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Tracy K. Smith describes the future from multiple perspectives in her poem Don’t You Wonder Sometimes. The poem begins by describing the stars after the sky becomes dark and how they “glisten like ice.” Typically stars are described as shining the sky and lighting up. However, ice is not necessarily bright and certainly is not very glamorous as stars appear to be. Later on the poem states “that everything lives on waiting only to be wanted back badly enough.” I had to think deeply in to this line for I initially was confused. Those things in life that are abandoned, remain part of life, yet they are wishing that they feel wanted once again. Tracy goes on to describe a time where the speaker was “blind to the future” and happy. She is relating to the innocence of childhood where people think little of their future concerns and know nothing about where their life is headed. I understand what Smith is saying in these lines for my life now is far more complicated than it once was. This life she describes in which she is “forever a child” at first appears to be very desirable for he is not concerned about death or stresses in life, but is rather living in the moment. Smith describes her childhood self as “thinking one day I'll touch the world with bare hands even if it burns.” The speaker believes that anything is possible at the is young age and is confident that her future will be full of success despite any barriers in her way. The poem goes on to describe how “the future isn't what it used to be.” I really found this line interesting because the future to me is what happens in time ahead, and can not be changed typically. Smith is relating to the idea that as people age, their perspectives of the future change and desires and goals become more complicated. There are barriers in future plans which we are blind to at a young age when we feel invincible. I found this poem easy to follow, and very enjoyable. I often think about how my future differs from my diary entries and pictures from my imagination when I was younger, so it was fascinating to hear about in writing.

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Tracy K Smith discusses an interaction with a stranger who conveys her love in her poem Wade in the Water. The poem begins with the speaker hearing another person say them love them and despite not knowing them, the speaker “believed her.” Initially I am a bit confused by the context of the poem, and am curious how one is in love with a stranger. While reading I imagine that the stranger is so passionate that the other person believes in their expression for love. The speaker compares the feeling that comes across her when the stranger expressed her love to “a room where the drapes have been swept back.” When drapes are opened in a dark room, the sun overpowers the room and requires eyes to readjust. So, in comparing the feeling that came across her to the drapes being pulled back, she emphasizes how the feeling engulfed the speaker suddenly. Also, when opening the drapes, light may reveal things that were not already there. So, the speaker may be revealing that the other person brings out components in her that were hidden. Smith goes on to say that “Each feeling pierced suddenly by pillars of heavy light.” Again, Smith compares the feeling overcoming the speaker to light taking over a room. Typically, light being shone in your eyes after being in the dark, is not a pleasant feeling. So, Smith contrasts the typical love-struck feeling in describing the feeling of love as unpleasant and coming by surprise. The word choice of “piercing” reveals the feeling is not so pleasant. Smith goes on describing all of the different situations in which the speaker feels love for the other individual. She loves “throughout the performance, in every handclap, every stomp.” The ongoing extent to which the speaker feels love is revealed in claiming that the love does not stop, even in the intermissions of a show. The poem ends with “is this love the trouble you promised?” leaving the impression that the the speaker knew the stranger that was identified at the beginning of the poem. I enjoyed the poem, and the use of comparisons to light. However, the context I found confusing at times since the premise of the poem is unclear.

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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 metre 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.
-Nature, October 2004

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.

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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 metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people . . .

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Analytical Reflection- Don't you Wonder, Sometimes?

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Analytical Reflection- Don't you Wonder, Sometimes?

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Analytical Reflection- My God, It's Full of Stars

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Analytical Reflection- My God, It's Full of Stars

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Sources for bibliography

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Tracy K. Smith is a famous poet as well as an educator. She was born on April 16, 1972. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, but she was raised in Fairfield, California. She went on to study at Harvard University where she joined the Dark Room Collective which is a reading series for writers of color. She received her MFA from Columbia University before going on to be a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1997 to 1999. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities, and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. Smith wrote four books of poetry. She wrote The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, and Duende (2007) which won the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award. Smith also wrote Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry as well as the poetry book known as Wade in the Water (2018). She has taught at many universities including Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. Smith also hosts hosts the American Public Media's daily radio program and podcast The Slowdown. The podcast is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. She is currently serving as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States and she lives in Princeton, NJ with her husband and their three kids. Smith is known for her use of a conversational tone in her poetry which invites the audience in, wanting to hear more. She has been awarded a great deal of recognition for her outstanding work.

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Poem #1

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My God, It's Full of Stars by Tracy K. Smith

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Poem #2

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1. Falmouth, Massachusetts, 1972

Oak table, knotted legs, the chirp
And scrape of tines to mouth.
Four children, four engines
Of want. That music.

What did your hand mean to smooth
Across the casket of your belly?
What echoed there, if not me-tiny body
Afloat, akimbo, awake or at rest?

