The Lightning Room With Danez Smith

In the third PANK queer issue, Danez Smith gave us two poems, ‘Mail’and ’10 RentBoy Commandments.’ Below, we discuss the violence that tries to stay hidden, the nature of performance, and the very same hands we use to pray to God.

1. Both of these poems have an undercurrent of violence to them, a fury that manifests itself in bruises, in hands around necks. This violence, enacted and repressed, does it come up often in your writing?

Violence has a tendency to show up in a lot of my work, but not always in gruesome ways. Sometimes violence shows up in sexy or innocent ways, sometimes with teeth and tools. It might even be in all my work, even if underlying it, it just waits for its turn on the page, waiting for me to ask “How would you like to dress today?”

2. ‘Mail’ is constructed via a series of increasingly terse and explicit letters, which take on both a sinister and confessional quality. It’s a fragmented poem of terrific implication- how do you choose how much to reveal?

That poem was a mess and a half to write. I wrote it several years ago after sitting down and looking at my work and wondering if I had ever told the truth within my poems (and it was a resounding Heeeeeeellllll No!). I let it all flow out, making no choices about how the voice appeared, just listening to it and letting it say more than needed. The sinister tone is something I struggle with in the poem; it came from a ridiculous level of guilt, and not knowing how to manage that, there was a bite to the confession. I think there is a gentler poem that wants to show itself, but I’m not sure I was (or am) distanced enough from the subject to hear such a soft voice.

3. To the men who pay them for sex, the narrators of these poems seem to become stand-ins for someone else: the wife, the son. Can you talk at all about this dynamic?

For these men, the body, the rented body of the RentBoy, is an escape. The body becomes a place of hiding, a world very careful and discreetly constructed. In that hiding, there is the understanding that the escape is only temporary. It’s that fleeting nature of the body that makes it feel like a stand in. These men are coming to the RentBoy for something unspeakable and divorced from their ‘normal’ selves, but that doesn’t mean that they stop being who they are at all other times.

4. ’10 RentBoy Commandments’ evokes a set of dueling voices, one from a place of hard reason, the other, more urgent and emotional. Can you discuss the friction here?

That tension is the battle between my many selves when I was playing the role of RentBoy. There was the reason to keep going always accompanied by reasons to quit, almost like those little cartoon devils and angels that pop up on your shoulders when you have any assorted dilemma. I wanted those two voices to co-exist without feeling like one had to come out the clear winner. I didn’t want it to be a choice between right and wrong, but between right and another right.

5. Listening to the reading of this work, there’s a terrific, burning intensity that sounds perpetually on the verge of boiling over. Do you perform your work often? How much of a poem’s meaning draws from its performance?

I do perform my work often, I was introduced to poetry through performance. I think the meaning has to inform the performance. If I wrote a love poem for my mother, I’d be silly go somewhere and read it with my veins popping out my neck and my fist curled up. Performance is just like writing, where in one we try to find the right words to act as the medium for an idea and in the other, you are taking those words and trying to give them the right voice to enter the world and be received as they should. Every poem has its own voice, it’s up to the speaker to remain as open and clear a medium as possible.

6. Where would you leave your most threatening note?

Above public urinals. I see too many men leave the bathroom without even entertaining the idea of washing their hands and there is a special place in the dungeons of my soul for them. I would love to scare them into cleanliness. Maybe in a church restroom, in big red letters that say, “You pray to God with those hands?”