00;00;01;17 - 00;00;23;17
Stasia Walmsley
Welcome to the Providence College Podcast. I'm station Walmsley. This fall, Providence College welcomed Patricia Smith, an award winning author of Eight critically acclaimed books of poetry and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Smith visited Providence as the most recent acclaimed guest of the Jane London Perel poetry and fiction series named for the beloved English and creative writing Professor Emerita.

00;00;23;29 - 00;00;31;05
Stasia Walmsley
For today's podcast, we invite you to enjoy Patricia Smith's presentation and poetry reading with an introduction by Professor Chardin.

00;00;31;05 - 00;01;15;21
Chard diNiord
Or what? Stella Poetic, poetic and dramatic qualities have moved eminent judges and fellow poets over the last 20 years to reward Patricia with so many August prizes, publications and awards. Here are just a few. Her oracular muse, her prodigious memory, her moral imagination, her transpersonal self, her electric voice. That pays anguish for each of her ecstatic moments. As Emily Dickinson wrote, the poet must in keen and quivering ratio to the ecstasies language, lives in Smith like an organ she can't live without.

00;01;16;08 - 00;02;02;04
Chard diNiord
If you attach the spectral screen to her brain, it would flash rainbow so sated or her mnemonic cathodes to her muses transmissions that she goes on eidetic automatic. So still it's her vision that she becomes one, that she becomes prophetic without really knowing that she's becoming prophetic. So ingrained is her mission and her courage to write so memorably about tragedy, about racism, about all that affects her so deeply in this culture.

00;02;02;29 - 00;02;31;01
Chard diNiord
After reciting her poem Not My Imposture, recently at the Dart Poetry Festival, Patricia stepped away from the microphone and commented, Damn, where did that come from? Right where all of her poems come from. The sacred ether. How fortunate we are this evening to hear her read to us. Patricia Smith, thank you.

00;02;31;01 - 00;02;49;15
Patricia Smith
That was an amazing introduction. I really appreciate it. Thank you for the warm welcome here again to Providence College. I usually don't tell people this, but I come up. I always come up and I really don't have any idea what I'm going to read first, because I like to be in the space for a minute and then think about it.

00;02;50;01 - 00;03;24;19
Patricia Smith
But I think I know exactly what I'm and we had a wonderful reception and I had visited the class earlier where I, I met some incredible students, incredibly curious students. And I appreciate them and thank them for giving me some ideas for what I want to read this book and scindia art. This was my answer or my attempted answer to a lot of the things that I was seeing going on in the news.

00;03;24;19 - 00;03;50;18
Patricia Smith
And I tell my students always to listen for the voice they're not hearing. And in a lot of the things I was seeing, the voice that wasn't being heard was the mother's voice. You saw a lot of people losing their lives tragically, and the mother is kind of the last person anyone listens to. They knock on the door and say, you know, your son or daughter is gone.

00;03;51;05 - 00;04;20;07
Patricia Smith
And then they knock on the door and say, the person that is responsible for your son and daughter being gone has been deemed not responsible, and then they disappear. So this book was meant to be a tribute to them. So I want to read a poem called Sagas of the Accidental Saint for the Mothers of the Lost. I don't expect you'll recognize my voice.

00;04;20;27 - 00;05;04;14
Patricia Smith
I don't believe the saga I've suppressed will ever sound familiar. I am just a stooped and accidental saint. No choice except to strain the limits of my throat. I am the mama weep beneath the fold that paragraph you skip the wink of gold inside a rotted mouth That shredding note of grief excuse what's inexcusable in me the shifting wildfire tinted with my ankles blue with fluid how I grieve in gospel you can't clutch a feasible display of double negatives I spew whenever someone says my child is gone and then goes on to pile the blame upon my child for being gone.

00;05;04;14 - 00;05;24;27
Patricia Smith
Or maybe you believe the mess is rightly traced right back to me. Whose body? How's the crime? My daughter out of dollars. Out of time. My son just seeking ways to be raised. So many ways. They stride into the line of gunfire, tease the trigger, crave the shot. Just living through their days as if they're not about to die.

00;05;25;23 - 00;05;48;04
Patricia Smith
He tells the paper bag of wine or tussles, laughing with his kid or rolls a joint or ask his boo to rate his hair while lazing on the stoop or dares to glare when someone shoves. She fights against the holes around her throat or someone looks the same as someone else, or sits inside her car or someone else's car, or leaves ajar a door she should have closed.

00;05;48;19 - 00;06;12;10
Patricia Smith
He plays a game of hoops to clear his head or doesn't raise his hands or raises them or doesn't stop or does or when commanded fails to drop his wallet, keys or phone. He sets ablaze a heap of trash, somebody's car or store while shouting slogans meant to make you care that he's alive, she's killed. If she's not there.

