On Danez Smith’s “Homie”

Graphic by Hannah Neubauer

Danez Smith’s talk about their third collection Homie began with a homage to their UW-Madison roots with the director of First Wave, Sofía Snow, who was in the same and very first cohort of the program with Smith. Snow introduced the event by inviting poets from the current First Wave cohort to perform their own poems before Smith. Setting the mood for the evening, their poems included themes of love, memory, and emotion.

Snow also performed her own poems that touched on her home, her mother, her father, and her upbringing. The beginning poets evoked emotion from the audience, receiving sounds of approval, remembrance, and praise. Danez Smith read from their poetry collection with the same sort of emotion, taking the audience on a journey of human experience. Their poems jumped off the page with their animated body language, humor, pausing, and interaction with the audience.

The poems chosen took the listener to a specific moment, not necessarily a place, and provided them an opportunity to peer in. For an instant, the listener could see into Smith’s story and feel the exact way they feel. While humor was used in just the right moment for relief, it also followed somber notes that resonated in between pauses and the quietness of the room.

Homie is an intimate account of human experience through the retelling of friendship, narratives of kinship, familiar feelings of love, and positions of comfort and discomfort. As I sat listening, I thought about the phrase that Smith kept repeating: “I wish I could write this down” and how it contradicted with the way that they performed their story. It was almost as if their story could exist outside of words. Their poems are so giving, allowing the audience to feel, and also know when to release, letting there be room for both humor and melancholy. [MAB6] When asked about where home is for them, they responded with “Home is where your people are” and after listening to Homie it would seem that their people live on in those pages. Smith is not apologetic in their nature they just exist and the audience they have written for exists too.