Commencement Tracy K. Smith

TRANSCRIPT

Amelia Worsley:

Okay. Welcome. Thank you so much for being here. My name is Amelia Worsley and I'm Assistant Professor of English here at Amherst College.

So before we begin, I'd like to acknowledge that the place where we gather today is the Nonotuck homeland in the Kwinitekw Valley, which has always been, and is still today, a crossroads of multiple native nations and a place of cultural exchange. I would also like to acknowledge the Nipmuc and the Wampanoag homelands to the east, the Mohegan and Pequot to the south, the Mohican to the west, and the Abenaki to the north. It is important to note that these are not merely historical relationships. They are enduring connections between contemporary Indigenous peoples and the place where Amherst sits.

So it is a great honor for me to introduce our speaker today, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, and writer, Tracy K. Smith, two-time Poet Laureate of the United States. In addition to being one of America's most revered poets and writers, she is also the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and a professor of English and African and African American studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Science.

Professor Smith is the recipient of a great number of honors and recognitions, including a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship. Appointing Professor Smith to the role of Poet Laureate, which she held from 2017 to 2019, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden called her a poet of searching, whose work travels the world and takes on its voices, brings history and memory to life, and with directness and deftness, contends with the heavens or plumbs are inner depths, all the better to understand what makes us most human.

Smith is a poet who speaks micro cosmically and macro cosmically, personally and politically, at the same time. In the poem, My God, It's Full of Stars, which my students love, for instance, when Smith asks us to ponder the question of whether aliens exist, she also asks us to meditate on the surprising relevance of that question to our individual lives here on earth. "Perhaps the great error," Smith writes, "is believing we're alone, that others have come and gone - a momentary blip - when all along, space might be choc-full of traffic, bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding, setting solid feet down on planets everywhere, bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones at whatever are their moons. They live wondering if they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know, and the great black distance they - we - flick her in."

Aliens might be all around us, Smith imagines, and we just might not have the right equipment to register their presence. So too, she hints, might the spirits of the dead be also living among us, unseen in a world choc-full of invisible traffic. These others might also symbolize the absent people we have once known or who populate our unconscious without our knowledge. And who else might be living among us, unseen and unheard? Smith invites us to wonder. Can they see us or are we invisible to them too?

Tracy K. Smith is the author of five acclaimed collections of lyrical, urgent, luminous poetry, including The Body's Question, Duende, Wade in the Water, and Such Color: New and Selected Poems. Her first commissioned opera loretto, Castor and Patience, premiered in Cincinnati last year. During her laureateship, Professor Smith sought to expand poetry's accessibility, by bringing poems and conversations about them, to places where Poet Laureates haven't always presented their work. She brought poetry to churches, community centers, rehab centers, prisons and jails in rural communities, in small towns across the United States. As part of this project, she edited American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, an anthology featuring the work of 50 contemporary American poets.

She also launched the American Public Media podcast, The Slowdown, which offers a poem and moment of reflection every weekday, another beam of light sent through time and space. In her memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, I couldn't help but notice, since we're in Amherst, that Smith speaks, among a great many other things, of reading a poem in her fifth grade class that gave her a feeling of a flash of recognition, as if she were "privy to magic". That poem was by Emily Dickinson, a being whom I like to imagine is standing flush against us here today, bursting at the seams with energy along with many other spirits who've excitedly gathered to hear this talk today.

Professor Smith's upcoming nonfiction book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, part memoir, part meditation, explores America's past and present challenges, to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another.

For our talk entitled, Where Are We Going? Who Is Traveling With Us?, please join me in welcoming Tracy K. Smith.

Tracy K. Smith:

Thank you so much, Amelia. I feel like you've invited the kind of convergence of souls and presences that I'm always hoping for.

I feel like if I put that there, you won't be able to see me, so I'll go like that.

And it's a really perfect segue to what I'm excited to talk about today, which is that sense of we that lives in my work. I think many of us who write poetry begin from the need or the wish to claim a self, an I, and the lyric poem gives us ample opportunity to step into that authority, even if it is something we gain by wish, by act, or by assuming or asserting a kind of connection to an other imagination that can help.

