Wednesday March 13th Bennington welcomed poet Patricia Smith to Tishman to read for the first Poetry at Bennington event of the Spring semester.
“Patricia Smith is the author of nine critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Unshuttered (Triquarterly Books, 2023), and Incendiary Art (Triquarterly Books, 2017), which won the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and the LA Times Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House, 2012), winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House, 2008), a National Book Award finalist. She is the 2021 recipient of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by the Poetry Foundation, and a 2022 inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. A Guggenheim and NEA fellow, Smith was a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.” (Bennington Events Page)
Michael Dumanis introduced Smith to the crowd of students in Tishman stating all of her achievements. He then left the podium to her by saying it is a privilege to host this wonderful writer.
Smith was as enthusiastic as the crowd and encouraged people to ask questions at the end, though her official Q&A had been earlier that day in the East Academic Center.
Smith read from her various poetry books, most notably Blood Dazzler from 2008, her most recent book Unshuttered that came out in 2023, and from a thick packet of papers she flipped through to find some unfinished poems.
The poems she read were about growing up on the South Side of Chicago, motherhood, and pickles stuffed with peppermint sticks. She read a few poems from her most recent book, Unshuttered: Poems, while displaying the images on the screen behind her. The book is beautiful prose containing the stories crafted from photos in Smith’s twenty year collection of 19th century Black men, women, and children. She showed us a young man in love, a young woman posing for her first photograph, and two women avoiding each other’s eyes.
Near eight o’clock, when the reading was supposed to finish up Smith asked the audience if we could hear a few more. The audience for the most part was respectfully enthusiastic with polite clapping and nods but one person from the first row shouted out enthusiastically: “We can go late!” to which Smith gave them a look and asked the room “Who is this?”
After an eruption of laughter and titling the loud audience member “Chad Bennington” she continued reading a few more poems. One was about the various hurricanes that took place in 2005 but showed them as a dysfunctional family.
While she tried to find a happy poem to end the reading on, Smith commented that people ask her why her poems are sad, doesn’t she write them when she’s happy? To that she says that when she’s happy she’s out being happy. When she’s not, she’s doing this. She motioned to the pile of books and papers on the podium.
When Smith decided it was time to take her leave it was around 8:16pm but no one in the audience, especially Chad Bennington, minded.
You can read her poems by buying her books in the bookstore. There was also a table of books at the reading and Smith stayed to sign copies.
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