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An analysis of "Declaration" by Tracy K. Smith

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An analysis of "Flores Woman" by Tracy K. Smith

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My recitation of Tracy K. Smith's poem "Sci-Fi"

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One of my favorite poems by Tracy K. Smith

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One of my favorite poems by Tracy K. Smith

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Tracy K. Smith- Appointment as 22nd Poet Laureate

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tracy k smith poet laureate consultant poetry life mars bibliography guide virtual program service digital reference section library of congress

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Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith: Online Resources - Library of Congress Bibliographies, Research Guides,and Finding Aids (Virtual Programs & Services, Library of Congress)

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Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith: Online Resources - Bibliography (Virtual Services and Programs, Digital Reference Section, Library of Congress)

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Tracy K. Smith's speech on reconciling poetry with modern political and technological culture

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Tracy K. Smith is currently in her second term as the 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate and is also a professor at Princeton University.
Credit: Emily Xu

United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith spoke about reconciling poetry with modern political and technological culture at the Philomathean Society's Annual Oration.

Smith, who has published five books and won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 poetry collection "Life on Mars," addressed a crowd of more than 300 students and community members in a lecture titled "Why Poetry? Why Now?" Throughout her hourlong talk in Meyerson Hall, she shared anecdotes and read various poems to show how poetry can provide an alternative to the impersonal nature of the digital age.

"In some ways, the question 'Why poetry?' disheartens me," Smith said. "I wonder why poetry is one of the few art forms that's subject to such a persistent need for defense. We don't hear 'Why fiction?,' 'Why film?,' or 'Why dance?'"

Smith contrasted the universal feelings acknowledged in poetry with the modern focus on individual uniqueness, saying that poetry allows a new perspective.

"You might also begin to recognize there are new possibilities of feeling and awareness available to you, ones that take you far beyond those pitched to you by marketing teams of corporations of products," she said.

College Junior Sydney Gelman, who is the Philomathean Society's Annual Oration Director, praised poetry's ability to bring people together at Penn, despite the University's pre-professional climate.

"I feel like a lot of times at Penn we are a very pre-professional society in which it's like work work work, have to get a job at Goldman Sachs," Gelman said. "I personally think literature is an entryway to empathy for groups you don't normally come into contact with."

Smith is in her second termas the 22nd U.S. Poet Laureate, a position she assumed in 2017. She also serves as the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

When reading and speaking about her own poetry, she highlighted her focus on expressing difficult emotions.

"I take part in the struggle that characterizes so much of living," Smith said. "Sometimes that means the anger that I feel because there is something that I know is wrong that I know is happening."

College freshman and Philomathean Society member William San Pedro said the event gave him a new appreciation for contemporary poetry.

"When I think of poetry, the first thing that comes to mind is Shakespeare or Robert Frost," San Pedro said. "There's still poetry happening now, and there's a lot of ways you can appreciate it. This [event] is one of them."

Each year, the Philomathean Society hosts the Annual Oration to bring notable speakers to campus. Past speakers include neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, primatologist Jane Goodall, and political scientist John Mearsheimer.

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U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith explains value of poetry in consumerist society at Penn

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United States Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith spoke about reconciling poetry with modern political and technological culture at the Philomathean Society's Annual Oration. Smith, who has published five books and won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 poetry collection "Life on Mars," addressed a crowd of more than 300 students and community members in a lecture titled "Why Poetry?

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Article about Tracy K. Smith's incorporation of the erotic in her writing

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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.
Read more "

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Oct. 20, 2014

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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."

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Audio clip of Tracy K. Smith's podcast

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Tracy K. Smith, Lewis Center for the Arts

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Tracy K. Smith is the author of the memoir Ordinary Light and four books of poetry: Wade in the Water (April 2018); Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, recipient of the 2006 James Laughlin Award; and The Body's Question, which won the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize.

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One of my favorite poems by Tracy K. Smith

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

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Tracy K. Smith- Academy of American Poets

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Tracy K. Smith | Academy of American Poets

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Tracy K. Smith - Tracy K. Smith is the poet laureate of the United States. She received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2014 and the James Laughlin Award in 2006 for her second book, Duende. She is the Poem-a-Day Guest Editor for April 2019 and 2018.

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Tracy K. Smith- Poetry Foundation

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Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The…

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Tracy K. Smith, born in Falmouth, Massachusetts on April 16, 1972 was raised in northern California. She received both a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Columbia University as well as a Bachelor of the Arts from Harvard University, where she also joined the Dark Room Collective, a reading series for writers of color.From 1999 to 1997, Smith also held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University for poetry and has used her creative writing to create four poetry collections. Smith is the author of the book Wade in the Water, the winner of the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, her debut collection of poems, The Body's Question, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002. Additionally, Smith's second book, Duende, won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and her collection, Life on Mars won her the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Smith is also the recipient of the 2014 Academy of American Poets fellowship and in June 2107 was appointed as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Smith has taught at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. She taught summer sessions at Bread Loaf School of English of Middlebury College in and was awarded the Robert Frost Chair of Literature in 2014. In 2005, she joined the faculty of Princeton University, where she was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa, he oldest academic honor society in the United States, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities.Currently, Smith teaches and directs the creative writing at Princeton University and hosts American Public Media's daily radio program and podcast "The Slowdown," sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. In April 2018, Smith was nominated for a second term as United States Poet Laureate by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.