Interrogating Blood Dazzler by Patricia SmithTweetPosted by Kit Frick on July 26, 2010

I was recently introduced to Patricia Smith’s collection, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008). Knowing little about Smith as a poet beyond her Def Poetry Jam appearances, I have to admit, I was at first somewhat skeptical. A whole book on Katrina? The concept had so much potential for triteness, for assumption and sweeping generality, for theft, for failure. And then I started to read…

I was initially struck by Smith’s specific, fresh diction and construction of truly arresting image. As Komunyakaa hints in his blurb on my paperback edition, it’s almost impossible to tell from this collection that Smith emerged from the spoken word scene: her poems are so…literary! For lack of a better word. (And, just to be clear, I am not intending to belittle or undercut the work of poets who write and perform spoken word, but rather to draw a distinction between my expectations for a collection from someone with those roots—I’m thinking Jeff McDaniel, whose writing I admire greatly, or Bob Holman, etc.—and what I see here from Smith.) And I love when poems fly against my expectations.

Smith inhabits a host of voices that weave in and out of this written-through book. First, we’re introduced to the voice of Katrina herself—hungry, powerful, woman. The personified storm’s music is urgent, elevated. We then encounter the voices of many inhabitants of the city. Some poems, such as “Man on the TV Say” and “Won’t Be But a Minute” are written in the colloquial dialect of the city’s African-American citizens. Others, such as “Inconvenient,” are characterized by the more formal speech of the city’s wealthy, presumably white inhabitants. There are also, of course, the voices of the doomed dog Luther B, the voodoo practitioner, the personified Superdome, President Bush (aka Dubya), the looters, Hurricane Betsy…Each voice has its own distinct music, yet all the poems are populated by a language of tumult and motion that is distinctly Smith.

When I discussed Blood Dazzler with poet colleagues last spring, I was surprised by the range of their responses. A few, like me, were immediately drawn in by Smith and largely admired her treatment of a subject that, as I suggested at the start of this post, had such potential for heavy handedness, grandstanding, and cliché. Others, however, questioned Smith’s motives. Was she benefiting from tragedy? Playing tourist in a ravaged New Orleans? Their questioning led me to more questions: does an artist need to be a resident of New Orleans (or, expanding the question out, any location where a disaster has occurred) to have a “right” to respond to that tragedy? Isn’t belonging to a broader demographic group—one of race, gender, sexual orientation, age, and so on—affected by that event license enough for a poet to take on such a subject? Isn’t how a poet responds more important than what “right” they had in the first place? How do we, as poets and readers, define literary tourism, and true craft?

I invite all who have read Blood Dazzler, are familiar with Patricia Smith’s other work, or would otherwise like to offer up their thoughts and ideas on the questions this collection provokes, to respond to this post. We’re a new blog, so let’s get the conversation going.

You can learn more about Patricia Smith and her books on her website.