00;06;12;10 - 00;06;33;06
Patricia Smith
Although she said she be or there before she should have been, or on her way to work, or coming home or walking like she should not walking down the street. She normally would. He walks too close behind. You have to jerk your purse out of the way. You palmed the mace. He passes spitting lyric, veiled in blue, not caring that he's offending you.

00;06;33;11 - 00;06;57;25
Patricia Smith
All you can remember is his race. You ask him to succumb. He dares decline. The situation quickly falls apart. A weapons raised to line up with his heart because he feels entitled to his spine. She fumbles in her pocket for some change or jumps. The A-Train a turnstile on a dare. She mumbles, like her mind is not all there or tears in a way you think is strange.

00;06;58;15 - 00;07;21;04
Patricia Smith
He wrecks his Chevy waves for help. He calls the nine the one the one he's waiting wrong. The folks around him said he didn't belong. He coughs or sneezes. Looks away. He brawls with brothers, sisters, father, wife. He waves a Wal-Mart toy. Or he can't find his place in line. He laughs too loud. He can't retrace his steps.

00;07;21;10 - 00;07;43;03
Patricia Smith
He drops his pants. He misbehaves. She turns her back or whirls around or could be packin, could be wanted, could be strong enough to snap your neck. She moves all wrong. He wanders into someone else's hood and colors that he struggles to explain. He prances strides. He's plotting an escape. He stops and spins on you. He's there for your daughter.

00;07;43;03 - 00;08;02;27
Patricia Smith
Or he scoffs when you complain about his smell. He crafts a sign. He parks behind your Chevy thrust his massive fist into or through the air. He wakes up pissed, but right on time, then asks his brow. When someone asks you, good. He waits as Turner takes a break. He takes a leak. He frightens everyone with his physique.

00;08;03;02 - 00;08;25;03
Patricia Smith
The situation's bound to escalate so many ways they're asking not to be. She's wearing out her welcome being black when no one asked her to. You've seen her lack of grace, the space she occupies, her glee when chicken weed or welfare checks roll in. He goes to class. He graduate. He graduates. He takes the seat right next to you.

00;08;25;04 - 00;08;45;23
Patricia Smith
His shoulder makes you quake inside. You simply don't know when he'll blow. She shops beneath the winking eye of video, but then pays with a card that can't be hers. His chest and arms are scarred with scrape and blood tattoos. So why untie the noose shaped like his neck? His clothes are blue or red. He wants your job.

00;08;45;23 - 00;09;13;23
Patricia Smith
He scoped your wife. He craves your home, your cash, your perfect life. That textbook in his hands, not fooling you. She hawks and spits. She begs for change. She blows a harp. She blows through blow. She blows her chance. A victim yet again of circumstance. He's fighting back, but everybody knows that he's too coarse, too dumb to street, too black, too dense, too doomed to think, too much of those too vicious pose too quick to come to blows too lightly.

00;09;13;23 - 00;09;35;13
Patricia Smith
He could spark your heart attack. He flares his nostrils, hides his hands. He flees without explaining why she lifts. She still she swipes, she grabs, she snatches, cuts a deal. He stumbles trips, he trips a wire. He sees too much. She needs too much. He feels too much. Her skin's too mud, his skin's too light He fights too dirty fights for breath.

00;09;35;19 - 00;10;03;04
Patricia Smith
The savage nights are huge with him The voodoo in his touch He shoots himself while handcuffed to a pole or hangs himself while hanging from a tree or wrings his neck. Although his hands aren't free, he always seems to fail at self-control. He's a monster ogre. He's the looming threat, insisting he didn't do that thing he did, denying that she'd hidden what she hid, confusing you by getting so upset.

00;10;03;27 - 00;10;29;01
Patricia Smith
He claims he's innocent. He files a case. He lives too large, too long. He must believe that he is white or free. He's so naive with every step he takes, he falls from grace. He steps inside or out or through or down. She bellows jumps or hisses, struts or spins. He stalks the street, steps off a curb. His sins should be enough to drive him out of town, where he'd be out of sight and out of mind and out of bounds, but thankfully not out of range.

00;10;30;03 - 00;11;06;17
Patricia Smith
And if you think he's all about the kill, the drops, the gun and gangster grind, you know for sure as soon as you see me, his momma grieving, ugly will and bout my child, my child and plucking Jesus out of every bag you just can't see why he deserves such stupid love my wailing thrusts Each Lord have mercy on my baby's soul My sad theatrics As my child grows cold and then the hungry cameras readjust my howls until it's not my child who's dead but something feral extra edged in like a threat to shrubbery.

