On Monday, May 8, 2023, CSWR Resident Fellow and Editor-in-Chief of Peripheries, Sherah Bloor hosted a Poetry Craft Talk and Reading with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Tracy K. Smith for a capacity Zoom audience. "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." (Quote provided courtesy of HDS Communications Intern, by Cecily Powell Tolleson. Full story here.)
[ACOUSTIC GUITAR]
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Poetry, craft, talk, and reading. May 8 2023.
SHERAH BLOOR: My name is Sherah Bloor. And I'm the Poetry Fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School. And I have the immense pleasure of running the Peripheries poetry series.
And we're so glad and honored to host our very own Tracy K. Smith today. Introducing these poets, I get-- I use this as an excuse to read-- reread through their body of work. In Tracy's case, five collections of poetry and her memoir. And I just wanted to say a few things about this experience that I've had over the past couple of days.
And the couple of Tracy's books which I don't own-- and this will be corrected-- I got from the library. And I set about reading everything in order. And I couldn't help notice the marginalia in the library copies that I got. And this annoyed me at first, and then it-- it was very interesting. I thought if these is like medieval manuscripts in which two different commentators were commenting on others' comments.
And so I got all of the books out from the library and multiple copies through Borrow Direct. And there's this informal reception tradition in the margins of Tracy's books I noticed. And you would notice things people underlining and underlining and underlining phrases.
So I remember just how many times someone underlined the line, "Oh Lord, Oh Lord, Oh Lord." Especially interesting where people would rewrite lines as if it wasn't enough to read it, you had to have it move through your body and through your hand. And I saw this with "Like God, it has no face."
Some people talking back to the poems, who is I? But we have surveillance cameras. This is the problem of life. And in her memoir Ordinary Light, people sharing in Tracy's life. The same thing happened to me, I'd read, or I also had that, watch that, thought that, this was my aunts-- these were my aunts too, or I'm so sorry that happened.
There was an Illustrator who drew little pictures of the animals in Tracy's poems. And one person whose commentary became another poem as if they were just immediately inspired to write their own poem in the margins and then comment on that and say, how do I do this? How does one have the courage?
All this made me think of the informal community around the poets as well as the public tradition. There are the books passed between friends, prescribed as a cure for heartbreak to help through the process of mourning.
And I wish I could interview those commentators. And I wish they had their own prizes to award. I imagine, this poem got me through a summer I didn't think I could manage. Prize awarded to, My God, It's Full of Stars. This book I reread to myself before bed even though I'm exhausted and I have no time and I'm struggling to stay awake but because I need this just this one thing for myself. Awarded to Wade in the Water.
Or the body's question got me writing again after I never thought I'd write. I wish I could tell you all of those honors with which this huge community of fans would celebrate Tracy. And I believe it might even overwhelm the public record to which I do have access, so I'll give a quick formal introduction.
Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize winning poet and former poet laureate of the United States. And she's faculty of English and African and African-American Studies at Harvard. As I said, published five books of poetry. The Body's Question, Duende, Life on Mars, Wade in the Water, and Such Color which was the new and selected, multiple awards including, as I said, the Pulitzer Prize. If I name them all, it'll just take too long and I don't want to take up so much time.
Her memoir Ordinary Light which I've mentioned was a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction. She's also the editor of Anthologies, the translator of Yi Lei, recently ran the famous podcast The Slowdown. And I believe currently writing librettos for operas. So we are so so honored and grateful for Tracy to visit us today. And just I'll mention one more place where you might be able to read her work is peripheries, our own literary journal where she might honor us with a piece of writing. Let me welcome Tracy.
TRACY K. SMITH: Thank you so much, Sherah. What a moving introduction. It really puts me in mind of the larger ramifications of something I really believe, which is that poetry is something that we were meant to talk about.
During my time as poet laureate, I was traveling and really just trying to have conversations with readers or listeners or people who didn't even imagine themselves to be poetry lovers. And what was really beautiful to me was that even in a large auditorium, those conversations felt intimate and vulnerable, private, and kind of like irreproducible in a really wonderful way.
And that I'm so heartened to imagine or to be reminded that that kind of conversation can take many forms. And sometimes it's marginalia which maybe I'll go to the library and add in my voice in another way to that really beautiful thread that readers are making.
