On Poetry as Historical Record, the Legacy of Colonialism, and Depicting Disaster in Verse

Lit Hub is excited to feature another entry in a new series from Poets.org: “enjambments,” a monthly interview series with new and established poets. This month, they spoke to Dorsía Smith Silva. Dorsía Smith Silva is the author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry Press, 2024). She has received scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She serves as poetry editor of The Hopper and is a professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras.

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Poets.org: Poeticizing large-scale disasters is complex and careful work, especially when the disaster is both fresh in the public’s memory and ongoing. In Inheritance of Drowning opens with “What the Poet Is Supposed to Write About a Hurricane,” an acknowledgment of this complexity but a commitment to bear witness throughout the poem, which functions as an ars poetica.

How did you approach the heavy task of writing about a mass tragedy, and what are your thoughts about the power of poetry to bear witness?

Dorsía Smith Silva: I think I was able to process the traumatic aftermath of Hurricane María by writing about my feelings and experiences in several notebooks. At the time that I was writing (this was right after Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017), I had no idea that I was composing poems. I was just writing vividly and candidly about the dire situation.

It took time for me to return to these notebooks and reflect upon what I had written. And when I returned to them, I was able to approach what I recognized as poems with a certain precision as a writer—not as a person that was in the middle of a traumatic event. I really don’t think I would have been able to have the emotional distance that one needs to revise a poem well if I had approached the notebooks earlier.

Nevertheless, it was difficult to revise the poems because I thought of how Puerto Rico was devastated after Hurricane María, and Puerto Rico is still suffering in many ways. Yet, I also thought that nothing will change if writers stay silent. There is a history of writers using poetry for social transformation and that is one of the central messages of In Inheritance of Drowning. I also believe that if we do not tell our stories, then who will?

Poetry can be an outlet for us to keep memory, record events, and experience the intensity of events, especially historical ones. In Inheritance of Drowning bears my firsthand testimony of how Puerto Rico was affected by Hurricane María and confronts the painful colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.

I think bearing witness is a marriage between the personal and political. Two significant poetry collections that show personal and political perspectives are Martín Espada’s Floaters, which highlights the problems immigrants have at the U.S.-Mexico border, and Patricia Smith’s Incendiary Art, which explores the horrific murder of Emmett Till and racial violence in the United States.

Yet, I think poetry does more than just carry the weight of certain historical moments and encounters that poets want to convey. It is more than a regurgitation of events. Poetry allows readers to have an intimate and complex examination of lives and sit with questions that wrestle with bearing witness.

Are we historical witnesses? Cultural witnesses? Political witnesses? All three? It is this attempt for the reader and poet to arrive at reclaiming the power of witnessing that helps poetry transcend time.

Poets.org: In Inheritance of Drowning is reminiscent of another book about a massive natural disaster that devastated a community of color: Patricia Smith’s 2008 collection Blood Dazzler, which tracks the destruction wrought by Hurricane Katrina. Did this work have any influence on In Inheritance of Drowning?

DSS: I composed the initial drafts of several of the poems in In Inheritance of Drowning right after Hurricane María struck Puerto Rico. Since I did not have electricity in my area on the island for several weeks, and the delivery of goods was unreliable, I read the poetry books that I had at home in my little personal library and used them to inspire me.

Unfortunately, I did not have Patricia Smith’s powerful collection in any of my bookcases. When I finally had time to sit and explore Blood Dazzler, I had already completed In Inheritance of Drowning.

Blood Dazzler and In Inheritance of Drowning are definitely in conversation with each other, though, especially how they navigate the multiple layers of trauma after a hurricane and the half-hearted response by the U.S. government to aid BIPOC people after a natural disaster. Both texts also convey the widespread destruction of powerful hurricanes. These are fearless collections that intersect climate change, environmental racism, trauma, and loss.

As I reflect upon about the influences on the collection, I think M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! had a profound impact. NourbeSe Philip deftly weaves water and trauma throughout Zong!, especially as the book shares the true account of African slaves who were thrown overboard for their owners to claim the insurance money.

In Inheritance of Drowning also has various representations of drowning that are linked to trauma and a part of Zong! is incorporated into two poems in my book: “Drowning in 5 Parts” and “In Inheritance of Drowning.” NourbeSe Philip also utilizes the white space on the page and transforms language to frame and unframe the slaves’ stories, voices, and deaths.

I think this is a brilliant and masterful way to approach literature. I tried to take a similar leap by playing with form in “While Black” and “Where Loss Begins at the Border.” Every time I revisit Zong!, I find a new way to approach poetry and think of the many ways BIPOC people have drowned and still are drowning.

Poets.org: The poem “Litany” employs anaphora and repetition. The listing is symbolic of residents’ attempts to prepare. Could you tell us more about your choices to employ these literary devices in this poem and elsewhere in the collection?