00;11;06;17 - 00;11;32;11
Patricia Smith
And Sundays, while he's wet and seeping into st, they frame his head and mine inside a single shot and ask my hair and bulging eyes just what I think I can implode on cue. They cut the camera back to frame the blooded mask and splay. You don't remember what I say or hear his name, but you are borderline obsessed with my collapse, my crumbled wine and Holy Ghost.

00;11;32;11 - 00;11;56;17
Patricia Smith
It flail. The matinee of Mama. You are entertained until you aren't. And then I'm just an open mall, a blur and tongue. You shouldn't waste your are on my unleashed display of overkill Ignore the blackish bruiser dripping bile the spittle spewing me still bellowing My Lord, my Lord, why would you let this thing disrupt my day? I disappear.

00;11;57;00 - 00;12;22;22
Patricia Smith
And while I'm relegated to an anecdote on way to nothing, all you can recall is sputtered gospel wall and Carter Wall. That corpse, the Titan wire around my throat. That's my son collapsed there. My son crumpled there. My son lying there. My son positioned there. My daughter repositioned there. My daughter as Exhibit A there. My daughter dumped over there and my son hidden away there.

00;12;22;28 - 00;12;42;09
Patricia Smith
My son blew there. My son dangling there. My son cage there. My daughter on the gurney there, on the slab there in the drawer there. My daughter splayed there. My son locked away down there. My son growing fidgety there. My daughter deposited it there. My son inside the talk there, my daughter being back there, my son on the slab there.

00;12;42;09 - 00;13;19;05
Patricia Smith
My son crushed there. My son rearranged there. My son crumpled in the door there, my daughter's neck shrinking in the noose there. My son's left eye over there, my son as exhibit B there, my son behind the wheel there. My son under the wheel there. My son slumped over the wheel there. My son my daughter blooded and not moving in the doorway on the stoop down the block in front of her kids, just inside the barbershop faced out in the street outside the bodega, inside the bodega, in the back alley behind the bodega on the videotape, a block from home leaving home, hanging out at home in the schoolyard, on the blacktop, in his bed,

00;13;19;05 - 00;13;40;28
Patricia Smith
in her kitchen. In my arms, in my arms, in my arms. That's my son shot to look thug. That's my daughter's shot to look more animals shot as kill, shot as praise, shot as conquest shot solution shot as lesson, shot as warning shot as comeback shot as payback shot for sport, shot for history. That's my son not being alive anymore.

00;13;40;28 - 00;13;56;24
Patricia Smith
There, that's my child coming to rest. One layer below the surface of the rest of my life. There.

00;13;59;08 - 00;14;05;17
Patricia Smith
Okay, I'm going to try and read from a series of books.

00;14;08;04 - 00;14;38;08
Patricia Smith
Excuse me. This is my first book. And for some reason, I thought it was a good pick. Good idea to put, like, a picture of my myself in my big forehead at four years old on this book. And I want to read this because so often people think that, you know, these poems I've built up to some of my latter poems, and I'd like for you to see what I was what I was doing in the beginning, which is not quite the same.

00;14;39;09 - 00;15;02;20
Patricia Smith
I'm going to do a persona poem. I like to I like to watch a lot of bad movies. And this this poem was inspired by the movie Clash of the Titans, not the new one. That was that was junk. The old one. You know, you know, when you get ready for school or work and you see the skeletons fighting and you go, that's okay.

00;15;02;20 - 00;15;25;02
Patricia Smith
I'm not going, oh, that's that's the one I'm talking about. And in there Jason goes and he needs to chop off Medusa's head. So I love that scene so much. And I said, Oh, wait a minute. I used to read a lot of mythology. How did Medusa become Medusa and Medusa fooled around with Poseidon in Athena's Temple and Athena was like, Oh, no, you didn't, you know?

00;15;25;02 - 00;15;44;08
Patricia Smith
And so Athena was the person who turned. But, you know, that's not what I'm talking about when I say Medusa, right? Who turned Medusa into, you know, the snakes? And then she turns men to stone, all that kind of stuff. So I thought I was going to write a funny poem about Medusa going to the hairdresser, but. But it didn't work out.

00;15;44;22 - 00;16;17;12
Patricia Smith
So this is what what I did, Poseidon was easier than most. He calls himself a god, but he fell beneath my fingers with more shaking than any mortal. He wept when my rope fell from my shoulders. I made him bend his back for me. Listen to his screams, break like waves. We defile that temple the way it should be defiled Squirming in bucking our way from corner to corner.