I thought I would-- and this plan might get changed midway through this reading and talk. But I thought I would frame my work in dialogue with a poet I love, Yi Lei. A Chinese poet who began publishing her poems in the late 1980s.
One of her most famous and controversial poems was called "A Single Woman's Bedroom." In a long suite, the speaker of that poem describes her longing for a lover who has broken a promise to come and live with her. She also expresses longing and insistence for freedom, both personal and I think collective.
As I was working with my co-translator Changtai B on bringing this work into English, Yi Lei would stand by and watch my versions of the poems take shape. And in that poem in particular, she said, you're paying too much attention to the love story in this poem. This is a poem about citizenship and freedom of the spirit.
And I think that when we listen deeply to another poet's work, we find a stronger footing in our own questions and themes as well. And so maybe this reading, which is kind of like a conversation between Yi Lei and myself will enact that a little bit even across poems that I wrote before I became a student and a devotee of her work.
Yi Lei passed away in 2018 before this collection, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree was published. But I feel that our conversation continued. There was a moment, I remember very clearly and very frequently, sitting in a hotel room while I was on the road working on the manuscript, getting ready to hand it in.
And I didn't know what the book should be called. I didn't know which poem ought to give it its title. And I asked Yi Lei to help me. And she gave me a nudge toward an English line in one of her poems. Maybe I'll start with that. Already I'm running afoul of my little plan, but I think that's always a nice sign.
This is a poem called "Nightmare." And it makes reference to Miguel or Michael Cervantos who was a monk who was-- or actually a secular humanist who was put to death for heresy. And he makes an appearance in the poem alongside the speaker.
"Nightmare." "I'm bound to a stake planted in a nameless square. Twigs pant at my feet, awaiting the match. Michael Cervantos, scraggy madman should be bound to and hoarse from shouting, I'm weak. I quake with rage. With what words will the world be quenched? Michael Cervantos calls on god. But I'm godless.
I say, soon the language of reality will be silence. What sparks true today blinds tomorrow. Today I die for a crime. Tomorrow people will be crowned for it. My name will grow wide like a tree. Flames growl and pounce. I am consumed with fear. Michael Cervantos and I cry out together, no, no. This morning, I woke with those words burning my lips."
I think poems help us talk to ourselves. They help us find the proper tone of voice and sense of stakes to be honest with ourselves about what we know and what we fear. And I'm going to move a little bit toward other ranges of consideration, ranges of distance. If that's a poem in which the speaker is bearing witness to a nightmare but also an understanding. This is a poem that's addressed to an other, a stranger.
"Between Strangers." "Stranger, who can measure the distance between us? Distance is the rumor of a never before seen sea. Distance, the width of a layer of dust. Maybe we need only strike a match for my world to flicker and your sky visible finally, and eye to eye. Reachable finally, the border between us.
What if we touched? What then? Would something in us hum an old familiar song? Maybe then our feet would wear a path back and forth between our lives like houses and neighboring lots. Would you give me what I lack? Your winter coat, your favorite battered pot. Logic warns unlikely.
History tells me to guard my distance when I pass you on the street, and I obey. But to stumble into you or you into me, wouldn't it be sweet? In reality, I keep to myself, you keep to you. We have nothing to rue. So why does remorse rise almost to my brim and also in you?"
Sometimes I think of poems as thought experiments whereby we can voice these questions, we can bring into language the wish or the inkling that what we obey in our day to day lives is less than what's possible. And I feel that in a poem like this.
I feel like Yi Lei also teaches me to ask questions in my work, and to struggle with questions that I don't and won't the answer to. I'll read, I think, two more poems by this poet. This is a love poem. I think it's also a poem that becomes cosmic in scale. That's something I admire in poetry in general when we can move from the known and the felt, into a space that upends our certainty and reminds us of the proper scale in which we operate. And I feel like this poem does that very elegantly.
Maybe I'll tell you a little bit about how these poems were made, these-- the English versions. I don't read Mandarin, Chinese, and so Changtai B who goes by the name David created a literal translation of Yi Lei's selected poems.