But I'm also interested in the different forms of community that poets summon. One we that's been important to me is we that is aligned with the community of Blackness. I think of it as a we or an insular sense of community presence and purpose that animates the Black lyric tradition poetry in this country by African American writers, which I believe has long been invested in amplifying, correcting, and guiding our sense of the presence, the nature, the contributions and the voices of Blacks in this country. Sometimes that's a documentary project, and sometimes it's about extending the personal investment to make space for those others whose experience is shaped in large part by the kinds of exclusions or misconceptions that are often directed toward Blackness.

But more and more, I'm also interested in a we that is made up, not only of those chosen family members that we might seek to align ourselves with, but something like the all, the big, willful, contradictory, ambivalent and worse us that we humans make together, wherever we are. And oftentimes the where we are that's on my mind is America. And so, much of what I'm writing about in the nonfiction that I'm going to share a little bit of today, it has to do with trying to summon courage to participate willingly in a we that royals with questions, fears, and a kind of willful silence in many places.

Poetry is a really good tool for doing that because it invites us to move closer by way of image, sound, and the imagination, the memory toward lives that have great bearing upon our own, but that the terms of the American imagination have given us many opportunities to move away from. So, To Free the Captives is a book that seeks to name for myself some of the factors or facets of the American imagination that facilitate that corralling of ourselves from one another, and also, in a way that might be similar to the poem that Amelia excerpt did, which is about saying there are presences here, and if I can find the right terms of imagination, I can understand what we have to do with one another. Summoning that kind of credulity to imagine that there's a vocabulary of awareness and even action or willingness that can bring us closer to one another.

It's a book that's written in many different tones and registers. Part of it has to do with turning toward the historical archive to find evidence of the lives of my grandparents and great grandparents and the generations that precede me. Part of it has to do with turning toward that archive to find what's missing in the little database of documents and records that I have access to as a Smith or, further back, a Brown on my father's maternal side, and to say, "Well, these other men who served in World Wars I and II had experiences that can tell me a little bit more about what shaped the lives of my ancestors.

But part of it is also about saying, who else that might be gone is invested in the ongoing work of building, restoring and learning essentially to love and care about one another? Because I live with so many ghosts. So many people I love who are gone, I like to imagine that they have crossed the mortal divide into an elsewhere that might be closer than we imagined to the here and now that I inhabit.

I'm also thinking in spiritual terms, or by way of what I think of as the vocabulary for the soul. And I think I'm willing to do that because I'm that terrified about the moment we live in and the impasses that seem to appear at every turn, telling us, those of us who have different value systems are not going to be able to come to a form of harmony. I can't accept that as an answer. And so poetry, the lyric imagination and my appetites as somebody who is invested in history, those are tools that are coming to my aid in trying to figure out a way forward.

Maybe what I'll do is start with a couple of poems that maybe open up gently a sense of this we, and maybe also demonstrate some of the ways that a lyric poem or documentary poem might invite convergence of perspectives between the poet, the reader, and far flung others. And then I'll read a few passages from To Free the Captives, perhaps interspersing with more poems. I do that because I don't think that there's time to read some of the longer historical anecdotes or family anecdotes, so you'll have to get the book in the fall when it comes out. But I'll start with an early poem called Flores Woman that appears in my second book. And it opens with an epigraph from an article that appeared in Nature magazine in 2004. So I'll just read that quote.

"A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago. Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one meter tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people made tools, hunted tiny elephants, and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area."

That species of human is named Flores man. And there's so much drama in that little epigraph to my mind. The scientific phenomenon that kind of accounted for their small size, and proportioned to the environment, the island environment, is called endemic island dwarfism. And then there's also the narrative of encroachment, right? They lived alongside modern humans who were colonizing the area. And so there's a story of fate that begins to be mapped out.

I also love the way that the word just in the phrase. "They lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores, just 18,000 years ago," changes the sense of the framework that we're operating in. And indeed, that's a pretty short amount of time in terms of grand history and human and environmental history.

