"“Can poetry hurt us?” the sixth grade class of Lillie C. Evans School in Miami asks Patricia Smith in her poem “Building Nicole’s Mama.”
"I think the answer is yes.
"Not simply because Toni Morrison tells us in Beloved that anything dead coming back to life hurts. But also because when I thought I was dead, when a man raped me the night before my twenty-first birthday in my college dorm room, when I didn’t know how to be part of the world or how to reenter a world where there’s nothing people won’t do to each other, Patricia and her poems hurt me back to life.
"...When you grow up in poverty, in a family of refugees that speak little to no English, in a community where few graduate high school or go to college, defeat and death are the only promises you know can be kept. Victory, I thought, couldn’t ever be ours.
"But Patricia clocked me.
"She taught me that we must win in this life because how else can we live? Winning is showing up. It’s finding a way. It’s fighting the fight until your knuckles bleed and your bones break and still you realize your spirit can go on swinging.
"She taught me that poetry hurts if we dare to write the poems we need to persist—if we see the poem as incantation. As wildfire. As rebellion. As a palm pressed against the widest wounds. A window drawn by the mind in a room with no exit. Poetry hurts when those who this land said were never supposed to be poets marshal poems as bricks hurled against a glass ceiling, as bricks in the house we are building for each other. Poetry hurts when we employ its every province—grammar, syntax, sound, meter, image, figuration, abstraction—to look at ourselves in the light and say, however we can, what it is and what it means to be human in that slippery moment because, once the saying is said, we must deal with what we see and not the mythologies and illusions that bring us comfort or reason to remain complicit or subservient to the kind of blindness that constitutes much of existence.
"Being Patricia’s student, being a witness to the miracles she makes, taught me not only how to be a poet determined to investigate what has otherwise been ignored, what has been misrepresented or deliberately subtracted from history by orders of the powerful, but it also taught me how to be a person. She taught me that the poem is never any better than the person, and that in the aftermath of violence, I didn’t just need to examine the how and why of violence, but to examine the how and why of compassion, of empathy, and to do so with an open heart willing to see what it can’t ever unsee, willing to know and interrogate the production of knowledge itself."
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