And even in that direct-- in some cases-- rough form, I heard and felt a kind of emphatic insistence. Sometimes that occurred through repetition. Other times it occurred by way of poems moving again and again by different means toward a single question or event.
And I was eager to find image systems that would allow me to feel at home and grounded in the body of Yi Lei's imagination. I was also interested in finding forms in English that could help constrain and guide my own ear and thought process through her cosmology. And sometimes that meant changing forms of the poem.
I'll read you one poem in which I had to invent a new cage or container for a poem that is a concrete poem in Chinese. And that couldn't be replicated in that fashion in English vocabulary. But let me read The Nude.
"My eye lapse at you in lamplight like a white hot tongue, longing draws back, then rises title. The curtain of my hair announces my breasts, your lips, a languid breeze. Like a miracle, we feast and feast and nothing is spent. Let flesh attend to flesh, sex to sex. Oh dexterous gold watch of the universe on which one minute can straddle 100 years."
I have this belief that the middle line of a poem is a key, almost in every case, to something that's at stake at the heart of the poem. And as a poet I know you don't know what the middle line of your poem is as you're writing it. And so there's something that feels like a mystery operating alongside the poet's conscious mind.
We have lots of different names for that, the unconscious is one. But especially thinking about my connection to Yi Lei or my interest in poems that take me toward what feels like the cosmic or the mysterious. I also urge myself to expand my vocabulary of what that might be. And to imagine it might be guides. And far flung can people on the other side of the mortal divide or language itself.
In this poem, the middle line is "A languid breeze like a miracle." And I think for me, that is the moment where something else becomes possible in Yi Lei's imagination. The room, the intimate encounter between two bodies is now in space with the ineffable and the profound and powerful. And the possibilities within the poem open in new directions for me.
There's repetition that does something, we feast and feast. And the miracle is nothing is spent. And then there's one of my favorite moments in her work, the moment where the scope of the universe also has bearing upon the moment at hand between lovers.
"Dexterous gold watch of the universe on which one minute can straddle 100 years." And that verb allows me as a reader, as a translator to live in both realms at once, to hover there. This is the poem that is a concrete poem. Maybe I can try and show it to you in-- if I can find it in the Chinese version.
These poems appear-- they look so different. They behave so different from one language system to the next that the book isn't a side by side translation. It is laid out like two manuscripts. But this is what the poem I'm about to read looks like in its original form. And it's a poem called "Red Wall." And so that block structure feels like it's very intentional.
This is a poem-- as I read it-- that's about nationhood and about allegiance and fidelity and also qualms and indifference or resistance. And how that dwells in and around our markers of nationhood and our relationship to the place that we help constitute.
"Red Wall." "Hot, having burned me but also warmed me, I regard it from a distance, the flowers choking it, bleeding onto it, red legacy binding our generations, from below we thousands cast upon it a beatific, benighted, complacent, complicit, decorous, disconsolate, distracted, expectant, execretive, filthy, grievous, guileless, hallowed, hotheaded, hungry, incredulous, indifferent, inscrutable, insubordinate, joyful, loath, mild, peace-loving, profane, proud, rageful, rancorous, rapt, skeptical, terrified, tranquil, unperturbed, unrepentant, warring, eye."
So you hear that, sort of, just insistent list of adjectives that the poem becomes right around the middle line of the poem. I'll just throw that out there. But it's-- that's the language that comprises that block or that wall in the original text.
I wanted to find something to bind my version of the poem with, but it couldn't be a physical form. And so I thought that alphabetizing those adjectives would become the constraint. And that it would maybe not be recognizable at first. But as the list goes on beyond what is acceptable, beyond what also feels almost practical, I think that maybe that ordering system becomes legible. You start to wonder, and so your eye starts to wander the text and you realize it's obedient to something.
And I'll read one last Yi Lei poem, which is a poem that I think also bears witness to her sense of ecology, sense of the natural world with its power, wisdom, and its sense of order, regeneration. Yi Lei reveres the ecology as something that we are accountable to and that we are stewards of. And something that has potent powerful force to act in its own-- in accordance with its own will.
This is "Song for Heaven, Earth, and Humankind." And it is inscribed for the painting Celestial Music Floats by Inio, written on the fifth day after the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008. So this is a poem that in some ways is an elegy.