DSS: In “Litany,” I wanted to employ these devices to represent the repetitive nature of preparing for a hurricane during hurricane season. Once Hurricane María was forecast to make landfall in Puerto Rico, we were repeatedly told by newscasters and the governor of Puerto Rico to gather supplies, secure our homes, and fill the bathtubs with water. This warning was drilled into our heads because the news kept repeating the same dire message.

After a while, it felt like we were stuck in a system of rote behavior and cognition because we were preparing for a hurricane and not really understanding the true impact that it could have. I think many of us were on autopilot.

We were preparing for Hurricane María just like we had done in the beginning of September when Hurricane Irma whipped Puerto Rico on September 7, 2017, and we wondered how many more times we would have to prepare until the end of hurricane season on November 30.

I also wanted to link the repeated words in “Litany” to the repetitive words that one usually chants in church. Those words usually bring healing or peace, but they can also be a prayer seeking help.

In this poem, the repeated words may bring comfort to the speaker as they may serve as a distraction from the impending destruction that the hurricane will bring. They may also bring a sense of relief as the speaker may think that by preparing for the hurricane, the speaker will stay safe.

I utilize repetition in “While Black” to emphasize that Black people are being murdered because they are Black. The point is to show how many cases there are in the U.S. where Black people have been killed for being Black.

Repetition is used in “Antes/Después María” to indicate how life in Puerto Rico dramatically changed after Hurricane María. Many businesses were destroyed, and some closed because of the lack of electricity. The rivers also turned brown, and many fields were gone. It was a painful time, since the land was brown for miles. There were no patches of green.

Thus, our lives have become measured in some ways by the question, “Do you remember that building/school/river before Hurricane María?” I think people may have some understanding of that feeling when you think of how things were before the pandemic, and how we are now. Life is never the same.

In the title poem, “In Inheritance of Drowning” the word arrived is mentioned in the first line of the first three stanzas. I wanted the poem to have a certain rhythm and a particular thread throughout the stanzas. The word arrival also highlights how the landing of colonial forces have decimated Black and brown people.

This arrival is linked to Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy which explores how Black people have to confront colonialism and violence as they move across different homelands.

Poets.org: Many of the poems in this book illustrate the uncategorizable nature of water—both a savior and a killer, as well as a point of sociohistorical intersectionality (i.e., water as the scenes of Columbus’s blundered voyage and the site of the Middle Passage). How does poetry hold space for multiplicity in a way that is unique from other literary forms?

DSS: I love that poetry allows room for multiple interpretations. Sometimes, our brains are hardwired for an absolute answer. We want to know whether the answer is x, y, or z.

Poetry removes all of that and asks us—really encourages us—to sit with the metaphors, similes, and other types of figurative language. We wrestle with the line breaks, imagery, punctuation, diction, and the form of the poem.

In the end, readers may bring different emotions, feelings, and perspectives to a poem, which may be completely different from the author’s interpretation. Yet, who is to say who is accurate about how to “read” a poem when poetry offers exciting discoveries and meanings?

With poetry, there is also a dynamic energy in interpreting and reinterpreting a poem. I am thinking of how Jericho Brown created the poetic form of the duplex in The Tradition, and how Diane Seuss reconstructed the sonnet in frank: sonnets.

I think poetry is evolving to the point where poets are willing to take more risks and merge forms (hainka), disrupt forms (broken villanelle), and embrace audio-visual poetry. I also think that poetry is becoming more essential, especially as it pushes the boundaries of our ways of interpreting literature, events, and contemporary society.

Poets.org: What are you currently reading?

DSS: I am enjoying from unincorporated territory [hacha], from unincorporated territory [saina], from unincorporated territory [guma’], from unincorporated territory [lukao], and from unincorporated territory [åmot] by Craig Santos Perez. These poems fascinate me, and I am discovering many important similarities between Santos Perez’s homeland of Guam and Puerto Rico, especially the United States’ legacy of colonialism.

Plus, I am learning about the history of Guam, which propels me to read more poetry books that incorporate history.

Poets.org: What are your favorite poems on Poets.org?

DSS: I have too many favorites! There are several poems that I think are brilliant and moving, but here are some that I return to over and over again: “Harlem” by Langston Hughes, “Folding a Five-Cornered Star So the Corners Meet” by Li-Young Lee, “Notes on the Below” by Ada Limón, “Hotbed 66” by Nikky Finney, and “Maps” by Yesenia Montilla.

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“enjambments,” a monthly interview series produced by the Academy of American Poets, will highlight an emerging or established poet who has recently published a poetry collection. Each interview, along with poems from the poet’s new book, and a reading by the poet, will be published on Poets.org and shared in the Academy’s weekly newsletter.