Patricia Smith is a poet, playwright, journalist,
performer, and musician.
She is a four-time National Poetry Slam
individual champion.
And in 1997 she tied with Jimmy Santiago Baca for the Taos
Poetry Circus World Heavyweight Champion
for Poetry in what organizers have called the bout's most
controversial decision.
She collaborates with musicians and filmmakers.
Has been on tour with Lollapalooza
and has appeared on the HBO series Def Poetry Jam.
She co-wrote Africans in America,
a chronicle of slavery in the United States
and a companion to the four-part PBS series of the same name.
Smith is the author of three books of poetry, Life
According to Motown, Big Towns, Big Talk, and Close to Death.
She is currently at work on a biography of Harriet Tubman,
Fixed on a Furious Star, and a children's book, [? Aunt and ?]
Girl.
In her poetry, Patricia Smith makes a case for complexity,
not obfuscation but precise observation.
The complicated paradox of our human condition.
The Library of Congress uses the curious subject
heading "social problems poetry" in cataloging Big
Towns, Big Talk.
I do make the case that in her unflinching persona poems
and riffs on current events and tabloid headlines,
Smith exposes the single faceted narrative
as one of our foremost social problems.
With poems that speak in the voice
of a prostitute or a pedophile, from the perspective
of a man who holds a hospital staff at gunpoint because they
refuse to disconnect his dying son's life support,
or a mother who kills in the courtroom
the man who raped her daughter.
In these poems, Patricia Smith's subverts our identity
and subjects our moral core to question,
and she does it with style, with sonic twists
and rhythmic patterns and talks.
She puts the muse back into music.
Please welcome Patricia Smith.
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