Every night you fed the others
Bread leavened with the grains
Of your own want. How
Could you stand me near you,

In you, jump and kick tricking
The heart, when what you prayed for
Was my father's shadow, your name
In his dangerous script, an envelope

Smelling of gun-powder, bay rum,
Someone to wrestle, sing to, question,
Climb?

2. Interstate 101 South, California, 1981

Remember the radio, the Coca-Cola sign
Phosphorescent to the left, bridge
After bridge, as though our lives were
Engineered simply to go? And so we went

Into those few quiet hours
Alone together in the dark, my arm
On the rest beside yours, our lights
Pricking at fog, tugging us patiently

Forward like a needle through gauze.
Night held us like a house.
Sometimes an old song
Would fill the car like a ghost.

3. Leroy, Alabama, 2005

There's still a pond behind your mother's old house,
Still a stable with horses, a tractor rusted and stuck
Like a trophy in mud. And the red house you might
Have thrown stones at still stands on stilts up the dirt road.

A girl from the next town over rides in to lend us
Her colt, cries when one of us kicks it with spurs.
Her father wants to buy her a trailer, let her try her luck
In the shows. They stay for dinner under the tent

Your brother put up for the Fourth. Firebugs flare
And vanish. I am trying to let go of something.
My heart cluttered with names that mean nothing.
Our racket races out to the darkest part of the night.

The woods catch it and send it back.

4. But let's say you're alive again-

Your hands are long and tell your age.
You hold them there, twirling a bent straw,
And my reflection watches, hollow-faced,
Not trying to hide. The waiters make it seem

Like Cairo. Back and forth shouting
That sharp language. And for the first time
I tell you everything. No shame
In my secrets, shoddy as laundry.

I have praised your God
For the blessing of the body, snuck
From pleasure to pleasure, lying for it,
Holding it like a coin or a key in my fist.

I know now you've known all along.

I won't change. I want to give
Everything away. To wander forever.
Here is a pot of tea. Let's share it
Slowly, like sisters.

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Interrogative Poem by Tracy K. Smith - Poem Hunter

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1. Falmouth, Massachusetts, 1972 Oak table, knotted legs, the chirpAnd scrape of tines to mouth.Four children, four enginesOf want. That music. What did your hand mean to smoothAcross the casket of your belly?What echoed there, if not me-tiny bodyAfloat, akimbo, awake or at rest?

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Poem #3

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After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being-a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure

That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?

Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he'll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired

And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life
In which I'm forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I'll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.

2.

He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That's Bowie
For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play
Within a play, he's trademarked twice. The hours

Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,
Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.
But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.

Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

The future isn't what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.

3.

Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he's hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He's in no rush. Doesn't feel
The way you'd think he feels.
Doesn't strut or gloat. Tells jokes.

I've lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I'll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He's got
The whole world under his foot,
And we are small alongside,
Though there are occasions

When a man his size can meet
Your eyes for just a blip of time
And send a thought like SHINE
SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE
Straight to your mind. Bowie,
I want to believe you. Want to feel
Your will like the wind before rain.
The kind everything simply obeys,
Swept up in that hypnotic dance
As if something with the power to do so
Had looked its way and said:
Go ahead.

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Don't You Wonder, Sometimes? Poem by Tracy K. Smith - Poem Hunter

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After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they spanHides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More likeSome thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being-a StarmanOr cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust,Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting onlyTo be wanted back badly enough?

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US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith at open mic at the Trenton Free Public Library

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During her first year as poet laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith launched a program of readings and discussions in rural communities in New Mexico, South Carolina and Kentucky. Her goal was not to instruct but simply to share her love of poetry and to listen to how others experience it. In April, to mark the beginning of her second term as poet laureate, Smith delivered a lecture at the Library of Congress about what she experienced during that tour and how poetry can defend us from the distractions and degradations of our technological culture. Her remarks are presented here in full with permission from the author and the Library of Congress.

Poetry is not the language we live in. It's not the language of our day-to-day errand-running and obligation-fulfilling, not the language with which we are asked to justify ourselves to the outside world. It certainly isn't the language to which commercial value has been assigned. But poetry - which awakens our senses, frees us from the tyranny of literal meaning and assures us of the credible reality of emotional truth - puts us in touch with something bigger than language, something I believe each of us was perhaps fluent in before the moment when language became our chief vehicle for meaning.

Before I go any further, let me say that this lecture, like the poetry I write, is the product of a particular imagination - one as informed by belief in a vast and mysterious and yet orderly and purposeful universe as by a deep curiosity about the voices, faces and lives of strangers. Furthermore, I am operating on the notion that poetry can save me from disappearing into the narrow version of myself I may be tempted to resort to when I feel lazy or defeated, or when my greedy ego takes over. I'm operating on the belief that poetry can restore me to the large original self I haven't yet learned to fully recognize.

