes fall in frosty silence.
     And Patricia Smith. Having read "The Intentions of Thunder," her selected life's work, plus new poems, published by Scribner last week and named Tuesday as a finalist for the National Book Award, I see her as a kind of heretofore unimagined superhero: WordWoman perhaps. The door explodes off its hinges, and there she is, in cape and purple tights, blasting the reader with her flamethrower of language, leaving us a Wile E. Coyote-shaped pile of crumbling ash, hesitant index finger frozen in air.
     Even the little intros to each section are concise marvels. At her start in 1991, Smith confesses: "She don't know line break. She don't know iamb. She don't know envoi. She knows stage and slam and people's faces when she poems."
     "When she poems." A three-word phrase to pop in your cheek and nurse all day, like a butterscotch candy.
     At least I could. You might draw back, objecting, "poem is NOT a verb!" Then this book is not for you.
     Pity, because you'll miss her heartbreaking evocations of her murdered father, who sired "a daughter who writes screams." Her mother, Annie Pearl Smith, "the sage of Aliceville, Alabama," unimpressed by the moon landing. "My mother saw the stars only as signals for sleep." Smith can pack a lot into a few words.
     Her own maturing, musky self, then a prolonged subterranean journey through the hellscape of America's racial past — and present — that makes Dante's "Inferno" seem like "Pat the Bunny."
     Widely acclaimed ("the greatest living poet," the Guardian wrote, and who is the competition? Billy Collins looking at clouds?), Smith once worked at the Sun-Times, and snatches Chicago, "city of huge shoulders, thief of tongues," away from Carl Sandburg's overlong embrace. The work reflects her raw, slam poetry origins — more menstrual blood here than you'd get from, say, Mary Oliver. There's a surprisingly stark rendition of the Olive Oyl-Bluto-Popeye love triangle that makes me wish Smith strayed far afield more, though I suppose it could be viewed as more sex, displaced onto Miss Oyl, "a stick interrupted by knees."
     The first quarter is mostly fun, which, like all fun, doesn't last. Starting with Hurricane Katrina, Smith serves up a threnody on race that spares nothing: "When a bullet enters the brain, the head explodes ..."
     Being a white guy reading "The Intentions of Thunder" is like crashing a wedding of people you don't know. You sneak in, help yourself to the buffet and the bar, join in the unfamiliar dancing. Then suddenly a funeral breaks out for a child you also don't know. A red-eyed relative leans in and and hotly tells you who's in that coffin and exactly what happened.

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