Patricia Smith, Teahouse of the Almighty, selected by Edward Sanders. Coffee House Press. 2006. Paper, 114 pp. $15.00.

It was more than a little surprising when a slam poet won the 2005 National Poetry Series. The NPS does not often slam.

So when Patricia Smith, four-time individual champion at the National Poetry Slam got the NPS nod, both Slam and Series worlds did a double take. After all, in 2000, Harold Bloom made his infamous proclamation in the Paris Review that Slam was “the death of art.” What’s changed since then?

Smith’s NPS winner, Teahouse of the Almighty, is certainly not the death of poetry. Though her first three books arrived in the early Nineties with comparatively little attention, her newest effort has garnered praise from both the Slam and Series worlds alike. And for good reason: it is one hell of a book.

This collection certainly challenges the poetry mantra of art for art’s sake. Further, the poems in this collection take on a sense of social and political responsibility that does not weigh down the language—the Achilles’ heel of slam. On the contrary, Smith’s ambition enriches her work and forces the reader to evaluate the poet as difference-maker.

Take for instance her first poem, “Building Nicole’s Mama,” written for a sixth grade class in Liberty City, Miami. “Building” is a poem that shows what poetry can do for the kids who seem to need it most.

I ask the death question and forty fists
punch the air, me! me! And O’Neal,
matchstick crack child, watched his mother’s
body become a claw, and 9-year old Tiko Jefferson, barely big enough to lift the gun, fired a bullet into his throat after mama bended his back with a lead pipe.

Smith herself is not so far removed from these children as say, an upper-middle class recently-graduated twenty-two-year-old doing Teach for America, and she reads the children a poem about her own “hard-eyed teenager.” A student asks if he is dead yet. That child’s question is the intersection of the two worlds Smith brings together. Smith’s son is an issue that often arises in this book. In the poem “Scribe,” she describes the genesis of her son’s prison nickname:

They bring him their imploded dreams, letters from their women-in- waiting tired of waiting. One deadline, he spins
impossible sugar onto the precise lines of legal pads, pens June/moon dripping enough to melt a b-girl’s hard heart.

The speaker/Smith (these two internal worlds are more intertwined here than in the poetry worlds of most contemporary poets) admits that “as a fellow poet, I envy my son, this being necessary.” Smith believes her son’s poems, written for men behind bars, are more useful and have a greater utility than her own poems, crafted and edited into book form. She has given us a poet torn between production and productivity—a poet torn between Series and Slam.

And while Smith is not the typical slam poet, she is the archetype. She is not manipulated by her sensitivities to the struggles of the world at large. The key is balance: her poems are deftly crafted while simultaneously leaping off the page and into the mouth, ears, and soul of the reader. Smith seems to warn the Series reader of Slam’s necessity in “Stop the Presses”:

There are no soft stanzas
in this city of curb sleep and murdered children. We need soft words for hard things, this silk brushing the inevitability of rock.

Smith, however, is not solely occupied with the problems of the world. She has strong narrative leanings and tends to allow her own person into the work. “To 3, No One in the Place” is just one of many poems written as a way of coping with failed marriages and a son in prison. In that poem, Smith, the storyteller, tells us all:

By 30, I had set fire to the names of two husbands.
Everything I crooned was pissed and indigo. Now I’m warbling beneath a shifting layer of 40, bound to a sad stash of ballads anyone with a steady tongue and half a dream could sing.

One cannot look away from the necessity of these poems, their sheer urgency and risk. One feels that these poems need to happen. They need to be read and studied, and they need to be heard. The poems read with the volatility of Smith’s stage presence; however, one would be hard pressed to admit that they are better on the page than they are on the stage—and not because these poems are necessarily lacking, but because Smith is a poet and a performer. This collection, however, is vocally fierce while remaining tender to the renderings of the human experience.

The poems exude a sheer sense of musicality, as anyone who has ever seen her perform could attest. Smith is a speech pathologist’s wet dream. She starts the poem “My Million Fathers, Still Here Past” with the line “Hallelujah for grizzled lip, snuff chew, bended slow walk, and shit talkin’.” This is no glittery lyricism. This is hard-edged, street-wise, hip- swaying word magic. You can hear the same bravado in “Hallelujah With Your Name”

I was 12, clacking knees, high-top
All Stars with flap tongues, a wad of grape bubble plumping my cheek

And perhaps, after all, it is only that necessary bravado that has divided the Slam and Series poetry worlds. Those divides have been blurring for years now in spite of resistance from poets on both sides. If Slam’s bravado once forced Bloom to decry the death of poetry, Teahouse of the Almighty’s move toward hybridity can only serve to erase those boundaries between poets and slam poets—spoken word poets and academic poets. After all, Smith reaches deep into a core of humanity with these conscious, moving, and unquiet poems. We may not always need poets who are trying to save the world. We do need, however, poets who will never turn from what disquiets them. We need poets willing to confront the tumult of reality and dance in its wake.