In the summer of 2016, doctors told author Clint Smith and his wife that there was only a 1% chance they could have children. Two months later, his wife was pregnant. “We bought a heart monitor and checked it every morning to see if the embryo was still there. It felt precarious because it was so unlikely,” Smith tells Esquire.

It would get more precarious five months into the pregnancy, when his wife began experiencing burning sensations in her legs and feet that wouldn’t go away. The first doctor they saw dismissed the symptoms as “all in your head” and refused to do any tests. Fortunately, they insisted on a second opinion, and discovered an uncommon condition that, left untreated, could have caused their baby to “extinguish in a womb of poisoned blood,” as Smith writes in a poem.

Clint Smith, a staff writer at The Atlantic, tells this story in his new poetry collection, Above Ground—a powerful examination of what it means to be a parent in our age of anxiety. From the elation of dance parties in the kitchen to the exhaustion of sleepless nights, he captures the fleeting moments of early fatherhood that can change your perspective on life. Readers of his first collection, Counting Descent, and his #1 New York Times-bestselling nonfiction book, How the Word is Passed, will find similar themes of duality here, “where we experience moments of joy alongside and simultaneous to catastrophe,” as he says. Plus, you’ll see how having children changed the way he thinks about slavery, which in turn impacted his nonfiction writing.

Today, Smith and his wife are parents to a five-year-old son and a four-year-old daughter. I spoke with him over Zoom while one of my kids was recovering from a respiratory virus, and while one of his was coming down with something else.


ESQUIRE: Before your son was born, were you anxious about becoming a father?

CLINT SMITH: I became a father earlier than I anticipated. When the doctors told my wife that she had less than a 1% chance of getting pregnant, we were mourning the loss of the future we had imagined together. When we first got that news, I was 26, and I thought we would have a longer period of time together before we had kids.

We knew we didn’t have much of a chance, but we said, “Let’s try.” And when she did get pregnant, I had to do a lot of recalibration. I was like, “You better get ready! These are the cards you’ve been dealt.” There’s no such thing as being fully prepared as a parent, but I wanted to be as prepared as one can be.

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It sounds like you had a very calm and thoughtful response. All I remember is sheer panic and reading every book on parenting I could find.

Oh, to be clear, I was terrified. I think that’s an inevitable part of it. There was self-examination, but there was also, “Oh shit, how am I going to do this? What does it mean to be a good dad? A good partner?” There was a lot of wrestling with questions, a lot of fear. It was surreal.

How did hearing your son’s heartbeat for the first time change you?

In many ways, that’s when it became real. Which also meant it became more scary, because of the prospect of losing something more tangible and three-dimensional, something I’ve heard and felt. Prior to that, it's a line on a stick, it's a doctor telling you something, it’s a tiny little sack on an ultrasound. But when you hear the heartbeat, it becomes so much more. It was exhilarating and incredibly fear-inducing, because it felt like a form of communication in some way. The idea of being stripped from this emerging soon-to-be-human—the idea of losing that—was scary.

In “Passage,” you mention reading to your son in utero. What did you read to him, and later to your daughter, and why was that important for you?

At first I felt kind of silly. I was like, “What am I doing? I’m reading to my wife’s belly. This kid doesn’t hear this.” But they do hear sounds, and as they get older, you see how their movement responds to sounds and light, and it feels like the early iterations of a conversation. Every kick felt like a reassertion of, “I’m coming, Dad.”

We read all sorts of children’s books that had been handed down to me, like Dr. Seuss. I read them poems. I read them early versions of my dissertation, which must have been terrible for them. There was not as much movement when reading my dissertation proposal as there was when reading Yertle the Turtle.

Did you write the poems in Above Ground in the moment, right after things happened? Or did you look back on them later?

It happened in all sorts of ways. Some poems were written in the notes section of my iPhone when I was up at three in the morning, trying to make sense of how this became my life, or when I was bopping around at two a.m., pushing a stroller around the block ten times.

But yeah, most of these poems were written as the things were happening, because for me, poetry is the act of paying attention. It is both the creation of art and the mechanism through which I do my best thinking. For me, the poems are time capsules, little archives that allow me to capture a moment or a feeling. And excavating the granularity of those moments makes me more appreciative of those moments as a whole, so the next time a version of that happens, I'm able to more fully be there with it. The period of time during which your kids are both physically able and emotionally willing to have a dance party with you in the kitchen is pretty brief. I think writing poetry helps me hold onto those moments in the same way that a photograph does.

Poetry is the act of paying attention.

When did you realize you wanted your next book to be about fatherhood?

I’ve been writing these poems since before my kids were born, and when this book comes out, my son will be almost six years old. When my wife got pregnant, I didn’t say, “I’m going to write a book about fatherhood.” But poetry has always been the way I process and make sense of the world, so that just felt like the natural thing to do with this very new part of my life.

