Last week Bluff by Denez Smith was published. It is fitting indeed that Graywolf, based in Minneapolis, has shepherded this collection, which focuses on the city as a place of protest after the murder of George Floyd. In the sprawling, eight-page poem “Minneapolis, Saint Paul,” Smith brings us the unbearable news. Though their poetry is powerful/brilliant, Smith doesn’t always try to make Bluff pretty—“it doesn’t feel like a time to write when all my muses are begging for their lives.” Smith’s honest about the limitations of what poetry can do and, like all poets, seems to even chastise themselves for writing it—“i’m a/ coward, a slave to slavery, it makes me a/ salary.” Or consider this chilling line—“they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore.”
There is so much to admire in this searing manifesto of a book. Bluff, even while acknowledging the shortcomings of art, simultaneously affirms it. Here’s “anti poetica”:
https://poets.org/poem/anti-poetica
Congratulations, Denez!
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Author: Denise Duhamel
