Review: The Laurels Of Thunder (A Review Of The Intentions of Thunder By Patricia Smith)

By Hugh Blanton

 

Patricia Smith is one of the most lauded poets writing today and now she can add another laurel to her wreath—the National Book Award for her latest poetry collection The Intentions of Thunder. Intentions isn't really a new book, it's a collection of all her previous books of poetry with a few previously uncollected poems thrown in for good measure. The books are ordered chronologically and allows us to watch her progression as a poet over the years from 1991 until now. There was more free verse in the beginning and the shift to more formal verse later is not all for the better. Some of the poems she calls sonnets are sonnets only because they have fourteen lines and she just phones in the rhymes on a few of them. Many of her early persona poems were a delight, but in later years she rarely dares to inhabit another persona. While many of her early poems are like hyperactive kids dashing about and shrieking, many of the older ones are glum and jabbing a walking cane at an uninformed and uncaring world. In a 2023 interview in the Chicago Review of Books Smith said, "I realize that unrelenting trauma sells."

 

There's nearly as much sex in Smith's poems as in an EL James novel—even Kim Addonizio might think she needs to bring it down a notch. In one of her many Olive Oyl persona poems she describes Bluto's "cock veined as a horse's neck." There's even sexual reference in the non-sex poems—while wandering the Louvre in France she rubs the surfaces of the sculptures "including the marble cocks of towering deities." Then we get this cryptic verse:

 

     We know the record. As it taunts us we have giggled,

     considered stopwatches, little laboratories. Somewhere

     beneath the suffering clean, swathed in eyes and silver,

     she came 134 times in one hour. I imagine wires holding

     her tight, her throat a rattling window.

 

This was a study done at the Center for Marital and Sexual Studies in 1975 by Dr. William Hartman and Dr. Marilyn Fithian. They claimed the woman subject had 134 orgasms in one hour and if you're wondering how they knew she was having orgasms, so did Mark Miller of Seeds of Science who said, "The apparent 'records' are likely artifacts of flawed methodology rather than evidence of multiple orgasms."

 

Smith writes often of her son Damon who was incarcerated at the Middlesex House of Corrections in Massachusetts, especially how she dreaded his phone calls with his plaints and pleas:

 

     there's the grasping whiner who really 

     needs canteen money but never thanks me for raising his 

     four-year-old daughter. He's the single-syllable grunt, head

     scarred, grossly swollen from prison workouts, who I

     avoid mentioning to friends whose sons are waving grad

     school acceptance letters or touring France with their jazz

     bands.

 

Damon often mentioned to his mother that his cellie was threatening to kill him, that's probably why he took to bulking up in the prison's weight room. Smith says he eventually started making money in prison by writing: "They paying me to write love letters to their ladies./ I write poems if they rather have that,/ this one big musclehead brother everybody be sweatin/ even asked me to write a letter to his mama on her birthday." She even confessed to envy of her son's writing.

 

Smith recounted her visit to the sixth grade class at the Lillie C. Evans School in Liberty City, Miami in her 2006 book Teahouse of the Almighty. When she asked "the death question" she said "40 fists/ punch the air." It was a class of forty students.

 

     I am astonished at their mouthful names -

     Ladkinishia, Fumilayo, Chevellanie, Delayo -

     their ragged rebellions and lip-glossed pouts,

     all those pants drooped like drapery.

 

There are several mentions of drooped pants throughout Intentions, they become less as the books move along and fashion styles change. In one of the previously uncollected poems included here, "First Time Trying to Say Where My Son Was" she writes: "Who was that smoldering child with bumpy dreaded crown/ and drip sex walk, slouch denims with airy ass backing/ his knees, unlaced Adidas flopping, swallowing his socks?"

 

Unfortunately, Smith is imitated for her weaknesses more than her strengths. Her rhymes are often like quickly jotted song lyrics she dashed off before getting on to something else more important: 

 

     You ask him to succumb, he dares decline,

     the situation quickly falls apart.

     A weapon's raised to line up with his heart

 

     because he feels entitled to his spine.

 

That's from "Sagas of the Accidental Saint", which starts off with six pages of terza rima before morphing into other forms and blank verse and news story ledes. (Feels entitled to his spine?) The poem also devolves into gimmickry with nine pages of a single line repeating on each page, "The gun said: I just had an accident." Smith seems to believe America is beyond salvaging, but not beyond witnessing.

 

One of the previously uncollected poems here is a poem titled "70" (Smith turned 70 in 2005). Older poets try to outdo themselves when it comes to poems on aging and Smith prepares the younger generation for what they are in for when they reach the seventh decade: "Well first, it seems immeasurably unjust/ that no one clues you to this bombshell—you/ will lose your pubic hair!" There are the usual observations of graying hair, she mercifully spares us from inefficient digestion examination. While the younger poets are out there on their Instagram's exhorting each other to keep poetry dangerous and change the world, Smith knows better. "I am seventy years of witness that/ poetry can change your life, but changes nothing else." That's a refreshing bit of honesty that acknowledges it's been many decades since anybody has bothered to send a poet to the gulag for something they've written.

Hugh Blanton's latest book is The Pudneys. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.