I was writing a lot of these poems while I was writing How the Word Is Passed, which is a book about how we remember slavery in America. I was thinking a lot about the way slavery impacted children. I’m standing in this cabin at the Whitney Plantation, and hearing the wood moan under your feet, seeing the light slide in through the cracks above you, and just imagining the enslaved people who lived in this place. I closed my eyes and imagined what it would be like if I woke up the next day and my children were gone, and I had no idea where they went, or who took them, or if I would ever see them again. I realized that this is the omnipresent threat that millions of enslaved people lived under every single day of their lives. At any moment you could be taken away from your husband, your wife, your children, your parents, for no reason at all.

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You’ve said that having children changed your perspective on the impact of slavery. Is that what you mean?

Growing up, the way I thought about the horror of the institution of slavery was through the spectacle of physical brutality. The beatings, the whippings, the hangings. But I never fully understood family separation as one of the central cruelties until I had my own kids, and then my understanding of the stakes changed in a fundamental way.

Does writing poetry help you “hold gratitude and despair in the same hands” without the despair taking over?

I think that that’s fundamentally at the core of human experience, even beyond the context of parenthood. Our lives are animated by this constant cognitive dissonance, this whiplash, this dialectic tension where we experience moments of joy alongside and simultaneous to catastrophe—both in our personal lives and geopolitically. And as much as the book is about fatherhood, it’s also about that idea.

Fatherhood is the most awe-inspiring, wonder-inducing, joyful thing you may ever do—and it’s so hard, and it’s so exhausting. It shows you parts of yourself that you love, and parts of yourself that you're not proud of. When it became clear that I wanted to write a book about parenthood, I wanted lots of poems about laughter and joy, but I also wanted to be honest. Parenthood is not just watching your kid go down a slide and smelling flowers and making pancakes and French toast. It’s much more difficult than that, raising children in a moment of so much social and political tumult, of climate catastrophe, of geopolitical instability. And that’s what parents have done for millennia. That’s the name of the game.

Parenthood is not just watching your kid go down a slide and smelling flowers.

And that tension between joy and catastrophe is a running theme throughout your work, correct?

It’s something that’s a theme in all my books. Even in How the Word is Passed, I’m interested in duality. America is a place that has provided unparalleled, unimaginable opportunities for millions of people across generations in ways that their own ancestors never imagined—but it has done so at the direct expense of millions and millions of other people who have been intergenerationally subjugated and oppressed. Both of those things are the story of America. You have to hold both of them together.

My first book, Counting Descent, is largely about coming of age as a young Black child, and about black childhood and adolescence amid the early days of Black Lives Matter movement and this continuous spectacle of Black death at the hands of the state. But while all that was happening, I was meeting and falling in love with the woman who would become my wife. It's always—all of it—happening together. There are certainly moments when grief overwhelms the joy and wonder, and there are moments when they overcome the despair. It depends on the day. It depends on the hour.

In “Trying to Light a Candle in the Wind,” you write, “I worry / that we are welcoming you into the flames / of a world that is burning.” Why do you think we continue having children in a world that feels like it’s falling apart?

It’s a very legitimate question to ask, but also one that doesn’t depend on the idea of rationality. Prior to 100 years ago, childbirth was one of the most dangerous things that women could do. Many women died during pregnancy. Even up until the early 20th century, so many children died in early infancy. And then coming back to my own research over the last several years, how do you make that decision as a person living in slavery? But people did, because that’s what people have always done.

And that is not to diminish the new concerns about an expanding global population and climate change. They're all legitimate concerns. But this has always been part of what it means to be human. You are taking an enormous risk in bringing a child into the world—a risk for you, a risk for them, a risk for the world. But today, it is safer to bring a child into the world than it has ever been, even if it still feels incredibly precarious. Obviously having children is a deeply personal decision, and each person should make the best decision for themselves and their family and their partner. And if people decide not to have children for all these reasons, it’s completely legitimate. But I don't think the answer is for all of us to stop having kids.

I don't think the answer is for all of us to stop having kids.

In “Cartography,” you write that you “think about how difficult it is for any of us to / admit that we’re not who we used to be. / That something in us has been lost / over time and will probably never / come back.” I remember feeling that way after my first daughter was born, wondering who I was turning into and whether I’d ever be the same. Among other things, is that what you’re referring to, the way parenthood can change someone into a different person?

This is the thing—and I hope you don't take this as a dodging of the question—but that's what I love about poetry. I love that that is your reading of it, because whether or not that was my intention in writing it doesn't matter. A thousand people can look at the same poem or painting or photograph and see a thousand different things. That is the remarkable thing about art. An author or painter can have an intention, but once you put your art out into the world, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t belong to you.

I have high school kids who DM me all the time who are assigned Counting Descent for homework, and they’re like, “Mr. Smith, what does the cicada mean? What is the slide? Is this a metaphor?” I always thank them for reading, but then I ask, “What do you think?” Too often we talk about poetry like it’s this puzzle that we’re supposed to solve, like a formula or geometric proof that we’re supposed to figure out. But really it’s a feeling. What is the poem saying to you? What does it make you feel? I love your reading of [“Cartography”], and I’m not going to tell you if I meant it like that or didn’t, because I think that’s the whole point of this art.