Poets have different names for that self. Stanley Kunitz called it "a pool of energy that has nothing to do with personal identity, but that falls away from self, blends into the natural universe." Emerson believed it lived in the same place the inner voice does, and that it had access to the large whole of which each of us are all but small parts, what he called the Over-soul: "the wise silence; the universal beauty." Elizabeth Bishop's view of such oneness, at least in her famous poem, "In the Waiting Room," is less consoling:

Suddenly, from inside,

came an oh! of pain

- Aunt Consuelo's voice -

not very loud or long.

I wasn't at all surprised;

even then I knew she was

a foolish, timid woman.

I might have been embarrassed,

but wasn't. What took me

completely by surprise

was that it was me:

my voice, in my mouth.

Without thinking at all

I was my foolish aunt,

I - we - were falling, falling

One of poetry's great effects, through its emphasis upon feeling, association, music and image - things we recognize and respond to even before we understand why - is to guide us toward the part of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon the collective.

Now, I feel strongly about poetry for what it offers in these terms, but I also, more and more, recognize its value as a remedy to the various things that have bombarded our lines of sight and our thought space, and that tamper with our ability or even our desire to listen to that deeply rooted part of ourselves. I'm talking about the many products, services, networks, trends, apps, tools, toys, as well as the drugs and devices for remedying their effects that are pitched to us nonstop: in our browser sidebars, in the pages of print media, embedded in movies and TV shows, on airplanes, in taxis and trains and even toilet stalls. I guess, more and more, I see the technology we live listening for and peering into as the primary and most effective vehicle of that sales pitch. So much so that I now wonder which came first, the device or whatever the device is urging us to click on and pay for. The glib, facile, simplistic and prefabricated language by which we as consumers are constantly surrounded is a language that flatters us, that urges us to indulge ourselves, to get away from it all, to be unique by opting in, talking back, liking us on Facebook, leaving a review, sharing, retweeting, etc. It's a sell so smooth that its terms have infiltrated the language of other facets of daily life: that of education ( rate your professor; did she make the material relatable and easily digestible or did you have to work to learn something?; what are the job outcomes and earning potential of your intended major?). Individual selfhood has taken on a different tenor; we "brand" ourselves (what an awful verb, aligned as it is with the practice of burning the owner's initials into flesh), we vie for "followers" on social media, we turn our experience into "content" that can be assimilated and "liked" quickly and reassuringly by others in our network. Friendship is different now, too; we have allowed conversation to be splintered and atomized by the devices we invite to interrupt and distract us. We aren't listening to what or whom we think we are. I'd go so far to say that much of the time, perhaps as an unconscious coping mechanism, we aren't listening at all. Not to other people and least of all to ourselves. We can't afford to.

What does this have to do with poetry? Well, as a writer, I'm convinced that one of the only defenses against the degradations of our market-driven culture is to cleave to language that fosters humility, awareness of complexity, commitment to the lives of others and a resistance to the overly easy and the patently false. Poetry is one vehicle for this humanizing, reanimating version of language, because the features of a poem insist upon a different value system. Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse. Rather than putting up a buffer between ourselves and those outside our immediate sphere, poems devise means to contemplate those others and to take in their perspectives. Rather than solving, sidestepping or denying problems, poems bear witness to dark facets of experience, they give us vocabulary for the terror, the shame, the regret - as well as the terms of hope - resulting from the choices we make and those we consent to. In other words, poems say, "Hey, come here, let me tell you what it was like." And they ask us to submit to another experience of reality. They disorient us from our home base, and they teach us to admit and submit to the feeling of vulnerability, to act upon empathy and curiosity, and to follow along allowing sense to accrue at its own pace and upon its own terms. If you do that enough times with a poem, you might begin to think differently about actual strangers, you might also begin to recognize that there are new possibilities of feeling and awareness available to you - ones that take you far beyond those pitched to you by the marketing teams of the corporations whose products are at the moment enjoying a good run.

In case I haven't said it clearly, the language circulating upon the surface of the 21st century is in the business of pulling us away from the interior, the reflective, the singular, the impractical and the un-summarizable. In such a current, the language of poetry is a radically re-humanizing force, because it is one of the only generally accessible languages that rewards us for naming things in their realness and their complexity. And despite what social media would have us believe, it is not the language of sharing and following, or buying and wearing, but rather that of bearing deep and unabashed witness to the urgencies and upheavals of lived experience, that comes closest to bringing us into visceral proximity with the lives and plights of others. That's not just distraction, and it's not a luxury. It's a means of self-preservation, a way of affirming commitment to the belief that our lives can and should matter to one another and to ourselves.