00;16;17;12 - 00;16;34;05
Patricia Smith
You know, the goddess probably got a real kick out of that. I'm sure I'll be hearing from her. So give me nightmares for a week or so that I can handle. Or I'll turn the water in my well into blood. I'll scream when I see it. And that'll be that. Maybe my first child will be born with the head of a fish.

00;16;35;03 - 00;16;59;00
Patricia Smith
I'm not even sure it was worth it. Poseidon messing with me like a mad man Losing his immortal mine because of the way my copper skin swells in moonlight Now my arms smoke and it's heart scale arising on my wrists like armor. Come on, Athena. He was not a particularly good man at that. Even though he can spit steam from his fingers, I won't touch him again.

00;16;59;15 - 00;17;23;26
Patricia Smith
Promise. And we didn't mean to meet in your temple, but our bodies were so misaligned. It's not every day a gal gets to sample a god, you know that. Why are you being so rough on me? I feel my eyes twisting the lids crusting over and boiling the pupils glowing like red coals. Athena Woman to woman. Could you have resisted him?

00;17;24;07 - 00;17;48;10
Patricia Smith
Would you have been able to wait for the proper place, the right moment? And I'm looking at this poem going, Am I going to read that line? Really? I'm about to read this line, Athena. Woman to woman. Could you have resisted him? Forgive me, everybody. Would you have been able to wait for the proper place, the right moment to jump those immortal bones?

00;17;48;10 - 00;18;12;25
Patricia Smith
Now my feet are tangled with hair, my ears are gone, my back is curving and my lips have grown numb. My garten boy just shattered at my feet. Athena, take away my father's gold sent me away to live with lepers. Give me a pimple or two, but my face to have men never again gaze at my face growing, stooped in anticipation of that first touch.

00;18;13;00 - 00;18;44;00
Patricia Smith
How can any woman live like that? How will I be able to watch their warm bodies turn to rock when their only sin was desiring me? They just want to see me sweat. They just want to touch my face and run their fingers through my my hair. Is it moving? Oh, I know. Okay. So I teach in the schools where I teach.

00;18;44;14 - 00;19;04;23
Patricia Smith
I have a hard time getting my students to right. So one day it was finals day. And, you know, I'm coming in, I come in and I say, you know, they're coming to class. The shoulders are slumped. They're like, Oh, I'm going to pass this fight. And I say, Good news, no final. Yeah, they carry me around the room on their shoulders for a while.

00;19;04;23 - 00;19;37;06
Patricia Smith
And I said, But here's what I want you to do. And I asked them what was their most difficult age? Anybody, what was your most difficult age? 1313 1557 Now, okay. So the consensus when I talked to my class was 13. And when you think about 13, you're just it's middle schools looming in your skin. If you have skin, something is wrong with it.

00;19;37;22 - 00;20;03;20
Patricia Smith
You know, your voice is cracking or you know, it's like it's awful. So I said, okay, here's your new final. I want you to write about being 13. I want it to be 13 stanzas, 13 syllables each. I mean, 13 lines each stanza, 13 syllables each line. So they were like, Good, I'll do this. But when I give my students something, I always do it too.

00;20;03;20 - 00;20;34;14
Patricia Smith
So my 13 was definitely like, not like theirs because, you know, I grew up with Fred Flintstone, so I'm going to read not all thoughts. I'm going to read a couple of these. Yes. Oh, again, I don't believe I'm reading this. Well, there's nothing like 13 ways of looking at 13. Okay. I'm going to read it. Can I read it?

00;20;34;17 - 00;20;59;25
Patricia Smith
Okay. I can read it. Okay. All right. 13 ways of looking at 13 one. This is for the girls. You touch your four finger to the fat, clots in the blood, then lift its iron stance to look close, searching the globs of black scarlet for the dimming swirl of dead children. You thread one thick that's cottony tail, then the other two the little steals guys of the belt.

00;20;59;25 - 00;21;20;01
Patricia Smith
This had to be a woman of a certain age. To understand this, you stand and lift the contraption, pressed your thighs close to adjust the bulk, then then to pull up coarse white cotton panties, bleached blue. And just to be safe, you pin the bottom of the pad to the shredded crotch of the Carters. Then you spritz the guilty air with the cloying kiss of FDX.

00;21;20;26 - 00;21;45;05
Patricia Smith
It's time to begin the game of justifying air time to name the mystery prickling. That's right. In your skin you convinced the boy's can smell you and they can. Three myths. Stein scribbled a word on the blackboard, said, Who can pronounce this? And the word was an enemy. And from that moment, you first felt the clutter of possible in your mouth.

00;21;45;10 - 00;22;13;01
Patricia Smith
From the time you stumbled to the rhythm, and she slow smiled, you suddenly knew you had the right to be explosive, tussling syllables through back doors. So make up your own words if you needed them all that day Sweet an enemy tangled in your teeth spread sugar tongue led you to the dictionary where you were assured that it still existed to the cave of the bathroom, where you warbled and bounced echo and finally convinced you own that teeny gospel.

