Amanpour and Company

Parenthood evokes powerful emotions from fear to joy.

It can be a tricky experience.

Clint Smith took these overflowing feelings and channel them into poetry.

The pieces he has done are all in his new book, aboveground.

Here he is.

Michel: Thanks so much for talking with us.

Clint: so good to be back.

Michel: A lot of people know your work from your essays, your journalism, your reported work.

I know your recent book was about the importance of memory.

What would you say this book does?

This particular book?

As a parent myself, there are times it just broke me.

I was just devastated thinking about the beauty, the terror.

The bigness of all the feelings.

There are also a lot of ideas about history and how all that fits together.

What do you think this book does?

Clint: I think you described it perfectly.

Part of what it is trying to describe is the messiness and inconsistency of parenthood.

How parenthood is this thing that is filled with so much love and levity and silliness and joy my and is also incredibly scary.

Incredibly difficult and anxiety inducing.

I am interested in how we hold all of those realities together, how parenthood is this thing that shows you parts of yourself that you are proud of and also it shows you what you are not so proud of, that you might be ashamed of that was not revealed to you until you became a parent.

This book is really thinking about the human experience, holding the love and joy and sense of wonder alongside the sense of despair and fear and what it means to be human amid the backdrop of catastrophe.

Michel: I get the sense that you started this book when you first learned your wife is pregnant.

Clint: absolutely right.

As I write about in the book, it was not guaranteed that my wife and I would be able to have children.

We were given a less than 1% chance by doctors.

So, we had an emotionally rocky fertility journey.

When we did conceive, it felt so miraculous but so fragile.

So amazing and also so precarious.

Part of what I wanted to do is use Poems as a way to mark moments in time, to track how I was experiencing, how I was processing within myself, these moments that felt both exciting and scary, all at once.

I just kind of kept going as my child went from being an embryo to a baby to a toddler, to this little human that runs around and bumped their head on walls everywhere.

For me, poetry is the act of paying attention.

Part of what I think it does is allow me to pay attention to my children the world around my children, the way that I have changed as my children have come into the world, how they have recalibrated my sense of the world.

For me, poetry is a really helpful means of creating time capsules within your life, almost archiving the different parts of your life so that you have these breadcrumbs you can use to trace how you have been and how you have thought about your life.

Michel: I would love it if you could rate a poem that speaks to the early part of hoping and just the idea that this person might not get here.

I loved, by chance.

Clint: by chance.

The doctor said you were impossible, and you arrived anyway.

It doesn't mean they were wrong, it means you defied science.

What is the difference between science and numerical other than discovering new language or something we don't understand?

The day we brought you home, I stayed up all night and watch you sleep in your bassinet.

I was afraid if I close my eyes, you would vanish.

A long time ago, your grandmother escaped a war in your great-grandfather bought in one.

You come from a history that is arbitrary and cloaked in love.

You come from a land mine.

You come from children who shared their bread when they didn't have to.

You, from the parachute that didn't open.

Michel: When I say that you broke me, this is one of the ones that broke me.

I thought, you are so right.

I am not trying to turn your art into journalism, but your experience describes that of so many people, all the what if's.

It also does something else, which is, you are talking about things that some people experience and other people don't have to.

I am thinking here about, it is all in your head.

If you could talk about a little bit of it.

Your wife's experience, your experience as a family in an emergency room when she had a health complication, her feet were burning.

So you wound up going to the emergency room, the doctors said, was dismissive.

You went home, the pain increased, and then she wasn't having it.

If I could get you to pick up where he walked out of the room and told the new nurse to send us home.

Clint: he walked out of the room and told the nurse to send us home.

The next day, the heat in your mother's legs grew into a blaze.

We drove to the hospital and asked to see a different doctor.

The nurse said, that would be possible.

Your mother's restraint fractured.

She had never allowed someone to tell her the ground isn't there when she feels the soil 'neath her feet.

She leaned over the desk, I am not asking you, I am telling you, I need to see a different doctor.

the nurse, now anxious, disappeared into the hall.

We were called to see a different doctor and that Dr. ran the test that your mother asked for.

What they found occurs in one out of 1000 pregnancies.

She told us you needed to be delivered early, that waiting too long might mean to listing wish.

-- you extinguish.

I can't think of what almost happened.

Michel: It was remarkable to.

this.

I obviously didn't know the story, but not to turn your art into journalism, but I think people now have become aware that the maternal mortality rate for black women is many times that of white women.

The death rate of black infants is many times that of white infants.

And frankly, it doesn't really matter if you have insurance or don't, if you are of means or not.

I was just wondering how all that came into play when you were thinking about this, or did it?

Or was at this moment with your life, or did all that history come back in?

Clint: you keep saying you don't want to turn it into journalism, but I think what is the common denominator is that both are the process of documentation.

Both journalism and the palm are the process of paying attention to a moment, a feeling, idea, phenomenon.

And naming it, excavating it.

In this sense, it is a sort of personal journalism, personal excavation because this was written in the midst of this moment where we have many black women who are coming to the fore , like Serena Williams most notably talking about their experience, the difficulties of their experience in childbirth and the way they weren't believed when they talked about what was happening to their own bodies during their pregnancy.

From medical authorities.

Then we have all of this research that comes out that demonstrates the way that no matter what your socioeconomic status is for your educational status, lack women consistently are not believe I doctors and nurses and other parts of the medical field when it comes to naming and talking about what they are experiencing, what they need and what sort of medical interventions are necessary in order to prevent something from happening to the mother or the baby.

I was reading all of this in the news and also watching it happen to the person I love most, and it felt important to write a poem from the perspective of the partner as well, to describe the sense of anger, anxiety, helplessness that one feels when you see this person that you care so much about and you know they are carrying your child and you see them dismissed over and over and over again, knowing that this isn't something they were making up.

Isn't psychosomatic.

That my wife knows her body, knows what is going on, and this is an experience that black women experience over and over again.

I wanted to dig into that moment to explore it and to name what was an experience that wasn't simply an abstraction, something that exists in the context of medical journals, that something happening right in front of me.

Michel: Do you think that poetry allows you to say things that your other writing does not?

Clint: I think what poetry does is it allows you to wrestle with a question and not have to come up with an answer.

It is something -- and you can begin the poem with one question and ended with new questions and I think that it is this space that is different than writing an op-ed or essay.

When I am trying to make an argument or assertion, that sometimes in poetry it is simply the act of reflection, meditation, asking questions of a world that is full of them.

I appreciate the space to wrestle with these questions and not feel pressure to present myself as an authority figure whereas if I have a specific set of ideas or opinions when really the poem is the space where I am trying to make space for those ideas and questions for myself.

Michel: I think you'll children are four and five now.

When they rate this book 20 years from now, what do you hope they will take from it?

Clint: I hope they know how much I love them.

How much I think that they are hilarious and fun.

And, that it was scary and it was hard and exhausting.

I think I want my kids to understand the fullness and complexity of the world and understand the fullness and complexity of their parents.

That we are two humans who are doing our best and we want them to be safe and loved and cherished and that we are also imperfect people.

In an imperfect world.

I hope that they feel love and generous and extend to us the grace that we try to extend to others.

Michel: Clint Smith, your latest book is, above ground.

Thing so much for talking with us.