This might be a good time for a poem. Let's listen to Laura Kasischke read her poem, "Heart/mind":

A bear batting at a beehive, how

clumsy the mind

always was with the heart. Wanting

what it wanted.

The blizzard's

accountant, how

timidly the heart approached the business

of the mind. Counting

what it counted.

Light inside a cage, the way the heart -

Bird trapped in an airport, the way the mind -

How it flashed on the floor of the phone booth, my

last dime. And

this letter

I didn't send

how surprising

to find it now.

All this love I must have felt.

I think any successful poem teaches you how to read it, and this poem provides a good road map to that process, beginning with the title "Heart/mind." What is the slash meant to signal? As a participant in a conversation at the Men's Addiction Rehab Center in Kentucky pointed out, perhaps it is heart over mind, an emotional reversal of the common notion of mind over matter. Right away, the poem invites you to question and theorize, and then it begins to tell you what it thinks of itself.

Those early stanzas, with their metaphors that unfold into concrete (if surprising) visceral examples over the span of a few lines, also set up a pattern that becomes useful to the reader once the poem becomes more spare and gestural:

A bear batting at a beehive, how

clumsy the mind

always was with the heart. Wanting

what it wanted.

The blizzard's

accountant, how

timidly the heart approached the business

of the mind. Counting

what it counted.

I get a strong visceral sense of those first strange scenes the poem sketches out. "A bear batting at a beehive." Not only do we have the alliteration of bear, beehive, batting, but we are presented with an image of this big animal angrily and hungrily swatting at something. There's danger on both sides of that equation: threat and counterthreat. So the poem begins with this strange sense of fraught balance. Then, moving on, "how / clumsy," comes in to characterize the bear. So perhaps what we are witnessing is not so much a vicious threat, as, simply, ham-fisted. When we take in the entire statement: "how / clumsy the mind / always was with the heart," suddenly, the heart becomes the hive. There's something in there that is hungrily sought but also worth protecting. Those first four lines of the poem guide you into a sense of all of the potential registers of emotion that are making this metaphor happen.

The next set of images does the same thing, beginning with "The blizzard's / accountant." Now, I don't have a way of picturing that. I'm already on alert from having had so many senses activated by the first metaphor, but I've got to let this next stanza show me what to see. "How timidly" - okay, maybe that's the accountant in the stanza - "how / timidly the heart approaches the business/of the mind." And, what kind of math would suffice in the face of a blizzard's worth of snow? And yet, the heart persists, "Counting / what it counted."

By the time we reach the lines, "Light inside a cage, the way the heart - // Bird trapped in an airport, the way the mind - " we can instinctively see what they gesture toward. They are shorthand for a process we can now complete on our own.
[Listen to 'From the Catbird Seat,' as Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith speaks with Head of the Poetry and Literature Center Rob Casper.]
Yet even having taught us how to work with what we have come to expect, the poem still manages to surprise us. I love this. I think every poem, every fully realized poem, finds a way to surprise its reader. Moreover, as a poet, I understand that a poem is only finished, only fully realized, if it succeeds in alerting me to something I couldn't have been capable of seeing at the outset, something I couldn't have known to say were it not for all of the things that the process of writing the poem has led me to say. Kasischke's poem moves through images of the heart as an indomitable beacon, something uncageable. And the image of the mind as trapped, bumping up against invisible barriers, forever barred from where it seeks to go. And she leaps from there to the sense of frustration and desperation in that image of the last dime on the mucky, disgusting phone booth floor. (Speaking of technology! Let me concede that there are some things that have definitely been improved upon . . . ) All of the visceral feelings that the poem draws upon, from its very opening, work to invest its arrival with a palpably felt urgency. I don't believe it was a plan, something outlined and plotted from the start, but rather that moving through the register of those different distinct feelings created the momentum that pulled Kasischke to the poem's closure, which, incidentally, resists metaphor. Perhaps by now the poem is free from the need for corollaries, invested as it is in the confluence of newly activated feelings:

this letter

I didn't send

how surprising

to find it now.

All this love I must have felt.

And how does this poem speak to my concerns about market-driven language? Well, I think about it this way: We don't read poems only for the rhetorical stance they take, or for the arguments they may actively or subtly make about their conscious material; we also - and, I'd argue, mostly - read them for how they direct our attention in ways that are antithetical to mere utility. In "Heart/mind," Laura Kasischke is not making editorial-like claims against the language of the marketplace, of commodity - but, in urging us to think and respond as it does, the poem persuasively unsettles the unthinking or automatic ways we often experience content, language and narrative. It is in this manner that this and other poems invite our dissatisfaction with the view of the world as a place made up mostly of resources to exhaust or consume.

