“If this were the only poem that you had ever seen, what would you suspect poems are for?”
On a recent sunny afternoon, Harvard Divinity School students and community members made their way to the Center for the Study of World Religion (CSWR) for a special poetry workshop with Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy K. Smith.
Many attendees cited the same motivation for attending: Finding their long-lost love for writing amidst the formality of academia. With a nurturing yet challenging demeanor, Smith cultivated conversation, building on the diverse perspectives present, including those of students from Harvard College and several of the University’s graduate schools.
Smith is Harvard Professor of African and African American Studies, as well as the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallace Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her five poetry collections, as well as an upcoming publication, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, have garnered numerous accolades, including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and the position of the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. In addition to being a poet, Smith is a memoirist, translator, and librettist. Her workshop focused on the creation and reading of poetry, specifically through the lens of the CSWR’s mission.
The CSWR provides a forum for conversations about religions’ complex roles in today’s cultures, economies, and political structures. Not only does this aim foster community and intellectual exchange among the faculty and students of HDS, but it also facilitates interaction and institutional collaboration across the University. As the CSWR uses academic programs such as film screenings, conferences and colloquia, panel discussions, and more, its events seek to engage scholars of religious studies in the field’s increasing globalization.
Smith’s event was one workshop in a larger guest poet speaker series, the “Peripheries Poetry Series.” CSWR fellow Sherah Bloor said that Peripheries features both programming and an arts journal, “which provides a record of these visits alongside poetry, prose, and visual art by emerging and established artists and writers from across the country and the world.”
Inaugurated in 2017 with a reading by HDS graduate and acclaimed author Robin Coste Lewis, MTS ’97, Peripheries has, according to Bloor, hosted “some of the best poets writing today: Cameron Awkward-Rich, Josh Bell, Sherrington Bitsui, Susan Brind Morrow, Robert Hass, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Fred Moten, Robyn Schaffer, Branda Shaughnessy, Evie Shockley, Anne Walden, Kate Zambreno, and Jan Zwicky,” among others.
To maximize the reach of Smith’s workshop and visit to HDS, the CSWR hosted the webinar with Smith, titled, “Craft Talk and Reading.” During the Zoom lecture, Smith read aloud not just her own poetry, but the works of poets with parallel themes to her own: divinity, healing, history, race, and love—to name a few. This basis of understanding toward Smith’s approach to poetry reading and composition provided a foundation for the afternoon’s in-person event, as well as offering engagement for community members who could not attend the session.
“There is nothing in a poem that isn’t asking to be noticed in some way,” Smith mused as she led the eager room of scholars to turn their attention to the packets in front of them. The first page featured a poem by John Keene, “The Angel of Improvisation,” an ambiguous four-word piece that sparked (what could have been) endless speculation about its implications. Smith then posed a question that she cites as foundational to her undergraduate poetry courses: “If this were the only poem that you had ever seen, what would you suspect poems are for?”
By applying this question to such a uniquely brief and structural poem, Smith challenged the room to consider the visual nature of poetry, not just the literary. Smith emphasized the importance of “grappling with the changeability of terms, with the degrees of transparency with the ways that things can mean,” empowering the role of the reader. With this reading lens fresh on everyone’s mind, Smith moved into time for composition and opportunities for sharing newly jotted creations.
The following two poems that Smith introduced to the workshop were Stephanie Burt’s “Wildflower Meadow, Medawisla” and Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s “The Ultra-Black Fish.” As with Keene’s piece, Smith read aloud the poems before stressing the need to hear poems from different voices and calling on others to take turns reading the works.
In these discussions, which more heavily concerned vocabulary, diction, and syntax, Smith continued to expand the standard experience of poetry reading, this time proposing the physically sensual experience of speaking a poem as an expansion of the traditional semiotic interpretations of poetry.
Smith’s poetry workshop blended analysis, discussion, writing, and sharing in a collaborative and motivational environment. By using other poets’ works as a basis for study and conversation instead of her own highly esteemed collections, she highlighted the practice of inspiring one’s own compositions through reading and respecting the creativity of your peers.
The gathering was full of laughter and mutual support, and workshop participants left the room with new compositions, new relationships, and a renewed spirit of creativity. Smith’s workshop embodied the extensive fruitfulness that academia can produce when it embraces imagination, artistry, and personal connections.
—by Cecily Powell Tolleson