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.
Tiana Clark — My Therapist Wants to Know about My Relationship to Work
Joshua Bennett — Owed to Your Father’s Gold Chain
Abigail Chabitnoy — If You’re Going to Look Like a Wolf They Have to Love You More Than They Fear You.
M. Soledad Caballero — Someday I Will Visit Hawk Mountain
Rafiq Kathwari — Mother Writes to President Eisenhower
Caroline Bird — Little Children
Marilyn Nelson — The Truceless Wars
Richard Blanco — Looking for The Gulf Motel
Yusef Komunyakaa — Praising Dark Places
Hannah Emerson — Keep Yourself at the Beginning of the Beginning
Kyle Carrero Lopez — Ode to the Crop Top
Divya Victor — First Petition
Denise Low — Walking with My Delaware Grandfather
Rita Dove — Eurydice, Turning
Poetry Unbound — Season 5 Trailer
BONUS: An Invitation from Pádraig and Krista
Danez Smith — i’m going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense
Craig Santos Perez — Rings of Fire
Alberto Ríos — December Morning in the Desert
Yehoshua November — 2AM, and the Rabbinical Students Stand in their Bathrobes
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