Friends, Pádraig here — we are awakening your Poetry Unbound feed to share this brilliant episode from the newest season of On Being, which is well underway. Conversations on love and loss, comedy and ecology, social creativity, poetry, and more all await you in the On Being feed — subscribe now and don’t miss out.
And — Poetry Unbound Season 8 is in production and will be arriving this winter. And now...
This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it.
Clint Smith is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed, but he is first and foremost a poet. He and Krista discuss how his various life chapters have been real-world laboratories for him to investigate the entanglement between language and the intelligence of the body — and the related entanglement between history and place. His poetic sensibility has singularly opened readers to approach a generative reckoning with American history — on whatever side of that history our ancestors stood.
Clint Smith has a way of making reckoning possible at a humanizing, softening, bodily level — in the marrow, you might say, of our bones.
Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and many other honors. His poetry collections are Counting Descent and Above Ground.
Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
Selina Nwulu — Replay
John Lee Clark — Self Portrait
Kay Ulanday Barrett — Pantoum for recital when my mom said, don’t let them see you cry
dg nanouk okpik — In a Lock of Hair
On Poetry and Patronage: An Invitation to Love Us
Benjamin Gucciardi — The Rungs
Rowan Ricardo Phillips — Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same
Alexander Posey — The Dew and the Bird
José Olivarez — No Time to Wait
Safia Elhillo — Ode to My Homegirls
Poetry Unbound — Season 7 Trailer
Ada Limón with Krista Tippett — “To Be Made Whole”
BONUS: A conversation with Lorna Goodison – and the humans behind Poetry Unbound
Danusha Laméris — Bonfire Opera
Rumi — You wake the dead to life
Naomi Shihab Nye — I Feel Sorry for Jesus
Victoria Adukwei Bulley — not quiet as in quiet but
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley — small talk or in my hand galaxies
Dan Vera — Norse Saga
Solmaz Sharif — Self-Care
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