"Song for Heaven, Earth, and Humankind." "Each blade of grass is a glorious eye, every ripe fruit, a mouth, angels stretch out their 1,000 hands, and dew drops and rain rain down, all things ache for love, water and fire withstand each other, heaven journeys alongside Earth, a small voice belts out the saddest song, year after year, flowers thrive, sea gives way to land, land to sea, humanity creates, ghosts endure, the soul and the cloud dances quietly."
I mean, that's Yi Lei. I hope that you might be interested in exploring her work. And I especially hope those of you who might be readers or speakers of Mandarin Chinese will read the poems and maybe even get the itch to offer your own versions of the translations so that those poems have a wider life.
And since the poems I chose from Yi Lei are speaking at different registers to the self in terms of the nation across the divide of strangers or neighbors, I thought I select-- I'd select the poems that I would read of my own with similar-- with a similar logic.
This is called "Flores Woman." And it begins with an epigraph from Nature Magazine. "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."
And in that same article, the circumstance or the condition that accounts for why and how humans and animals might grow smaller over time in proportion to their environment is called endemic island dwarfism.
So this species of human was named Flores man. And I wanted to imagine a space beside someone like Flores woman. And I start with this poem because I understand, I know that it's also a poem in which I find another vocabulary for thinking about what's at stake in my living. And I think in some cases that that's a really helpful and humbling or chastening exercise.
"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, heard, hunt, a dance against hunger, music, feast, and fear.
This island becomes us, trees cap our sky, it rustles with delight and 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 racked with danger, like a dark star, I want to last."
I recognize in some of the gestures in this poem that part of my brain was also thinking about the statement in the article that modern humans at the same time were colonizing the area. And so I think my ear and mind enter into this scenario with a sense of threat. What is encroaching upon the stability or the sanctity of these people's lives.
I hear that in gestures like a rage of waves protects the horizon or legs and arms racked with danger. And, of course, in that wish which is my wish too at the end of the poem, to last. Sometimes poems give us practice thinking about questions and themes that we'll take up more fully later. But you can see certain seeds. And that's something I'm noticing in this poem now.
So the second Yi Lei poem that I read was that poem "Thinking Toward a Stranger." And this is my poem "Mothership" written for the poet Kamilah Aisha Moon when she was still with us in the year that she lost her mother. And I had this moment where I imagined that Aisha's mother and my mother who were both deceased would know each other now as they had in life. And that gave me a sense of comfort.
And then that thought grew in diameter. And I began to imagine, well, what if that's what happens to all the mothers? What if they all are united in some way where they can come to understand. And that's kind of where this poem digs in.
"Mothership." "You cannot see the mothership in space, it and she being made of the same thing, all our mothers hover there in the ceaseless blue black, watching it ripple and dim to the prized pale blue in which we spin, we who are Black and you too.
Our mothers know each other there, fully and finally, they see what some here see and call anomaly, the way the sight of me might set off a shiver in another mother's sun, a deadly silent digging in, a stolid refusal to budge, the viral urge to stake out what on solid ground is authority, and sometimes also territory, our mothers knowing better call it folly."
All of the new poems in such color was written during the summer of 2020. And so much on my mind was what felt like and what feels like an ever increasing onslaught of violence against unarmed Black citizens. And I think that's the sense of territory and threat that the poem is grappling with.
I wish I had a love poem like Yi Lei's poem "Nude." But I'll read one of the first love poems that I published in my first book. This is called "A Hunger So Honed." I think in my own vocabulary it begins to open up a space for me to consider that has to do with what lives outside of our wanting of another, and what charge that space or maybe even a presence holds.
And I think it's a space and a presence that I return to with many vocabularies in my work. And I also believe that in some ways it's a site of interest for me in terms of a practical theology that I believe my poems are also helping me to construct.
"A Hunger So Honed." "Driving home late through town, he woke me for a deer in the road, the light smudge of it fragile in the distance, free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh, his hand on my hand, even the weight of our voices not speaking.