00;22;13;06 - 00;22;46;26
Patricia Smith
You wrote it again and again and again. And for turning trying hard to turn hips to slivers sway to stutter. You walk past the Sinclair station where lanky boys dusted in their hair, dressed in their uniforms of oil and thud rename you with their eyes. They bring sound shutter and blue from their throats just for you. Serve up the ancient sonata of skin drum and conch shell sing suggesting woos of am radio boom boom high.

00;22;46;26 - 00;23;12;01
Patricia Smith
You just going to walk on by like that and suddenly you know why you are stitched so tight, crammed like a flash bomb into pinafore, obeying your mama's instructions to be a baby as long as you can because it's a man's world. And James Brown is gasoline. The other side of slow zippers. He is all of it. The growled, please, please, please.

00;23;13;02 - 00;23;39;00
Patricia Smith
In the oh eight in the bathroom of the what? Not joint on the way to school, you get rid of the starched and billowy lace, barrettes, trimming, unraveling braids, white knee socks and sensible hues from a past plastic bag. You take out electric blue eyeshadow platforms with silver glittered heels, neon fishnets and a blouse that doesn't so much button as suggest shut.

00;23;40;16 - 00;24;06;06
Patricia Smith
The transformation takes 5 minutes and you emerge feeling like a budding lady. It was the seventies, feeling like a budding lay lady, but looking in retrospect, like a blind streetwalker bursting from a cocoon. This is what television does turns your mother into clueless backdrop, fills your pressed head with the probability of thrum your body becomes not just yours anymore.

00;24;06;06 - 00;24;33;25
Patricia Smith
It's a dumb little marquee nine with your bedroom door closed, you are Skyscraper Bouffant, Peach Foundation eyelashes like upturned claws. You are exuding ice. You are pinched all over by earrings. You are way too much woman for this room. The audience has one chest, a single shared chance to gasp. They shudder. He's waiting for you to open your mouth and break their hearts.

00;24;34;04 - 00;25;09;25
Patricia Smith
Taking the stage, you become an s pour into hip swings. Justice gets, the front row collapses. Oh, they want you. You lift the microphone, something illegal comes out of you. Mama flings the door open with a church version of your name. Then you are pimply, sexless assed and double Dutch knees. You are spindles, you are singing into a hairbrush 13 You're almost 14 and you think you're ready to push beyond the brutal wisdoms of the one and the three.

00;25;10;02 - 00;25;36;01
Patricia Smith
But some nagging crave in you doesn't want to let go. You suspect that you will never be this unfinished. All Hail Mary and precipice stuttering sashay fuzes in your swollen chest suddenly lit and spitting, and you'll need to give your hips a name for what they did while you weren't there. You'll miss the pervasive fever that signals blooming the saw lessons of jump rope in your calves.

00;25;36;23 - 00;26;16;23
Patricia Smith
This is the last year your father is allowed to touch you, sighing You push Barbie's perfect body through the thick dust of a top shelf bear. Her prideful heart thunders. She has heart, and you? Well, she has taught you everything. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Jane. Oh, let's see. I don't want everybody to leave depressed. So let's see.

00;26;16;24 - 00;26;44;20
Patricia Smith
And look, this is when I look through and go, oh, my poems tend to be, shall we say, depressing. Okay. Ooh, that's really depressing. Do it. Okay. Oh, okay. I can do this. So when my. Oh, can somebody give me a time thing? Because I don't know. Okay, how long am I supposed to be? 20 more minutes. Okay, everybody.

00;26;44;20 - 00;27;11;22
Patricia Smith
Okay, guys. Good, good audience. I like. I like. Sit your. Okay. So my my father, Otis Douglas Smith. Oh, oh. When I was a little bit older, my mother said, you wouldn't believe what your father wanted to name you when you were born. And I said, What? And she said, Jimi, Savannah, Jimi, Savannah. And I said, Excuse me.

00;27;12;04 - 00;27;35;15
Patricia Smith
And you named me Patricia. And you know how cool a poet named Jimi Savannah would have been. So anyway, so this is called should have been Jimi Savannah. My mother scraped the name Patricia and from the ruins of her discarded delta, thinking it would offer me a shield and shelter that leering men would skulk away at the slap of it.

00;27;36;10 - 00;27;59;20
Patricia Smith
Her hands on the hips of Alabama, she went for flat and functional, then siphoned each syllable of drama, repeatedly crushing it with her broad, practical tongue until it looked like an instruction to someone and not a name. She wanted a child of pressed head and knocking knees a trip up in the double Dutch swing, a starched pinafore and peppermint and the sour pickle kind of child.