So I wanted to kind of move close to that story somehow and to imagine that it might be possible to listen for the voice of someone I call Flores woman. And so that's what this poem seeks to do. It operates by way of a number of definitions.

Flores Woman. "Light: lifted, I stretch my brief body. Color: blaze of day behind blank eyes. Sound: birds stab greedy beaks into trunk and seed, spill husk onto the heap where my dreaming and my loving live. Every day I wake to this. Tracks follow the heavy beasts back to where they huddle, herd. Hunt: a dance against hunger. Music: feast and fear. This island becomes us. Trees cap our sky. It rustles with delight in a voice green as lust. Reptiles drag night from their tails, live by the dark. A rage of waves protects the horizon, which we would devour. One day I want to dive in and drift, legs and arms wracked with danger. Like a dark star. I want to last."

What I love about writing poems that kind of guide me toward other voices is that I know I will fail. I know that there's no way that I can tap into the actual language value system wishes and hopes of this other human, even somebody in our time. But it invites or requires me to imagine, kind of like sitting down at their feet and wanting to listen in a humble and receptive way. And it also, what I find is, it alerts me to feelings that I have in my own life that I haven't found reason to bring into language. And that feels like an important thing to listen and look for.

I want to read one newer poem and then dive in a little bit to a passage from To Free the Captives. And this is another poem that is interested in crossing a distance or a divide, but it's not something that spans history. There was a period... Well, we live in this period. This poem emerges from the consternation and grief that I feel as a citizen witnessing so much violence against unarmed Black citizens in our country, this pattern or tradition, if you will. And I started to write a poem from the voice or perspective of somebody who I imagined was being apprehended.

And my poem failed. I couldn't get out of the mindset that I wanted, that I insisted upon protecting this person from harm. And so my poem became a series of things that I knew at the outset I believed and that I believe are correct. But the poem wasn't teaching me anything. It wasn't struggling, even against my own sense of my own correctness. And if that's happening in a poem, I get the feeling that perhaps I'm not thinking in the right way. So what allowed me to kind of revive this poem was the decision to invert the perspective and to write from the perspective of somebody with power, authority, who was apprehending this person.

The poem became a series of questions, and what was startling to me was the fact that I had, ready to go, a vocabulary of suspicion, a vocabulary of assumption, a vocabulary that kind of understood the terms of regard that often determine how people like me are perceived in moments of conflict.

And I'll say one last thing about this poem before I finally read it. It had no title for a little while. And then I was returning from a trip abroad and going through customs and I said, "Oh, I know what my poem is called. It's called The United States Welcomes You. And I think what I'm seeking to do with a choice like that is to acknowledge all the many borders that separate us from one another, and to think about what gaze characterizes the way we're encouraged to look across such divides.

The United States Welcomes You. "Why and by whose power were you sent? What do you see that you may wish to steal? Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies drink up all the light? What are you demanding that we feel? Have you stolen something? Then what is that leaping in your chest? What is the nature of your mission? Do you seek to offer a confession? Have you anything to do with others brought by us to harm? Then why are you afraid? And why do you invade our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute as ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess? Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?"

One of the poets whose work has just continued to teach me, even in the decade since I was a student in her classroom, is the great Lucille Clifton. And her poems are invested in planetary values of regard and stewardship. They're invested in celebrating and honoring and defending the sanctity of Black life in this country.

And they're also always reminding us that we are accountable, to something beyond that which we imagine ourselves to be accountable. So what we can do and what we can get away with in our lifetimes and on this planet isn't the end of the story. I feel like in some ways that's a space where that poem I just read ended. But I'm going to shift gears.

So this is a book that's coming out in November. I'm reading from manuscript pages, pages I don't think I've read aloud yet to others, but I'm going to read one... I'm going to read three brief excerpts from the last chapter in the book. And I guess one image system that aligns them is water. But I think they're also invested in these terms of connection, accountability, and maybe even a form of support or aid that we can activate if we can acknowledge it.