I watched a long time, and a long time after--" sorry I lost my place. "I watched a long time, and a long time after we were too far to see I told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs all phantom and shadow, so silent it seemed I hadn't wakened but passed into a deeper, more cogent state, the mind, a dark city, a disappearing, a handkerchief swallowed by a fist.
I thought of the animal's mouth and the hunger entrusted it, a hunger so honed the green leaves merely maintain it, we want so much when perhaps we live best in the spaces between loves, that unconscious roving, the heart its own rough animal unfettered.
The second time there were two that faced us a moment the way dear will in their Greek perfection, as though we were just some offering the night had delivered, they disappeared between two houses and we drove on, our own limbs, our need for one another, greedy, week."
A lot of the poems that I'm writing-- I would say most of the poems that I'm writing now and maybe even for the last couple of book projects have been preoccupied with questions of nationhood, questions of citizenship, an itch about the form of regard that we are encouraged to adopt across lines of difference.
And I'm trying to figure out what I know about this sense of distance, mistrust, hierarchy that I don't wish to know. If that makes sense. What does it mean that I can populate a poem like the one I'm about to read with a vocabulary that to my conscience, comes from the wrong set of assumptions?
And so poems in this fashion or poems are trying to listen differently toward documents and voices from history that we believe we know. Those are tools by which I'm trying to figure out a different mode, a different relation, and a different sense of what questions we might more productively begin to ask and answer for one another.
So this is a poem called "The United States Welcomes You." It's comprised entirely of questions. The first few drafts of this poem were written from the perspective of somebody I imagined like this, being apprehended by a person with power or the authority of law.
But I had too much cherishing for that person. I wanted to keep the encounter from going wrong in the way that so many such encounters do. And so my poem was failing. And the strategy that I devised in order to revive it and keep moving forward was to change the perspective, to speak out from the perspective of someone who I imagine might be standing like that or at the very least with a bright light saying, tell me what I know you're up to.
And that was a form that offered a lot of momentum and what felt to me like productive unrest. "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?" Form is something in this poem that-- and in many poems, to be honest, that helped me keep going. Even after I figure it out the strategy that would save the poem from platitudes, I still didn't necessarily know where the poem ought to be to trying to get to.
And the choice to compose it entirely in questions was a constraint that gave me a more narrow set of possibilities which I could follow forward. I remember getting to the moment in writing this poem where I began to think something other than me-- something other than what I'm consciously aware of is beginning to break in. This poem might know something, might be capable of showing me something.
And for me, it happens around the line-- the middle line, "Have you anything to do with others brought by us to harm?" And so for a moment the speakers began to-- beginning to envision the self as a subject or a site of scrutiny.
And a few lines later, that speaker asks, "Is this some enigmatic type of test?" And for me, that was the moment where a subterranean kind of awareness or anxiety begins to come into the poem. Maybe it's merely vulnerability.
But what excited me about that thread within the poem was that it made me trust that even in circumstances where power is easily and frequently abused, there might still be a place where the imagination can ponder even just instantaneously the notion that there's an accountability to something other than the human that we might all actually have. And that felt chastening and exciting to me.
And it allowed me to end this poem without simply pointing a finger at someone but saying, oh, I'm caught in that same dynamic as well. What are we accountable to? And what happens if our choices thus far constitute a kind of failure?
I'll read one last poem of my own. And so that final Yi Lei poem that I read is thinking about the planet, the Earth. This poem is too, but by way of other circumstances. It begins with a frightening dream that I had, that I couldn't wake up from. And it moves toward the sense of the numinous or the sublime.
"The Angels." "Two slung themselves across chairs once in my motel room, grizzled in leather biker gear, emissaries for something I needed to see, I was worn down by an awful panic, a wrenching in the gut contortions.
They sat there at the table while I slept, I could sense them with a deck of playing cards between them, to think of how they smelled, what comes to mind is rum and gasoline, and when they spoke though I couldn't, I dared not look.
I glimpsed how one's teeth were ground down almost to nubs, which makes me hope some might be straight up thugs, young, slim, raw who bounce and roll with fearsome grace, whose very voices cause faint souls to quake, quake then, fools, and fall away, what God do you imagine we obey?
Think of the toil we must cost them, one scaled perfectly to eternity, and still they come telling us through the ages not to fear, just those two, that once, and never again for me since, though there are, are there?
