Line/Breaks
Clint Smith * Track #12 On Counting Descent
Download "Line/Breaks"
Album Counting Descent
- #1Something You Should Know
Clint Smith
- #2What the ocean said to the black boy
Clint Smith
- #3Ode to the Loop-de-Loop
Clint Smith
- #4Ode to 9th & O NW – Washington D.C.
Clint Smith
- #5Counting Descent
Clint Smith
- #6A lineage
Clint Smith
- #7Ode to the Only Black Kid in the Class
Clint Smith
- #8Ode to the End-of-Year 6th Grade Picnic
Clint Smith
- #9For the boys who never learned how to swim
Clint Smith
- #10Beyond This Place
Clint Smith
- #11What is left
Clint Smith
- #12Line/Breaks
Clint Smith
- #13When Mom Braids my Sister’s Hair
Clint Smith
- #14What the cathedral said to the black boy
Clint Smith
Line/Breaks by Clint Smith
Performed by
Clint SmithAbout
This poem is dedicated to Dead Prez’s song “Last Days Reloaded” and the line “taking my own life / into my own hands,” which made Smith come to understand the function of line breaks better than the books he had been taught in class ever had.
Line/Breaks Annotated
In their song,
“Last Days Reloaded,”
when Dead Prez said,
taking my own life/
into my own hands
it was the first time I
understood line breaks.
It wasn't The Odyssey.
It wasn’t Hamlet.
It was when stic.man told me
how police had made
a mockery of his home.
Mrs. Johnson had never
spoken of it this way
when she explained
it at the board,
how you could capture
disillusion & agency
in the span of one breath,
this duplicity of danger,
this split tongue.
This language that cannot be
contained by a single
space.
Line/Breaks Q&A
Who wrote Line/Breaks's ?
Line/Breaks was written by Clint Smith.