So this begins in a moment of meditative practice, something that for me developed in 2020 under the excoriations of that difficult year. And for me, that practice became a form of dialogue, visual and telepathic dialogue with others, that I feel to be ancestors or guides of some kind. So if you could get your head around the logic or illogic or counter logic of that, you'll find yourself in the headspace of these few passages.

"I lean back and cover myself with a quilt. I close my eyes. I enter the rhythm of breathing. Gradually, there is this sense of depth, a farther field aswirl with ashen dust, against which the shape of a black mountain range is defined. I've arrived, I think to myself, as if the journey has been arduous, as if there is some exhaustion I must be seeking to appease with the good news that there is no further distance left to cross. Those dark human silhouettes, the ones that arrive in meditations like these, I am met by a forest of them. They rise as if from the ground, as if they have been congregating here together, resting or working at something, close to the soil. They grow tall and draw near."

"My body, I can feel it there on my couch, in my house, where it is propped on pillows and warm under the weight of a quilt. My body rests at ease, safe at home, while the soul of me roams. When I tell the familiar figures what I need, assurance, peace of mind, courage, strength, do you know what they do? One by one, they climb down into me, down because I am reclining there like a low boat before them. They flood in. The quiet channels of water and the reeds growing up through mud are like the labyrinthine waterways where rice grows or once grew. Perhaps rice is something the tall forest of figures here knows or once knew."

"But there's no hurry. No sun to get out from under, no winter about to descend. Nothing follows on our heels. Nothing size waiting for us to arrive. Nothing hollers out impatient from the banks. Nothing scolds. And yet, I believe that some labor awaits, that they are here to reveal a task not yet complete."

"I drag my hand through the water, shallow runnels swell up and pucker the smooth glassy surface we skim. The air is still. The boatman's shoulders and arms move in a rhythm I teach myself to breathe to, purposeful, unhurried strokes. Have I asked him to lead? Have I asked to be led? From where I am, behind him and below, my eyes can't graze his face, which anyway would be a soft, unfeatured plane, not clearly seen. He doesn't need to be held, caught, claimed by my gaze. He is his own. This goes for the others too, even the ones I somehow carry."

The next passage moves into history, and so I thought maybe I would open up that space by reading a poem or two that's connected. So this is a poem, it's a found poem called The Greatest Personal Privation. It is a poem written, using language that appeared in a series of letters written back and forth by members of the Charles Colcock Jones family who were a slave owning family in 19th century Georgia, coastal Georgia in South Carolina. Jones was a Presbyterian minister. He was trained at Princeton Theological Seminary. And at the beginning of his career, he and his wife wondered whether they should get out of this slave holding business. And like many people in their position, they developed a rationale that allowed them to kind of not change anything.

But there came a moment, when one of the families that was enslaved to them was, to their minds, causing trouble. And they had to figure out what their decision was going to be. Some of the women in this family were named Patience, Phoebe. There was a woman named Jane. There was a man named Titus, Castor. And ultimately, they broke up the family. They sold them away.

There's not a lot in the historical record that bears witness to the voices of Patience, Phoebe, Castor, Titus and others, and so my listening into the language of those letters was a willful attempt to hear a counter narrative, in the voices of those that were enslaved to the Joneses. And this is the poem that emerges from that.

And I'll tell you that if I'm trying to write a poem in this manner, again, kind of like the last poem, if I have an agenda, the poem usually fails. But if I can allow myself to listen as if these documents, no matter who wrote them and the circumstance of time, together can be willing to admit a larger truth, then I can sometimes hear something that feels credible or useful to the moment and I'm listening within. And whenever I'm listening to history, it's because I'm worried about the present.

So this poem uses those letters and this is what I imagine Patience and Phoebe and others might say. Oh, I'll read you a little excerpt of Mary Jones's letter, written long before the conflict I just described. She was away from home, convalescing from an illness, and she sent a letter to her cousin, lamenting the fact that she was missing these women who took care of her. And she said, "The greatest personal privation I have had to endure has been the want of either Patience or Phoebe. Tell them I am never, if life is spared us, to be without both of them again." And I think of how chilling a message like that would've felt.