Sightings, flashes, hints, a proud tree and vivid sun, branches swaying in strong wind, rain hurling itself at the roof, boulders, mounds of Earth mistaken for dead dogs, lions in crouch, a rust stained pipe where a house once stood which I take each time I pass it for an owl.
Bright coral so dangerous and near, my mother sat whispering with it at the end of her life while all the rooms of our house filled up with night." Thank you so much. Excited for whatever questions you might have.
SHERAH BLOOR: That was so, so beautiful, Tracy. And amazing having just read through all your work, just to hear you read it's really exquisite. And you are such an incredible reader. It's like at once very-- maybe it's because you read "Mothership" I'm thinking like this, but it was very comforting and yet you feel like you're being confronted by things. But in a place where you can-- you're also be comforted. This is a very nice thing.
I have a bunch of questions, but we also have one sitting here. So I'm going to extend my own question to this question sneakily. One question I had was, I was interested in when-- and I can't quite remember this right, but you were translating an Yi Lei poem and you're told maybe don't focus on the love story as much, this has something to do with nationhood.
And then I was thinking, oh, maybe there's something interesting that love stories do take over for us some of those yearnings that we can't admit, our yearnings about nation and community and the largest of love that should be there. And so I was thinking about the relationship between love stories and poems about nationhood. But there's a question here I'm going to read out from Densen Staples. He's a PhD student.
TRACY K. SMITH: Hi, Densen.
SHERAH BLOOR: Yeah, he's great. OK, so thanks for this ruminative talk, Tracy. I'm thinking about your reflection that your recent book projects have been about nationhood. The concept, the practice, the pitfalls, the promises.
I'm reminded of the mid-century African-American poet Bob Kaufman who was preoccupied with nationhood and also with another of the registers and scales you mentioned earlier, the cosmic, the cosmos, the cosmological. I'm curious how nationhood and the cosmos relate for you, if at all, in your thinking and your poetry.
TRACY K. SMITH: I love that question. I hope we can interact one day off Zoom, Densen. We've been on Zooms together a lot. That question is really an obsession of mine. And I believe, I believe in my understanding it has a lot to do with the terms at work in the tradition that I claim and descend from, which is I describe it as the Black lyric tradition about work written that is at once interested in the public, the manageable, the familiar, and the dynamic of that.
But it's also aware that there are limits on possibility. It's aware that in order to get the full sense of what we're working within and what we're failing at in some ways, you've got to look beyond the ground, beyond the city, beyond the nation, even beyond the human. And I feel like Black poets are really good at doing that.
One reason might be because if you can change the scale on which you're considering a problem that is a threat to you, you can change your understanding of your place within it. If you can become psychically larger than it, you perhaps have recourse to other forms of consolation but maybe even more importantly, forms of logic or counter logic.
And I feel like the tradition of Black faith, the tradition of Black artmaking and organizing and communities maybe bears witness to some of that alternate strategizing. And I think it lives in poetry as well. I think it lives in the fact that poems are places where we affirm the self and draw toward that vulnerable self, the longed for community that might be bolstering, consoling. And also it might galvanize into something that's a force of its own.
SHERAH BLOOR: [INAUDIBLE] and there's two more questions here that are quite broad so I don't know. I can see how you respond to them. So at one moment you said, maybe you're working toward a practical theology. I knew someone was going to ask a question about this. I was trying to think of one like, oh, what would that look like? Someone's asking you to expand on what that might look like, I suppose.
TRACY K. SMITH: Well I guess in some ways it connects to that previous question. But I will say that I found myself writing about God and the universe together when I was experiencing grief. It wasn't the first time that grief had been a part of my life. But I lost my father in 2008.
And I felt like I needed to figure out where I wanted him to be, where he and my mother had been entrusted or delivered to. What that left me with recourse to in a world that felt frightening as it does now. I was pregnant with my first child at that time and so the stakes were suddenly much larger than they had ever been before for me as a person, not even as a writer.
And god started appearing in a lot of those poems and the poems in Life on Mars. And when it's not god, it's an it. It's the wish for a sense of a system, even a system that doesn't make earthly sense that I could ponder. And since I'm a writer or a maker, that I could renovate.
