Tracy K. Smith, the 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate, on Why Poetry Is for Everyone
Even if you haven't enjoyed poetry in the past, Tracy K. Smith, who just finished her term as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States, explains why poetry is, indeed, something that can be enjoyed by everyone. Smith, the Pulitzer Prize winning Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, underscores how poems encourage readers to feel.
During her tenure as Poet Laureate, Smith compiled an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, which she took to various communities around the country, including senior centers, prisons, and colleges. With this collection, Smith sought to reach readers who might never have encountered poetry before. She explains, "you don't need a new vocabulary; you don't need prior knowledge. All you need to do is read attentively and be aware of or alert to what you feel, what you wonder, what the poem causes you to remember or realize."
As readers, we all have emotions and memories to offer text. But why might we shy away from such an offering? Perhaps we think our responses are illegitimate. Smith addresses this concern by saying that "once people have permission to see that what they're noticing is valid, then they see all kinds of things in poems." She debunks the notion that poems are "rarefied objects for the select few."
She says her approach to readers is really just to say, "read a poem and listen, and listen to your reaction as well...you can get quite far on that. That's not the end of the road, but it's a pretty good journey that you can take." Instead of finishing a poem and wondering if you "got it," ask yourself if you liked the way two words sounded next to each other, or if an image stirred a sensory recollection. Imagine what a stanza might sound like read aloud in the different voices of people you love. Observe if a line made you shake your head, raise your brows, or widen your eyes. Did one phrase make you grateful? Did another make you fearful?
Of course, we might withhold emotions when reading because we are afraid. Perhaps even after putting aside the idea that our reaction is "wrong," the fear of confronting what the poem pushes up against persists. But Smith says that she wants to scare herself a little bit when writing a poem. For her, revelation in poetry means "coming close" to things that she dislikes: "mistrust, fear,” or even contempt. Considering emotions like these might unsettle us. But meeting questions that elicit anxiety, and doing so with an open heart, can be a productive challenge and a fruitful exercise.
When discussing her own body of work, Smith says the questions at the heart of her poetry are: “Who are we to one another?" "What do we do to one another?" and, "What's the fallout from that?" In Smith's first collected volume of poetry, Eternity (May 2019), these meditations swing from geographies as private as a home (a marriage between two people), to as public as a country (contemplating citizenship), or even to as enormous and humbling as the cosmos. (Her poem, "My God, It's Full of Stars," ends with "We saw to the edge of all there is-- / So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.") The titles of the distinct works mirror this motion: from The Body’s Question, to Life on Mars.
Smith stresses that her desire to write is in large part rooted in the emotional effect of reading poems. Enjoying poetry might begin with your asking what you feel yourself, and then seeing how a poem can help you grow. But it can also spur reflection beyond you. The first poem of Smith's book, Duende, is called "History." In the "Prologue" she writes, "This is a poem about the itch / That stirs a nation at night. / This is a poem about all we'll do / Not to scratch--." She describes that poem as a "breakthrough because it wasn't about private experience," and was instead, "thinking as part of a collective." Arguably, since each of us is part of a collective, we have a responsibility to open ourselves to one another through language. Reading poetry can help us do that.
It seems obvious that not everyone will experience a poem the same way. Particularly with writing about identity—racial or otherwise—a text runs the risk of alienating a reader. In "Study of Two Figures (Pasiphaë/Sado)," poet Monica Youn writes, "Revealing a racial marker in a poem is like revealing a gun in a story or like revealing a nipple / in a dance. / After such a revelation, the poem is about race, the story is about the gun, the dance is about / the body of the dancer—it is no longer considered a dance at all and is subject to regulation."
When I ask Smith how she writes about identity and if she ever worries about being confined to certain categories, she says she understands that markers of identity can become "permission for a certain type of reader to surrender, or shut down on a poem." But, she believes that there are more cases where "that's a failure of the reader than it is of the poem, as a work of art." Empathy ensues when a reader accepts the work as an invitation. Come with an open mind, bring your emotions, and your experience will be enriched.
In her more recent work, particularly Wade in the Water (2018), Smith considers her own racial identity, and what it means to be Black in America. I ask her if the 2016 presidential election affected her decision to more overtly consider race in her work. She answers, "I think it was the world," trailing off, when she adds, "I mean that Fall..." she describes feeling a shocking realization that the world wasn't as far from "these dark chapters as we imagined it was. Fears about safety that I didn't have on my active brain were present." How do we write poetry for everyone when the country is so divided? How can poetry serve us during dispiriting times? Perhaps the book that reflects a vision for universalizing poetry is one that prioritizes experiences that have historically been overlooked. In reflecting on the recent history of this country, Smith says she feels it is "impossible for a waking person to feel removed from a private consideration of race."
One poem, "Unrest in Baton Rouge," was inspired by a Jonathan Bachman photo. The picture captures the activist Ieshia Evans on July 9, 2016, as she offers her wrists for arrest during a protest against police brutality in Louisiana. Smith's poem begins with a jarring stanza, "Our bodies run with ink dark blood. / Blood pools in the pavement seams." Smith asks, "Is it strange to say love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak?" In the following couplets, Smith wonders in a haunting rhetorical question, "Even the men in black armor, the ones / Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else / Are they so buffered against, if not love's blade / Sizing up the heart's familiar meat?"
Even as Smith draws attention to a singular photograph and event, the words are situated in a universal question that invites all readers to pause: "Is it strange to say love is a language / Few practice, but all, or near all speak?" Disappointment lives here, but so does hope. We have a common mother tongue in love, we need only to enable and remember its meaning. Smith says she writes to find a "new circuit" for her thoughts, so that what she knows "as a citizen isn't going to get in the way of some other revelation." What we know, what we think we know, and what we are allowed to know are not prerequisites for encountering a poem. Just as Tracy K. Smith embraces new circuits in composing a poem, so may a reader embrace new routes for feeling and relating to poetry.
The cover of Eternity is tree bark. Annual growth rings billow out in circles, ballooning from a timber core. Traces in the wood of a tree can signal drought, excessive rain, injuries, pollution, or fire. The poems in each of the books, selected for this collected volume, are connected with enduring questions, some of which hold traces of threatening disaster. Bound to each other like branches, the poems grow up, down, and out with time. Smith says, "poetry speaks to life...and that's why it's important." And like the trees that produce the air we breathe, Smith's poetry is generous, doing precisely what she promises: "Poems can help you live," she says.
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