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Carmen Giménez Smith

Visiting Poet

Carmen Giménez Smith

The timely, searing poems of Carmen Giménez Smith insist on confronting America’s xenophobia and systemic racism. Describing Giménez Smith’s most recent collection, Be Recorder (Graywolf, 2019), the National Book Awards committee praised the ways in which her poetry “turns the increasingly pressing urge to cry out into a dream of rebellion—against compromise, against inertia, against self-delusion, and against the ways the media dream up our complacency in an America that depends on it.” Giménez Smith is the author of five additional collections of poetry, including Milk and Filth, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and celebrated by Publishers Weekly for the way that its images “challenge classist, consumerist, and socially polite forms of feminism." Giménez Smith teaches English at Virginia Tech. She also co-directs CantoMundo, serves as publisher of Noemi Press, and is poetry editor (alongside Stephanie Burt) for The Nation.

Select Poems

I’d once have left

brown behind

having already

left the tribe behind

and her tongue

and the garb that made me

theirs behind because it felt

like leaving hoi polloi behind

to finally put behind the chola

in my mother’s tongue

lingering in quiet deep vowels

behind meant I could leave

behind inferiority complex

not really but in theory 

I tried to leave my eden-dreams

behind but they stuck to my shoe 

because of my anarchic spirit

I leave behind dignity

so the angel inside me

stays behind me too

along with my poison pen 

never mind I’ll need that 

anger was my primary breathing

apparatus for so long 

what a mixed blessing when it worked

I’ve learned the most from the cracked 

once I broke into pieces

now I break into wholes

—excerpt of "Be Recorder"

I was light from the mouth from every part of me

I was of the earth or a scar in the earth rent through

the ruins of late civilization and bubbled from it and

became a saint’s reptilian spirit and I could taste

the wheat and coal and gold like a trinity of bounty

and I was vapor like a smog that becomes a wraith

over the city then back to its animal form decompressed

and atomized into its past life as star and I was that animal

truth the spirit I had dreamt about being more cloud

and star then given I was just the density of water

a reciprocity in and out the fade of my fugitive

substance going south and the yearn for decadence

disappears in the annals yet leaves a taste in the mouth

metallic and lime the sense of dissolution and I was speed

and insistence to reset the orb of gravity I was risen from foam

necessitated by colony sired in violence exported as luxury

—excerpt of "Be Recorder"

Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes in my head.” Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize for the sight in my eyes.

—Susan Briante 

I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,

not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t

upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like

to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,

or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you 

because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing

for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),

but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing. 

Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.

I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at Kroger.

I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.

I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.

I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.

Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.

I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me

an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,

when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into

a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask

that we get started. This is our first step toward world domination.

About Carmen

Personal Website
Poetry Center Reading Dates: November 2020