Here is another poem. "Music from Childhood," by John Yau:

You grow up hearing two languages. Neither fits your fits

Your mother informs you "moon" means "window to another world."

You begin to hear words mourn the sounds buried inside their mouths

A row of yellow windows and a painting of them

Your mother informs you "moon" means "window to another world."

You decide it is better to step back and sit in the shadows

A row of yellow windows and a painting of them

Someone said you can see a blue pagoda or a red rocket ship

You decide it is better to step back and sit in the shadows

Is it because you saw a black asteroid fly past your window

Someone said you can see a blue pagoda or a red rocket ship

I tried to follow in your footsteps, but they turned to water

Is it because I saw a black asteroid fly past my window

The air hums - a circus performer riding a bicycle towards the ceiling

I tried to follow in your footsteps, but they turned to water

The town has started sinking back into its commercial

The air hums - a circus performer riding a bicycle towards the ceiling

You grow up hearing two languages. Neither fits your fits

The town has started sinking back into its commercial

You begin to hear words mourn the sounds buried inside their mouths

This poem behaves quite differently from Kasischke's. Firstly, it's a pantoum, which means the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third lines of the following stanza. Because the repetition only occurs once, it's not a pattern that you can readily anticipate. To my ear, the form creates an eerie sense of deja vu, the feeling of having known something without quite understanding how, which I think supports some of the other behavior in this poem. There are fragments, shifting pronouns. The you being addressed early in the poem suggests that the speaker is talking to himself; later, the you seems to become a specific person: "I tried to follow in your footsteps, but they turned to water." There are unexplained visual images in the poem. There's a specific sense of place. But none of it feels fully anchored; I couldn't confidently say these are the terms of the speaker's life. What I do feel confident of is what seems to accrue emotionally through the poem, this sense of searching, of turning back to recall something that's only partially clear. Many of the poem's line breaks foster sudden shifts of subject and context.

In the second stanza of the poem, I'm drawn to this beautiful line: "You begin to hear words mourn the sounds buried inside their mouths." I can't tell you exactly what that means, but mourn, sounds, buried and mouths create a sudden sense of sonic authority. I think of loss; I think of language and voices, which conjure people. But then the line break carries me from "buried inside their mouths" to "A row of yellow" - and maybe this is just me, but when "mouths" is followed by "a row of yellow," I anticipate a word like "teeth." Instead, we get "A row of yellow windows and a painting of them." So suddenly, the poem leads us from an almost dreamlike, mournful perspective to a gaze that has shifted to look out. This is a poem that's not going to guide its reader by the hand, but if you surrender to it, and the feeling of being a little bit lost part of the time, you get to feel many different things. I come away from this poem thinking about someone who may really have grown up in a household with more than one language. But I also feel the sense of interiority and privacy that's so active in this poem that I am convinced that any person anywhere is living in two languages: the language of the self and the language that comes from outside of the self.

I shared this poem at Cannon Air Force base in Clovis, N.M., with men and women enlisted in the Air Force, air base employees and military spouses. It's the kind of poem that requires you to let go of the wish for linear narrative and respond, instead, to the tone, to the accrual of images, to the almost haunting effects of hearing every line repeated once and no more. I asked what people noticed - that's the question I ask the students in my classrooms as well as the audience members who have attended readings I've given in rural communities in New Mexico, South Carolina and Kentucky over the last several months. And just as with the Kasischke poem, which, in a room of men working to overcome addiction, activated very specific memories of struggling with similar questions of mind or reason versus feeling or urge, John Yau's poem reminded airmen of their time in the service, of seeking to follow in the footsteps of a parent and then finding themselves in their own lives, lost at times without a clear model or guide: "I tried to follow in your footsteps, but they turned to water." The poem with its sense of rootlessness, of struggle to make sense of disparate languages, also reminded people of displacement - the kind one feels in childhood or adolescence, as well as the kind one feels upon being deployed, or upon being uprooted again and again by assignments in different places. One audience member spoke about the occasional feelings of social or racial isolation he sometimes feels in the service. Just as none of the recovering addicts felt the need to argue that Kasischke's poem is about addiction, nobody felt the need to say, Yau's is a poem about being in the armed forces - but in both cases the poems afforded listeners with new images, new metaphors and new vocabularies for living with the feelings indigenous to their lives, whoever they are.

That's one of the remarkable things poems do, one of the ways poems lead us first more deeply into ourselves, and then, more naturally toward the areas of common feeling we share with others. That's how poems teach us to recognize that there are forms of community that exist across or in spite of the obvious dividing lines we are taught to respect.