The Greatest Personal Privation. "It is a painful and harassing business belonging to her. We have had trouble enough, have no comfort or confidence in them, and they appear unhappy themselves, no doubt from the trouble they have occasioned. They could dispose of the whole family without consulting us, father, mother, every good cook, washer, and seamstress subject to sale. I believe good shall be glad if we may have hope of the loss of trouble. I remain in glad conscience, at peace with God and the world. I have prayed for those people many, many, very many times."

"Much as I should miss Mother, I have had trouble enough and wish no more to be only waiting to be sent home in peace with God."

"In every probability we may yet discover the whole country will not come back from the sale of parent and child. So far as I can see, the loss is great and increasing. I know they have desired we should not know what was for our own good, but we cannot be all the cause of all that has been done."

"We wish to act. We may yet. But we have to learn what their character and moral conduct will present. We have it in contemplation to wait and see. If good, we shall be glad. If evil, then we must meet evil as best we can. Father, mother, son, daughter, man. And if that family is sold, please, we cannot, please, we have got to, please, the children, mother and father and husband and all of you, all, I have no more. How soon and unexpectedly cut off, many, many, very many times."

This is a passage. In some ways, it kind of comes out of nowhere. It's preceded by sort of a present tense or recent present tense memory of family reunion in New Orleans in 2005. But this is a passage that is exploring the Clotilda slave ship. And I think maybe the passage itself explains a little bit of the history, but there's a recent film called Descendant, the documentary that I think is also a really powerful and compelling encapsulation of this story, which is ongoing.

"But because something is always watching, always circling, often veering in close to sniff, before loping off again for a time into the distance, I'll return to history, to a gathering of a different tenor. This story is about a boat with bodies in its hold, a boat called the Clotilda, sailed in 1860 from Mobile, Alabama, to the Dahomey Kingdom of Ouidah, in what is today Benin, West Africa, sailed there and back, in the fashion of other such boats, galleons with peculiar names. Antelope, Juno, Volunteer, Spy, Jamaica Packet, Two Brothers, Baltimore, Fly, Planter, Indian Prince, Africa, Success."

"I'll tell it in broad strokes. I'm sick of stories like this, and there are so many submerged still, waiting for the waters to recede, waiting to be properly believed. the Clotilda grazed the coast of Florida, cut east through the Caribbean, then southeast farther still, until after 10 weeks at sea, the anchor was dropped in the bite of Benin, and the crew scuttled off after plunder. 110 shackled men and women and children were hauled aboard and lodged below, the way, with a good shove, a splinter can be lodged where it does not belong, and thus rendered painful and difficult to extract. The white wake of that ship, at its good clip and chased by wind, churned and hacked and slapped and marked the surface of the water. And what I need you to remember is that that water made its way, over time, to mingle with other water, every wake, every ripple, every burble of surf, the entirety of all past and future sea."

"Timothy Meaher, the ship's owner, sat at home, rubbing his hands together. His endeavor is sometimes described as a wager, a rich man's joke. Told this way, he becomes the kind of child wealth allows some to remain, a boy puffed up in a waistcoat and starched collar seeking attention and more. I can see him saying, 'Place your wager to anyone who scoffed that it couldn't be done, that no man could revive the trans-Atlantic slave trade, not half a century after law prohibited the importation of enslaved Africans,' this is not what he called them, 'to these shores.' Did anyone suggest that, possible or not, it was an abominable thing to do? If so, Meaher nearly brushed them off with big talk about how he could get away with anything. If freedom is worth amassing, a man like Meaher thought, it must occasionally be tasted, flaunted, proved. Otherwise, what does it matter? Otherwise, what is its use?"

"The 109 surviving men, women and children of the 110 shackled and shoved onto the Clotilda, the ones hauled as if across a chasm of half a century, we might agree to deem them the first known time travelers. And like all time travelers, they wanted to go home. They remembered home. They asked to be returned, home, dwelt inside the word they called themselves, Dahomey."