00;27;59;25 - 00;28;35;16
Patricia Smith
Stiff laced, stiff laced and unshakable fixed on salvation in her Patricia and would never I throat the Lord's name or where one of those thin sparkled skirts that flirted with her knees. She'd be a nurse or third grade teacher or postal drone jobs requiring alarm clock discipline and sensible shoes. My four down beats were music enough for that vapid life of butcher's shop sawdust and fat that as cuisine for raised spirits into the writhing pockets of a murphy bed, no crinkled consonants or muted hiss with some in me.

00;28;36;23 - 00;29;08;01
Patricia Smith
My daddy detested borders one look at my mother's watery belly, and he insisted as much as he could insists with her on the name Jimmy Savannah seeking to bless me with the blues baby blues bathe moniker, the name of a grown gal in a snug red dress and unleased all stars. He wanted to shoot muscle through whatever I was called, arm each syllable with tiny weapons so no one would mistake me for anything other than a tricky whisper was with a switchblade in my shoe.

00;29;08;16 - 00;29;34;13
Patricia Smith
I was bound to be all legs. A bladed debutante hooked on lucky strikes and sugar. When I sent up prayers, God's boy would giggle and consider Daddy didn't want me to be anybody's sure. Fire factory. Nobody called back or seized rhythm, so he conjured a name so odd and hot, even a boy could claim it. And yes, he was prepared for the look my mother gave him when he first mouthed his choice.

00;29;34;23 - 00;30;05;14
Patricia Smith
The look that said, That's it, Otis. You didn't lost your mind. She did that thing she does where she grows to full inches with righteous. And he decided to just whisper, Love you to me. Savannah Whenever we were alone re and re christening me the seed of Otis, conjuring his own religion and naming it me, you guys. Thank you.

00;30;05;23 - 00;30;24;04
Patricia Smith
Thank you so much. I'm trying to even this out because. Oh, about this. Hmm. Okay, that should work out.

00;30;26;07 - 00;30;50;09
Patricia Smith
Okay, so from the first book again, so excuse me for any like stakes so you got you guys know about the Romper Room Lady now. Okay. So the Romper Room Lady, there was a show on top and this was before Sesame Street, wasn't it? Or maybe Sesame Street was just start or something. So the Romper Room lady, it would be like being in a kindergarten classroom.

00;30;50;15 - 00;31;05;10
Patricia Smith
So the camera's on and you're just watching her. Oh, we're going to work on our colors. We're going to sing a song. We're going to do this one you that. But it was and it was it was. I thought that was one Romper Room lady. But then I found out it was like a franchise. They were like Romper Room ladies in a lot of different cities.

00;31;05;28 - 00;31;22;20
Patricia Smith
And one of the things she would do is at the end of the show, she would come up really close to the screen and she would go, I see Carol, I see Debra eyes. You know, it's just like, oh, my God, you know? So I thought being who I was and graduating from Chicago Public Schools, that she could see out the thing, right?

00;31;22;20 - 00;31;42;21
Patricia Smith
So I was like, I'd be all dressed up. I'll be like, Oh, she's going to see me today, you know? But if you since it was kind of live in a lot of places, there is a video of a romper room lady who went crazy on the air. She just lost it. And she started chasing the kids around like she was trying to strangle the kids.

00;31;43;00 - 00;32;19;08
Patricia Smith
It's hilarious. Anyway, so I'm like, You can't do anything about a poet because we just grab it like, I'll take that. So this is. This is her. Okay. When doorknobs began to feel cold beneath her fingers, she dreaded the twisting, the opening, the biting frost and full jazz snatches, bound to slap her full in the face. So she learned to keep her hands very slowly at her sides.

00;32;19;08 - 00;32;50;06
Patricia Smith
Such a proper oatmeal, 3 to 1. Once again, she poured her pupils tight into the camera. I see Damon, I see Cora, I see Michael. I see Sharon. She didn't see anybody. She never did see anyone. But they man at the creation of box top children of toddlers with inquisitive blue ovals with A's and B's and CS, marching in uniform stupidity down their throats.

00;32;50;24 - 00;33;18;00
Patricia Smith
She sense rebellion in the silks of their hair. She smells something crazy in the pale, sinewy skin of their necks. She could hear their hearts beating tell tell rhythm a b c d e f no. If only she can pull their withering singsong voices away from her face. If only her thighs didn't lean forward at night remembering there's sputter talk there's 6070 snaking fingers.

