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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.
Christian Wiman — All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs
Carlos Andrés Gómez — Father
Ellen Bass — Bone of My Bone and Flesh of My Flesh
R.A. Villanueva — Life Drawing
Zaffar Kunial — The Word
Dilruba Ahmed — Phase One
Layli Long Soldier — WHEREAS my eyes land on the shoreline
Chen Chen — I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party
Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill — Ceist na Teangan (The Language Issue)
Aracelis Girmay — Consider the Hands that Write this Letter
Tayi Tibble — Our Nan Lets Us Smoke Inside
Paul Tran — The Cave
Philip Metres — One Tree
Roger Robinson — A Portable Paradise
Seán Hewitt — Suibhne is wounded, and confesses
Meleika Gesa-Fatafehi — Say My Name
Lucille Clifton — song at midnight
Chris Abani — The New Religion
Molly McCully Brown — Transubstantiation
Natalie Diaz — Of Course She Looked Back
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