"War came. They were freed. The land they bought and town they built is called AfricaTown. It sits north of Mobile Bay. They raised houses. They loved. They planted stories in their children, and the stories sent out strong roots, stronger than what threatened them if they uttered what they knew. They suffered disregard and worse. The land bordering their community has been polluted for generations, by industries that turn a steep profit. Many have died as a result. Those who survive are victors of nothing shy of war."

"That is what the guilty and the complicit have labored to wage, in AfricaTown and elsewhere, a war fought with rope, guns, doubt, drought, law, land, mobs, dogs, red lines drawn on maps, memes, spoofs, silence, indifference, words, theft, jokes, threats, flood, taxes, levies, lies, pride, scorn, ash, bronze, snub, bomb, storm, hail, bale, rigamarole. Is there anything that hasn't been rendered a weapon, even 1,300 acres of the Meaher's remaining undeveloped land, gifted to the people of Alabama as a state park, and an act of intended absolution that withholds all promise or hint of apology. Even this takes on the contours of a weapon."

"Oh my country, won't you admit? Can't you see that the white wake of the Clotilda has dispersed everywhere, sloshed to the ocean, swept to the clouds? I am sipping it now from a glass. Is there yet a chance that certain words, uttered in the right way, will land?"

And I'll skip ahead to the final passage I'll share, which is another meditative scene that calls back to that, by way of this notion of water as this site of convergence.

"When I tried to return, in meditation, to the realm of shadows and channels and reeds, where I sailed in the boat of my body, the place configures itself differently. The mountains in the distance are nearer this time in my mind's eye, chalky in the distance and moon white. I wait. I wonder what I will be permitted to see. Liquid again, dark waves of open sea, I stand near the prow of a ship and arc. I am there among others, beside and behind them, small in a forest of tall shoulders, long arms. We list and tilt, lift and drop, tossed in the warring currents of a storm. This water is the totality of all waters I've said as much. But now I see, dark, muscled, and filled with our refusal, our insistence, our forgetting. We are the matter. We are the source of its unrest."

"Those few who have greeted me, filled me, led me from the safety of another vision's quiet banks, now they lead me to see where all are heading, where all will meet, every us, every we, every cherished, familiar few. And they will not let me stop with them. There are none who do not number among us on this deck, among the generations of every known and chosen family. What each makes of the figures among us, and of what the churning waves lift for each into view will, for a long time, appear to differ. But what surrounds us, the white wake of every ship that has churned up history, will break eventually, around and upon us all. This is what they have brought us here to see, the enduring disseminating sea, which we stare out onto from the human plane, insisting we are not, all of us, aligned."

"I wonder what farther shore we may hope to reach. I wonder whether and where we arrive."

Conscious of taking us to a pretty heavy place, so maybe I'll end with a poem and a poem that is still concerned with the sense of we and us and the continuance that we're kind of bound to, but maybe it tilts toward a different tone. And then if you have any questions, I'd love to hear them and try and answer.

This is a poem called Make of Yourself an Instrument of Day. Does anybody know the sound of a morning dove's cry? Is there anyone who could do it?

Yes. Exactly. Thank you. All right. So that's what the speaker of this poem is hearing.

Make of Yourself an Instrument of Day. "A dove's known song, those five warm notes and two measures of silence. Sounds then ceases, over and again, in pattern. Finally, the bird flies off into a clean patch of sky. But something now rings in the bell of my body, clapped awake by what the bird kept saying. So much is over, I think it was, or nothing is finished. Some of what the bird's saying were questions. Why did you worry? What were you hoping? As if there is only a single tune any will need. Look past your longing, I heard. Morning is dawning. Wind, leaves, human flurry, the long song we make and ride, the one everything alive sings with us."

Thank you for listening.

Thank you.

So we do have a few minutes for questions and there's a microphone there, but if you just want to ask, I'll be happy to repeat it for anyone who didn't hear.

Hi.

Speaker 3:

When did you write your first poem?

