Instead, I can only yoke together antonyms to convey anything of their particular vibration: their joy-dread, hunger-contentment, holy-profanity. I’d like to unwrap some brand-new words, oddly pronged words, to convey their wary intelligence and open heart. I’d like to invent or order up new adjectives to describe the startling originality and ambition of Smith’s work. Smith calls this form a “dozen,” referring to “the dozens,” the insult game the boys are playing as well as the number of stanzas in the poem. The poem keeps building this way each stanza growing by one line until we arrive at the last one, 12 lines long.
The poem, titled “how many of us have them,” follows two boys (“yes, black - on bikes - also black”) as they tease each other, affectionately hurling abuse back and forth. Early in “Homie,” a new poetry collection by Danez Smith, I encountered a form I’d never seen before.
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