In Retrospect: An Interview with Patricia Smith, 2026 Debut Chapbook Prize Guest Judge
This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Patricia Smith, who won the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry for her collection The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems, which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out their poetic processes. We sought to hear about core poems and fascinations which have shaped Smith’s body of work, from her early writing to her most recent compositions. With Smith’s poetry, “every book since her groundbreaking debut has been a fusion of form and feeling,” the National Book Award Judges said. Here, she walks us through her life in poetry thus far, from early musings about a fictional character to poems inspired by photographs.
Frontier Poetry: What was the first poem, published or unpublished, that you remember writing? What aspect of it do you look back at and appreciate the most?
Patricia Smith: I’m not sure these qualify as poems but—I’m an only child, and when I was young I filled dozens of those wire-bound composition books with a life that wasn’t so lonely. The writing was mostly reams and reams of prose, but when I was feeling particularly innovative, the musings would veer into my version of poetry—monosyllabic lines with hard rhymes of the June/moon variety. These stories/poems chronicled the continuing adventures of Erica Donovan, an insanely gorgeous head cheerleader/valedictorian/
FP: If there is a poem you could identify as the axle your very first collection, Life According to Motown, spins around, which poem would that be? What did the process of writing that poem entail?
PS: That would have to be “Sweet Daddy,” a poem I’ve written over and over again, in various versions, for practically every book. I love my daddy. Wait a minute—I LOVE my daddy. One of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do was write about him after his death—it’s like putting it down on paper would make it too real. So that was my first attempt. I had yet to learn that an elegy doesn’t mean you have to give the death the power in the poem. I think I managed to give the reader a glimpse into my dad’s huge personality, but I was still grieving, and the poem is darker than I meant for it to be.
FP: You’ve developed poems in response to photography throughout your career, especially in two of your collections. What did writing and publishing poems in response to and alongside Michael Abramson’s photography in Gotta Go Gotta Flow teach you about your poetic process? Where did that process differ or align with your process in Unshuttered?
PS: The poems in Gotta Go, Gotta Flow were incredibly easy, and lots of fun. I won’t tell you how long it took for me to finish the book, because you wouldn’t believe me.
My dad was a regular of those types of clubs, and so I knew those people. I lived in that kind of neighborhood. I knew the people who would party hard on Saturday night and show up—a little worse for wear—in church on Sunday morning. So the poems were fun, a celebration of a community not many people get to see. I also have been in love with persona poems from the very first time I encountered them, and those tiny glimpses helped hone my skin.
In Unshuttered, I had lived with those photos for years, used them as prompts (most successfully in workshops I held for Cave Canem), so each of the people in those 19th century photos had already become someone, not something. By the time I decided to feature them in a book, I had envisioned their lives. The poems were much more in depth than the ones in GGGF, so I had to take much more environment into consideration—not only the time, but the location, and what was going on in that location at that time. I also wanted to remind readers that there were people who were happy, despite the era. I wanted them to remember that there were gay people, although no one talked about them. We tend to think of the entire 19th century as a difficult and tenuous time for Black folks, and it was. But there were also normal lives being lived.
Yes, yes, there’s an debate about whether infusing these photos with voice amounts to exploitation. That’s a long discussion, and I’ve had it often. Thanks for not asking the question!
FP: In terms of the evolution of your collection, The Intentions of Thunder, could you briefly map out the stages your manuscript went through, from a starting point to the final draft?
PS: I just discovered that I left some poems out that I meant to put in! I went through every book—more or less meticulously—to pluck out my favorites (and, in some cases, other people’s favorites). My main concern was putting the earlier poems first. Because many of them were crafted when I was involved in the poetry slam, which meant they weren’t technically on-point, I wasn’t sure I wanted them to be the first thing the reader saw. I even tried to sneak and revise some of the first pieces, but my editor caught on right away.
Solved the problem by writing those little prose snippets at the beginning of each section to let the reader know what stage of my career I was in when the poems were written. In reviews of the book, that element seemed to stand out as a positive.
FP: Lastly, you’ve said you seek chapbooks with “a vibing wire running through the work, one that jolts and energizes me with no sign of letting go” for the Debut Chapbook Prize. How do you bring that electric energy into your own poems?
PS: I said that? LOL. That doesn’t come easy. It’s a sign that the poet has spent time with their own work—enough time to know what it needs to avoid being ordinary. I need something to not let me know—the narrative, the structure, the entry point, the music. Ideally, ALL OF THAT.