Tracy K. Smith:

In fifth grade, soon after reading that Emily Dickinson poem. That was the first poem that I wrote, believing I was stepping into the wisdom and authority that I believed poems transmitted. But when I look back on some of the things my mom saved, I see that I wrote bad rhymes and dog girl and stuff even as a younger kid. But I think the poem, "I'm nobody, who are you? Are you somebody too? Then there's a pair of us, don't tell," that poem of hers invited me to think, oh, there's paradox... I didn't have the word paradox at that time, but that wonderful paradox opened up a huge sight of knowing and questioning and possibility. And that was my first attempt to try and do something like that in my own vocabulary.

Speaker 4:

Who do you consider your greatest influences?

Tracy K. Smith:

Well, Lucille Clifton is certainly one. Another couple of teachers that I studied with early on in college are Lucy Brock-Broido, who I think actually educated a huge sector of my generation of poets. And Andre Cole, Seamus Heaney were other teachers.

But I also learned from my peers. I feel like this is a moment. No matter how often in April we are asked that question, does poetry matter, by magazines and newspapers, I believe we are in a moment where poetry is something people are urgently turning toward, for grounding, for encouragement, and also as a tool to make their own questions and voices and needs known to themselves and others. And so I just find a great sense of guidance and sustenance from the work of other contemporary poets. And some of the people I love are Jericho Brown, Kevin Young. Kevin Young is now the director of the Museum of African American History and Culture. And younger poets too, poets like Eve L. Ewing, who writes a lot about history, but she also is considered an Afro-futurist and writes comics.

And I have some pretty good students too. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 5:

[inaudible 00:50:42] efforts to bring poetry to places where it would not be. And just wondering how that's going and what feedback you get, and what are you doing to make it even more accessible to... I mean, frankly, I don't read poetry and maybe I should. And so just wondering how you're getting the word out?

Tracy K. Smith:

Well, that, I served in the position of Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. And during that two years, the Library of Congress made it possible for me to take this tour across rural America and visit those places that Amelia mentioned.

And they also helped to publish a small anthology of 50 poems that I put together to take into these places, and that book is called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time. It's still available. And I would just go in and I knew that there would be people who had written poems and who loved poems, but there would also be a number of people who, like you, were like, "I don't really have a relationship to this form." And so I would say, "Let's look at a poem from this book." I chose poems that would be approachable. I chose poems that could also help people learn to gain a little bit more confidence as readers.

And every single time I would go into a space, I would say, "You do not need an academic vocabulary to experience a poem." And so the only questions I will ask you are, "What do you notice? What do you remember? What feelings, experiences, and recollections does this poem activate for you?" And that kind of started our conversation again and again.

And I learned so much about poems that I loved. I remember sharing a poem that I think, in some ways, was a love poem in a men's rehab facility. And this was a place where people were not there by choice, but the court had ordered them. And somebody that one of the handlers from the Library of Congress was like, "Are you going to be okay going in this room?" There was a guy who has white nationalist tattoos on his face. And I was like, "Okay, we're here. Let's go in in good faith and see what happens." And that guy said, "This poem, I know it's a love poem, but the sense of vulnerability and loss and powerlessness in some ways, it really gives me a new vocabulary for thinking about addiction and my relationship with substance."

And I just was like, every time another person reads and talks about a poem, it becomes larger. And we become larger to each other. And I felt like, as much as I think poetry is a literary godsend that we need, it's that other effect that I think we actually need more. And so, I felt like the poems kind of did that for us in every space. And this is a time, if you'll remember when our political rhetoric started getting very heated, divisive, and to be able to say, "I'm crossing all these ideological divides and people are willing to be real together," it gave me great faith. I kind of fed on that, the memories of that during the pandemic when we were all isolated and fearful.

Speaker 9:

I'm wondering if in your academic position, you're sometimes asked, not why poetry matters, but why the humanities matter and why people should major in the humanities [inaudible 00:54:19] to our institutions.