00;33;18;06 - 00;33;51;00
Patricia Smith
If only she didn't always break. Just sort of the stoplight terrorized by primary colors, never wanting to reach home where her nights were indelibly haunted by the farmer in the Dell, and her screams were shaped like the heads of children smile. Okay, so I think I might have. I just lost it. It's like, what did I write that for one?

00;33;51;18 - 00;34;28;13
Patricia Smith
Oh, oh, I'm having a problem now. Okay, so I've got probably about 10 minutes. All right. Okay, I'll read this. Yes, about 10 minutes worth. Yeah. All right. So a friend of mine, John Freeman, there's an online journal called Lit Hub. And he called me and said, I want you to write something for a lit up. What I'm asking people to do is to write letters to the times we live in.

00;34;29;11 - 00;34;51;18
Patricia Smith
And I said, Oh, it sounds interesting. And then he said to me for some strange reason, you could probably do it as a poem, but that would be too hard. I was like, Goodbye, John, I'll talk to you later. So I didn't. I didn't write to the times we live in because poets never, ever listen to what you tell them to do.

00;34;52;16 - 00;35;16;25
Patricia Smith
What I did was I wrote a letter to Black History to set the different elements of Black History. So so it starts out like on a slave ship and moves forward to that. And it is you'll you'll figure out it's like sonnets, but it's like a crown. But it's not the full length of a crown, but it's called salutations in search of and what it is.

00;35;16;25 - 00;35;53;06
Patricia Smith
It's the letter keeps trying to rewrite itself dear floaters, bloated kin, dear flooded necks and reckless sleepers. Manic for the flow, though you are elegant in flight, your wrecks distressed the ocean's floor, the stark tableaus of sliding skin and swarms of slither set to drumbeat in your hollows. This is free proclaimed by slavery scourge do you regret rebuilding scar with water dear debris that ocean's mother's all your rampant funk and spurts her undulating arms for you.

00;35;53;13 - 00;36;29;24
Patricia Smith
She likes to think that you are simply drunk with purpose. Dear the voyage never knew your name You rise in pieces Love to death at last unshackled time will hold your breath, dear while tumultuous Your mouth, dear God, your mouth and fevered skirmish with the tongue, the like, the delight denying sound for rope or goldenrod dear mouth still bulging with Atlantic wrung into its new your tangled words are lashed into the back, intending to explain the gritted teeth expected for a flesh of rot, a chain that's wrenched away with clinging shreds of skin.

00;36;29;24 - 00;37;17;28
Patricia Smith
Dear going to market beauty on the Black Sea driven deep dear charted womb within you squirms a tendency a paradox you trusted voyage trust to kin and found the tongue through tumult. Now you need a sound dear mute contrivance graceless drudge dear hexed dear wily roots and conjures dear persist with your existence flaunting all that flexed and bumptious brawn dear flagrantly dismissed the writhing in the cottonwood and dear flail and drip dear runaway who runs the hell away dear pray for drooling Cur dear veil of Judas moon its murmur decibel of light dear cautious measurer of splay and fury in a heedless star Dear we, dear woman who was now learned to unsay her purpose

00;37;17;28 - 00;37;44;17
Patricia Smith
as a mute machine Dear, be that soft alive Dear man whose beating drum was lost at sea What nouns will you become? Dear lurch and pirouette dear flame to facade Dear I that won't dissolve your audience obsessed with shrinkage fancies to applaud and whoop but damn that I and the suspense and dogged smolder of its wide allowed identified and doomed to swing.

00;37;44;21 - 00;38;24;20
Patricia Smith
You vow to witness your enraptured crowd delighting in your new scene as a thing to do. Do not wish to be seen by you, dear languid rumba, freakish scorch and sway, do you black reckoning dear chart askew this dear stuff of nightmares seeping into day The fire has died There's nothing of you there But still they see the fiction in your glare Dear Langston, Zora Louis, Josephine, Dear Harlem, their rampaging stanzas still explosive, whether they are sugar leaping pronouncements from a horn, the thrill of stories, towering faces like the ones who hallelujah every time they read themselves or not.

00;38;24;20 - 00;39;07;11
Patricia Smith
To be outdone, a pure astonishment of women need this nurture and this verve on dimming days, dear, give you back your name, dear, higher ground dear noontime stutter balancing presences and being negro all upside that tone dear swinger to a thicker harmony dear every man they said you couldn't be Dear migrant on a greyhound stand upright or crammed into a wheezing in Plymouth, or bewildered by the real soon to ignite beneath your seat, dear locked and shuttered door with you on both the sides, dear bound to be more partial to the heat fox say the chill in Oh Chicago knows your bones The key is birthing your own sun and clutching at walks with you

00;39;07;18 - 00;39;41;16
Patricia Smith
Dear you already done surrendering magnolias, feigning shame at chitlins, holding that amusing gun to your own truant heart, to your faultless aim Dear Northern body scrubs at what it must that wily scarlet slap of southern dust Dear edgy citizen Dear Crais Careen through multitudes of all the same as you, Your skittish, eyes outstretched, dear scene, and then, as if on cue unseen, you knew enough to heed the itchy that cooled you into rusty yawning maws of factories.