My rural outreach project, even in just three "pilot" trips, has awakened a belief in the real possibility that we might learn to become open to participation in real-time communities forged along varied and sometimes unlikely lines. And it's urged a powerful submission to feelings of humility, shared vulnerability, doubt and trust. It's been a privilege to share my own work and the work of other contemporary poets with strangers that crowdsourcing algorithms tell me I ought to have nothing in common with, and to hear people say things like, I'm white, you're black; I'm from this place, you're from another, and yet, when you talk about your father you restore my own father to me. This happens again and again, though the vocabulary for connection is different from person to person and poem to poem.

I think my interest in such a project is an extension of my own belief or wish that Americans of all backgrounds might have something quietly urgent and humanizing to offer to one another. But in order to get to it, we have to turn down the volume on all the many sources seeking to sell us on the notion of an unmendable divide - because that's what they're doing, they're selling us on a product, which is strife. In order to get to community, we have to go quiet, slow down, allow ourselves to be both vulnerable and brave, and approach one another with an idea as simple as, I'm me, you're you, we are not the same, and yet perhaps we can feel safe here together talking about something as simple as a poem.

Poems encourage the notion that your life must be as important to you as mine is to me. And they encourage the more difficult notion that your life must be as important to me as my own life is; that I can only truly honor and protect myself by honoring and protecting you. Now maybe that last bit is a distant dream, the purview of a few great poets and philosophers, but I hope it isn't. Either way, I believe that poetry helps bridge the gap between self-centeredness or tribalism and true compassion. Poems do this in myriad ways. One of them is by helping to inoculate us against the catchy, inescapable, strategically biased language of the market, firing away at us from every direction in its ceaseless ploy to be the only language.

Tracy K. Smith is the poet laureate of the United States. Her most recent collection is "Wade in the Water."

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Perspective | Tracy K. Smith: 'Staying Human: Poetry in the Age of Technology'

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During her first year as poet laureate of the United States, Tracy K. Smith launched a program of readings and discussions in rural communities in New Mexico, South Carolina and Kentucky. Her goal was not to instruct but simply to share her love of poetry and to listen to how others experience it.

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"I only got one body," a black woman says, deadly earnest, on a recent episode of "Random Acts of Flyness," the HBO series about race. She pauses before adding, "And I got plans for it." It can be startling to hear a woman of color describe and claim her own body: despite advances in our culture, some eyes still roll when a black woman says "I" or puts herself forward; in this political climate, it can be perceived as an aggressive act or as hysteria or-the worst-as special pleading. This has been an on-again, off-again problem in American letters since the nineteen-seventies, when authors ranging from Toni Morrison to Lucille Clifton, Gayle Jones, and Ntozake Shange began to write from inside black women's lives, from a landscape that was dominated not by visible or invisible men but by black female characters, living intricately and boldly in their times, in their minds, and in their bodies, and pursuing joyful and complicated sexual lives. This was no small achievement, as the poet and activist Audre Lorde argued in her 1978 essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power": "In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives."

Forty years later, it is still a bold move for black women to take on the erotic in writing. Consider, for instance, these lines from Robin Coste Lewis's incredible poem "Plantation," in her 2015 collection, " Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems," addressed to another woman of color: "Then your tongue / was inside my mouth, and I wanted to say // Please ask me first, but it was your / tongue, so who cared suddenly // about your poor manners?" For Lewis and others, including Tracy K. Smith, the current United States Poet Laureate, writing about desire is a way of being heard in a world where it's still necessary to say, as the woman on "Random Acts of Flyness" had to, "I only got one body. And I got plans for it."

In Smith's four books of verse-her latest, " Wade in the Water " (Graywolf), came out in April, and was recently followed by an anthology, "American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time" (co-published by Graywolf and the Library of Congress)-love and sexuality take many forms. The poem "Serenade," in Smith's witty and authoritative first book, "The Body's Question" (2003), opens with a scene of happy erotic abduction:

I am dancing with Luis,
The dancing puto,
Delirious with Spanish and moonlight,
With the scrawl of streets that led us here
To night in a foreign language.
We are dancing the merengue
And my body rings
With the ringing that wants to be answered.
As though I am a little drunk in the bones.

In the next stanza, Smith zooms out to show us the place that holds her lust, like a delectable treat, in its hand. She's in a "City of Restless Vendors, of Steep Embankments," where her foreignness is no doubt part of what makes her feel so free. Soon, though, she shifts her focus back to Luis. Dancing with him makes manifest the question of the body-its capacity to feel joy, its capacity to give joy:

Luis takes my hand in his hand
And draws circles in the air
Above my head. I am spinning.
Sloppily at first, until my mind
Begins to understand that grace
Is a different phenomenon here,
And lets go of my two legs,
Allowing them to dance on their own