And so the first things those poems I found myself doing were to kind of blow out the wall on the terms of the afterlife that I had been given, and make it larger. And make it connect with things that I had in my own upbringing been told were incompatible with the faith that I was given. That I needed them to talk to each other and coexist.
And so I feel like the poems have moved forward in that questioning or seeking or inventing. The newest poems in such color and a great thread of a book called To free the Captives, a book of nonfiction that is coming out in November, has to do with meditative dialogue with ancestors and others. And guides in a way that doesn't fit in the Christianity that I was taught as a child, but that enlarges my vocabulary for what it is we're working at and what and to whom we are accountable.
And that had ramifications, not only in terms of the spiritual, but also the civic. If history is upon us, if history, even if it's up ahead looking, saying, come on, catch up. What are you going to do? It means there's something, some work, some duty that we all are responsible for. And those other actors invested in the very same history are not just watching, I don't believe. I think they're working with us if we can listen in the right way.
SHERAH BLOOR: I think that that's going to help answer this question if we can listen in the right way, because I've heard you speak about this before. So people are asking about how your poetry comes to you and about writing process.
So we've got two questions about this, how do the poems come to you? And I was curious about your process. What is your relationship to craft? How do you work with idea language and metaphor? I also notice changes in writing in "A Hunger So Honed." How does your writing and editing process look like? Do you come back to poems after you've written them? That's a lot of questions but--
TRACY K. SMITH: Yeah, I'll try and cover. I don't know what time we have. Yeah, that poem I was feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm far from that poem. It's one of the earliest poems in the book-- in my selected. But I feel faithful to those early-- to the poems as they were realized. I'm not a writer who goes back and revises those poems that now have life. But I spend a lot of time revising them before they get to that place.
And what I'm doing as I'm revising is a version of what I'm doing as I'm writing, which is to think where are opportunities that I'm moving across literally or in a utilitarian way. Just to say what happened or what the terms or the feelings of an experience were.
And how can I go back into them and get more out of them. How can I use what might be a descriptive metaphor as if it were something real and present in the world of the poem, and what can it teach me to notice, and how can it respond to my presence as well.
So those are questions I ask about verbs and nouns. And I think, OK, if this verb is telling what was done in what fashion, what verb from another context would also bring intention. Or these other terms of encounter into dialogue in a palpable but maybe also slightly invisible way so that the experience of the poem is operating in different registers at the same time.
I also know that there is a lot that's happening in auditory. My auditory awareness of poems that I'm writing now, that's different. I think in the beginning of my career, statement was the element of a poem that I felt very excited by because it meant I knew something. I could see or assert or define something.
And then image became a way of moving beyond the limits of what I was certain of or what I had authority to say, into what I could respond to and observe. And now I think that the rhythmic behavior of language, the musical behavior of language and what sound can guide me to ask or say, as opposed to other kinds of logic, that's a really big part.
And maybe that has to do with this notion that I'm trying to listen outside of the concrete and literal toward these other voices that I imagine have intentions and demands. And so I'm excited about where that's leading. It's leading into a place that's populous, populated, full with presences that I think have stories, poems, and adminitions that feel very, very needful.
SHERAH BLOOR: I've heard you answer that question multiple ways. I was listening to some interviews you did and your answer is always slightly different. This is interesting, but always about listening to what you've just written. And having that courage to write a thing not knowing where you're going, and then listen and see where it's going to take you. And I wonder whether that's how the middle of the poem gets to have the key in it, because it's the point where you're listening and you're not trying to control.
TRACY K. SMITH: Yeah, I think so. I think there's something about that. And it's always curious to me that often it is kind of in the midpoint of a poem even though, who knows, there's any number of choices that could make a poem longer or shorter. That might also have taught me something about what I want to do in revision as well, yeah.
SHERAH BLOOR: Some of us are going to be able to continue this conversation with you because Tracy very generously is going to visit us and run a workshop. So we look forward to continuing that conversation in a couple of hours. And thank you so, so much, Tracy. We'll see you soon.
TRACY K. SMITH: What a pleasure. Thanks so much. Bye bye.
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