The intent is unmistakable from the very first words: “anti poetica.” This is the title of the opening poem in Danez Smith’s Bluff, and it reappears twice more, a refrain both defiant and meditative. Smith’s commanding litany leads us through a cascade of negations — “no poem wiser than kindness”; “no poem free from money’s ruin”; “no poem in the winter nor in whiteness” — before landing at:
no poem to admonish the state no poem with a key to the locks no poem to free you
This is renunciation sharpened into resistance. Here, poetry is not a balm or a promise but a refusal — a rejection of poetry’s presumed power to resolve, to console, to liberate. Smith dismantles the idea of art as salvation, challenging the reader to reconsider what poetry can and cannot do.
The following poem, “ars america (in the hold),” refines this rejection into something fiercer — a battle cry, a demand. If creation itself birthed the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and its enduring aftermath, then, Smith proclaims, “kill the stars … kill all reason … kill god.” The invocation of an Amiri Baraka epigraph — “Warriors are poets and poems” — reframes poetry as weapon and poet as combatant.
Bluff opens with this charged repudiation, a lyrical rebellion against the limits of language and the myth of artistic neutrality. Yet within its defiance lies an unsettling question: If there’s no poem to free us, what remains? This inquiry shapes the entire collection, turning each verse into both a reckoning and a reckoning withheld. The result is poetry stripped of pretense, bristling with urgency, demanding to be met on its own unyielding terms.
The tone turns personal and scathing, as in “less hope”:
apologies. i was part of the joy industrial complex: told them their bodies were miracles & they ate it up, sold someday, made money off soon & now, snuck an ode into the elegy … they clapped at my eulogies. they said encore, encore. we wanted to stop being killed & they thanked me for beauty &, pitifully, i loved them. i thanked them. i took the awards & cashed the checks. i did the one about the boy when requested, traded their names for followers. in lieu of action, i wrote a book
“Someday” recalls Smith’s acclaimed poem “summer, somewhere,” which envisions a paradise for murdered Black boys. “The one about the boy” could reference many poems from Smith’s previous collections.
Bluff emerges as a counterpoint, positioning Smith at a pivotal moment. In “volta,” they declare: “i need a new bravery. i don’t want to live/a coward’s peace. where’s my mission?/what world comes if i use my hands?” These hands, once crafting poetic “tendered violence” for visibility, coin, and clout, now seek a deeper purpose.
Smith wrestles with being “a slave to slavery, it makes me a/salary, i wanted freedom and they gave me/a name.” Naming has always been central to Smith’s poetics, but what happens when identity labels — Black, queer — are weaponized by others? Who controls those definitions? In “on knowledge,” a black box stitched with white “I”s visually enacts how Smith — who writes “i” in lowercase — “helped patent/my chain, penned my pen.”
It’s time, then, not for ego but for action. Time for less joy, less boy — time to “move my mind/deeper into the dark/question of its use.” The last word in “on knowledge” is “action,” floating free from its black square, invoking artistic rebirth akin to Kazimir Malevich’s iconic work.
What does action look like? “Let me map you to oasis,” the book’s closing lines suggest. “Let me show you where/the weapons are.” An awakening, a call to arms.
But the book’s first word isn’t “anti poetica” — it’s “BLUFF.”
Can we take Smith at their word? Confession is always crafted. After three “anti-poetica”s and two “ars america”s comes a surprising “ars poetica.” Smith has always interrogated poetry’s utility, never shying from self-scrutiny. Even in 2015, they wrote: “raise your hands if you think/I’m a messenger. now this time/if you think I’m a tomb raider.” Their poems, fed up with mere beauty, demand action: “my poems are fed up & getting violent./i whisper to them tender tender bridge bridge but they say bitch ain’t no time, make me a weapon!”
What’s changed? The tone: where “Homie” was ecstatic, Bluff is grimly prophetic. Gone are “the window, the wind, the flowers, the hive,/myqueenmyqueenmyqueen!” and friends “whose names burst my heart/to joyful smithereens.” Instead, “my people ain’t even my people. their utopia/calls for my death & they dress for the occasion.”
The shift runs deeper, embracing not polarity but paradox — an “all-of-it-all-at-once” reckoning. In Smith’s poems of place, Minneapolis is “my murderer, my mother/-ship, my moose heart, my mercy.” It’s where George Floyd was killed and where “the beauty of the food drive makes me cry.” It’s home.
Cities, like selves, are multifaceted, containing protest and police, cowardice and commitment, money and kindness, looting and food drives. There’s no poem to free us — and no freedom from ourselves.
In the face of it all, what is hope — or despair — but a bluff?
I was wrong about the last words to leave the collection. I expected closure or redemption, some final synthesis to hold onto. But Bluff defies that impulse. It resists a tidy ending, instead insisting that reckoning is continuous, unfinished. The poems don't resolve — they resonate, echoing with unresolved grief, persistent beauty, and the ache of belonging to a world that is as brutal as it is tender.
The closing lines feel less like an ending and more like a door left ajar, daring the reader to linger in the tension, to sit with discomfort, to question what remains after the last page. In Bluff , there’s no easy comfort, only the persistent call to witness — to hold both love and loss, protest and mourning, survival and joy — all at once. It’s a stark, relentless vision, but also a deeply human one.
Perhaps that’s the final paradox Smith leaves us with: the impossibility of being whole in a fractured world, and the equally impossible refusal to stop trying.
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