Tracy K. Smith:

Yeah. Well, I have students who are working in... They're writing poems or taking literature classes, and many of them are English or literature majors. Many of them are coming from the other schools at Harvard Law School Education. Or I have a microbiology student who was in a workshop of mine last year.

And what I find is that the questions that they are investigating, and the research that their poems are allowing them to do, gives them different and better traction in the questions of conscience that they have, many of which extend from this other scholarly work that they're doing, or simply from being alive in the 21st century. And I really believe that the vocabulary of the soul, the self, the body, the sense of empathy and curiosity, the vulnerability that lives and is honored in the humanities is the vocabulary that's going to save us if we will be saved. Technology can perform scientific miracles, but we also see what it is doing to the scope of our imagination, our vocabulary, our sense of regard for ourselves and others. And so we need an enlarging vocabulary, and we need methods that allow us to recognize we're small, and others have keys that we desperately need, and I think that lives in the humanities.

Speaker 6:

I see a lot of themes of science in a lot of your works, in space and time and even archeology and the water cycle. Sort of a two part question. One, are you interested in those things outside of poetry as well? And two, I'm also a microbiologist and a poet sort of, and I bring a lot of science even to my poetry because that's what I know. And when you're doing that, do you have an intention or a purpose that it can serve, or some way of using it as a tool? Because, I don't know, I've never been able to really figure that out, but I feel like it is useful in a way. And I was just wondering if you have any words on that.

Tracy K. Smith:

Yeah. I'm interested in all of those things and I don't have the right brain, is it the right brain or the left brain, aptitude to hold onto that kind of data. And so what I love is that scientists are really great at offering metaphors to make their work a little bit more graspable for someone like me, and to bring it into a space where you understand how it touches our living.

So the questions that I have that lead me in those directions are questions about life and death. Where do we go? Or what is going to end us? What can we do against that or about that? And so poems help me slow down and look closely at those sights. They urge me to do some reading and learning, and then they offer a different path forward than I would have, just based on the knowledge that I feel more at home in.

I think that... One of the funny things that disciplinarity can do, or that it did for a person like me, was it made me feel I'm authorized in some spaces, but I'm not really. I'm sort of an interloper or a guest or an outsider in others. But I don't think that's really how the world works. And so to imagine that you have this authority in a scientific language, and to say this can be helpful to thinking about these other human questions that might not need the terminology or the methodology of science, but that could be sort of blown open in a new and newly useful way, if they can be approached through this other lens, that feels really helpful.

And even if I'm on the receiving end, I'm reading a poem that comes to me and teaches me some things about another field and also teaches me things about what I think I know, that's one of the hugest delights that I think I can experience as a reader. So keep making those unlikely inroads and kind of claiming the fact that they're necessary to one another, if that makes sense.

All right.

Speaker 7:

Can I ask one final question? I love the way you described lyric at the beginning, what you said kind of mode that poetry gives you access to. And I was wondering how you carry that with you as you're working in other genres [inaudible 00:59:21] nonfiction. What are the connections or maybe even frictions you see between your work as a poet and your work in other genres?

Tracy K. Smith:

One connection that's been really useful, as I'm writing about different kinds of history, public history and more private, is the musical aspect of poetic language, which works into two ways.

When I'm reading a poem and I feel the presence of rhyme and repetition and meter, my body is out in front of my cognitive mind and bringing in the material or the matter of the poem. And before I kind of realize that I am grasping a concept or receiving what might even feel like an argument or an opinion, it's mounted me. It's in me. And that opens up a different kind of receptivity to those ideas when they finally become legible.

And I feel like that has been a helpful compositional mode in writing in terms of history. Oftentimes, history is fraught. And one of the reasons why it feels useful is that perhaps it opens up a different kind of receptive mode in the reader or listener, but mostly it emboldens me to move into material with a different kind of courage and momentum than I otherwise have. And it allows that sense of association, which I think is so important in a poem. The fact that we don't move in applauding linear fashion, but we leap through things that have urgencies in relation to one another, it allows that to guide some of the thinking that I'm doing in this other vocabulary. So that's one thing.

All right. Thank you so much.