"Serenade" evokes a passage in Ntozake Shange's 1975 "choreopoem," " For colored girls who have considered suicide / When the rainbow is enuf," where a "lady in blue" describes sweaty nights full of desire, dancing the "mambo, bomba, merengue" to Willie Colón:

so off i made it to this 36 hour marathon dance
con salsa con ricardo
"suggggggggggar" ray on southern blvd . . .
wit my colored new jersey self
didn't know what anybody waz saying
cept if dancin waz proof of origin
i was jibarita herself that nite
& the next day
i kept smilin & right on steppin
if he cd lead i waz ready to dance

Smith has some of Shange's theatrical force, though she is quieter in her effects; they both shimmer, but Smith has less flash. Her tone, conversational but never arch, invites us in. She's a storyteller who loves to explore how the body can respond to a lover, to family, to history. In her second book, " Duende " (2007), the Smith who danced freely within the sphere of place and history is undone by the real and metaphysical responsibilities of the erotic life she has chosen. From "One Man at a Time":

The having, but the taking.
I want, I want. You,
Then me. The struggle
To give everything away.

Reading Smith, one is suddenly aware of "man" not only as a gender but as a weight-a solid force that risks ending the poem for a moment. But the moment passes as Smith, no longer the girl carried off by Luis, does the taking. But what is it that she has taken? What needs to be rooted out? That all-consuming, lunatic desire that ages us even as it drives us wild?

In "Duende" and in her third book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning " Life on Mars " (2011), Smith explores another aspect of her "I"-Tracy before she was Tracy. In "Interrogative," she writes of her pregnant mother: "What did your hand mean to smooth / Across the casket of your belly? / What echoed there, if not me-tiny body / Afloat, akimbo, awake, or at rest?" To imagine who you were before you were is a way of understanding who you are now and what you may become. Smith is interested in the roots of love, the various selves that go into the making of a body. But "Duende" isn't all wish and wonder. It's also about threats to the female body, pleasures that can be withdrawn, judged. In her extraordinary poem "The Searchers," she writes about a character in John Ford's 1956 film of the same title-a white girl who was kidnapped and brought up by Native Americans. Saved, in a manner of speaking, by John Wayne, the child is returned to the white world she has never known:

Again and again, the questions arise: What does it mean for a man to take a girl or a woman? And what can it do to a man's idea of a woman if she is free and takes him? Is a relationship a kind of abduction or a form of rescue? Are men agents of freedom or of oppression? Are relationships a metaphor for life or life itself?

Part of the gorgeous struggle in Smith's poetry is about how to understand and accept her twin selves: the black girl who was brought up to be a polite Christian and the woman who is willing to give herself over to unbridled sensation and desire, even with guys of other races.

Born in 1972, Smith was the youngest of five siblings. Her parents, Floyd and Kathryn, an engineer and a schoolteacher, respectively, were Alabama natives who came up, politically speaking, during the civil-rights era. Smith was born in Massachusetts, but the family soon moved to Fairfield, California, where Floyd was stationed at a military base. Smith was a relatively privileged child; some of her siblings were already away at college when she was learning to read and write, so she had her parents more or less to herself. Words were a bond between the couple and their child. In her remarkable memoir, " Ordinary Light " (2015), Smith describes the bookshelves that her father had built in the hallway leading to her parents' bedroom. There she found "the books my father would forever push me to read: 'Kidnapped,' 'Gulliver's Travels,' 'Ivanhoe,' and the ones I eventually came to discover on my own. . . . There were some of [my mother's] books on the shelves, I'm sure of it, books on child-rearing and theology, but the majority of what sat there spoke to my father's sense of the world-or the world as he'd like us to know it: a vast and varied place full of mystery and order."

For Kathryn Smith, mystery and order were ecclesiastical; the world began and ended with His word. It wasn't that she was fierce in her belief so much as that she was calmly, resolutely resigned to the power of faith. Floyd was happily resigned to the power of science and earthly life. (At one point, he set up an incubator in the house, so that Tracy could see how birds were hatched.)

If there is a central underlying tension in "Ordinary Light," it's the division between Smith's reflective, mother-identified self-the one who, at age three, told her mother that she wanted to open her heart to the Lord-and the energy that goes into actively living one's life, as exemplified by her father. Should Smith be independent, like a boy, or was it her portion, as a girl, to wait for Jesus to take the wheel? Were girls like her meant to be the upholders of community-Christian community-while boys were free to be individual thinkers? And where was Jesus when, for instance, a girl Tracy knew asked her if she wished she were white? Smith writes:

I don't think we ever truly forgot about whites, even when we were alone among ourselves in the thick of family. I doubt any blacks do. There's always a place in the mind that feels different, distinct; not worse off or envious but simply aware of an extra thing that living in a world that loathes and fears us has necessitated we develop. Perhaps that thing is the counterbalance to the history of loss I often tried to block out with silence: a riotous upswing that, quickly, painlessly, allows the mind to unravel from all the knowing and wondering it has been taught to do; a simple tickle of recognition capable of catching us up in a feeling-no matter how very fleeting-of historical joy.