00;39;41;24 - 00;40;19;21
Patricia Smith
Dear often in the wrong direction dear Chicago digs its cause and you there drink air gorgeous with disease and pay stubs. Mayor Daley startling swell his pocked and luster face an odd reprieve of those you thought you left behind. Dear Bell that keeps on ringing blues that hit their mark and make you dance all righteous in the dark, dear still a nigger in all kinds of light, dear bull, stop their bull's eye Trees rise up on spindly toes When they were all your skins rose by dear quiet mistake of you the ray you dare expose your neck and walk as if you own a thing dear blue on you And don't you wish there was

00;40;19;21 - 00;40;38;18
Patricia Smith
a ship? One chance to take a frenzy wing into the ocean Nothing but the buzz of flashers pinning you against the past Dear suicide, dear in the back Deer in the headlights You're not tag to last until the morning You are tacked to crack beneath their weight And don't you dare believe that any one of them will let you breathe.

00;40;39;15 - 00;41;27;03
Patricia Smith
Dear George. Trayvon Ryan a breed to mere elation. A Dominic Jamal Antonio D'Angelo Ramier Ashanti Bottom Terrance John Chanel Stefon for Orlando Country B Lean Rome Mellow Emmett Eleanor Monty Venetia Kiki Altin Mac Francine Tunisia Eric Dominic Rene Michel Elijah Nia Amadou A Chi Minh Nina Cortez Country Sean Alberta Michael Gabriel Olu Natasha Brooklyn Walter Lee Laquan Ahmad Muhammad El Rey RS Shane Rashaad Denali Sandra Oscar Blaine Dear Someone who woke up without a sun Dear damn the dawning echoes of a knock with no boy crouched behind it Nothing done to fix it, dear reverberating shock.

00;41;27;09 - 00;42;08;26
Patricia Smith
There's someone flailing, ripping at the air Dear Hollow, where he was dear someone who's obsessed with resurrecting him Who dares believe the muck of bullet hole and bruise will ever breathe as anything but dead dear someone loving body on its way to being only body just that red and syrupy annoyance hosed away when street decorum says it will Dear, damn, dear chalk all washed to none Dear traffic jam, dear woman wounded by the things you've heard Dear angry all your days Dear vibing wire on top of your head Dear Better watch the words you say to white folks Don't make them tired of you, dear Wish you'd pinched those no nostrils down that nose is

00;42;08;26 - 00;42;26;09
Patricia Smith
half your face, dear Talk too loud, dear Stay out the sun You fool around Get blacker than you are What you too proud to settle for That ordinary man can't be too late real soon Dear press those naps And don't you tell me that you plan on yelling about that Black Lives Matter mess, dear, who the hell do you think you are, dear?

00;42;26;09 - 00;43;05;05
Patricia Smith
Who in the hell do you think you are, dear? Someone who woke up without a son and spurned and spun the blues. The singer moaned so loud the record skipped to save itself Dear, done so wrong dear friend, let us in the lard Dear wonder, could a matchbox hold your clothes Your child's been scraped up off the boulevard since then Ain't seen yourself Do you suppose some rebel yell can find you Hit you hard There's someone who has chosen just to rust instead of breathe Here's how they lie to you Your child will keep on dying And you must keep punching play to watch him Blue and blue until he trends.

00;43;05;19 - 00;43;54;21
Patricia Smith
Then he's a photograph who laughs at you and rips himself in half. I rip another page in half, dear, dear and start again dear floaters bloody kin dear Flood it next door while tumultuous Your mouth Dear dear mute contrivance graceless Drudge dear hexed dear Lurch and pirouette dear flame facade dear Langston Zora Louis Josephine Dear migrant on a greyhound stand upright dear, edgy citizen, dear craze carrying There's Still A Nigger in the neon light Dear George, Trevor and Brianna breach a mirror There's someone who woke up without a sun Dear woman wounded by the things you hear Dear anyone who wakes up without the sun.

00;43;55;18 - 00;44;01;15
Patricia Smith
Thank you all very much.

00;44;01;15 - 00;44;15;04
Stasia Walmsley
Thank you for listening to this edition of the Providence College podcast, and thank you to our producer, Chris Judge. I'm Station Wamsley. Check in on Mondays for new episodes available everywhere you get your podcasts.