The Smith of "Ordinary Light" is our Emerson, the Emerson of "Self-Reliance," say, especially when she is examining a woman's habit of making do in order to make something great. Emerson noted, "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." In Smith's world, possibility is the key. Unlike some black writers, she doesn't address the double rejection of blackness-by society and by the fractured family-not just because she didn't experience the latter but because she's more interested in black excellence and achievement that aren't tainted by class aspirations, all that upwardly mobile Jack and Jill society jazz. The Smith kids made it because of who they were, not who they knew. Their parents taught them, by example, to be aspirational. Love and self-love, especially for blacks, are not a given but aspirational, too.

At Harvard, where Smith studied English, she began to write in earnest, inspired by what she heard in her head, of course, but also by the work of several poets she would consider essential to her growth. Emily Dickinson's outrageous freedom when it came to drawing on Biblical cadences and forming her own colloquialisms may have been Smith's greatest influence. She also fell in love with a boy, with whom she experienced physical pleasure. When Smith went home the following summer, at her mother's church she heard a woman praying out loud for her and her boyfriend. In a passage of agonizing beauty, she notes how far she felt she'd travelled from the religion that had infused her girlhood:

Left behind by the homily and miles away from the other churchgoers, whose minds, at least from where I sat, appeared to be actively trailing the minister's words, hearing them and chuckling or murmuring, or merely nodding to themselves as the meaning sunk in, I realized I had no idea what the story was that I was part of. I didn't yet know what was important to me or what would remain important years down the line, after the thrill of experiencing these first freedoms, and the weight of living with what they brought, had passed.

After Smith's mother died, of cancer, in 1994-characteristically, she felt that her disease was part of God's grace, His plan for her-her father began seeing another woman, and Smith confronted him about it. How dare death and time erode the world her parents made for her? Had she herself left it behind when she decided to inhabit her own mind and body? Had she left her parents behind? If so, the abandonment was momentary, just as death is. (It's grief that's long.) In the end, Smith embodied her father's science through precision and observation, and her mother's faith by surviving with grace. In "The Speed of Belief," from "Life on Mars," she tells the story of love, her parents' love, as something that outlasts death-at least in a child's imagination. After her father died, she writes:

Probably he spun out of himself
And landed squarely in that there, his new
Body capable, lean, vibrating at the speed
Of belief. She was probably waiting
In the light everyone describes,
Gesturing for him to come. . . .
They told us not to go
Tipping tables looking for them. Not even
To visit their bodies in the ground. They are
Sometimes maybe what calls out
To people stuck in some impossible hell.
The ones who later recall, "I heard a voice
Saying Go and finally, as if by magic, I was able
Simply to go."

And where does Smith go-where does her body take her-as love and eroticism are folded up into marriage and children? Does the body forget itself, its needs, its happiness in unfamiliar landscapes, as it becomes more and more rooted in domestic affairs? Smith gives us a possible answer in "Wade in the Water," in her poem "The Everlasting Self" (for which the title serves as the first line):

Comes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction-
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.

The point, she's saying, is to last, to make love a habit, a collaboration that regenerates itself by doing, by staying together beyond the highs and lows of new passions or old regrets. "Wade in the Water" is suffused with sadness and with the weight of history, the old racism that makes fresh wounds in black bodies-black female bodies-day after day after day. But, in the book's title poem, Smith describes watching a performance of the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters-who keep alive a voice-and-movement ritual first performed by African slaves-and being changed by it, as one is changed by love, if one stays open to it. She may no longer be dancing with Luis in a foreign country, but her body still recognizes and can be taken over by the power of other bodies making art, of other voices telling their stories, and hers, because they know who they are-as blacks, as women, as humans in their single and collective body:

One of the women greeted me.
I love you, she said. She didn't
Know me, but I believed her,
And a terrible new ache
Rolled over in my chest,
Like in a room where the drapes
Have been swept back. I love you,
I love you, as she continued
Down the hall past other strangers,
Each feeling pierced suddenly
By pillars of heavy light.
I love you, throughout
The performance, in every
Handclap, every stomp. ♦

An earlier version of this piece misspelled the name of the publisher Graywolf.

This article appears in the print edition of the October 1, 2018, issue, with the headline "The Muses."

Hilton Als, The New Yorker's theatre critic, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the author of " White Girls " and an associate professor of writing at Columbia University.
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"I only got one body," a black woman says, deadly earnest, on a recent episode of "Random Acts of Flyness," the HBO series about race. She pauses before adding, "And I got plans for it."