Male Speaker: Now, you might think that 2017 was an inauspicious time to become the poet laureate. The country was still reeling from the most divisive election in memory, at least until the next one. What was poetry going to do about it? All the while Tracy K. Smith decided not to keep a low profile. When she was appointed poet laureate, she wanted to engage with the American people, as many of us as she possibly could.

Smith appeared in front of audiences everywhere from senior homes to prisons. She estimates that she traveled one to two nights per week for two years and at the same time, she put together a collection of topical poems called American Journal that she read from while on the Road. Here's Tracy K. Smith reading one of those poems by Joy Harjo, a poet from the Muskogee Creek nation, who also succeeded Tracy as poet laureate. The poem's title is simply, No.

Tracy K. Smith: [reading No By Joy Harjo]

Yes that was me you saw shaking with bravery, with a government issued rifle on my back. I’m sorry I could not greet you as you deserved, my relative.

They were not my tears. I have a reservoir inside. They will be cried by my sons, my daughters if I can’t learn how to turn tears to stone.

Yes, that was me standing in the back door of the house in the alley, with fresh corn and bread for the neighbors.

I did not foresee the flood of blood. How they would forget our friendship, would return to kill the babies and me.

Yes, that was me whirling on the dance floor. We made such a racket with all that joy. I loved the whole world in that silly music.

I did not realize the terrible dance in the staccato of bullets.

Yes. I smelled the burning grease of corpses. And like a fool I expected our words might rise up and jam the artillery in the hands of dictators.

We had to keep going. We sang our grief to clean the air of turbulent spirits.

Yes, I did see the terrible black clouds as I cooked dinner. And the messages of the dying spelled there in the ashy sunset. Every one addressed: “mother”.

There was nothing about it in the news. Everything was the same. Unemployment was up. Another queen crowned with flowers. Then there were the sports scores.

Yes, the distance was great between your country and mine. Yet our children played in the path between our houses.

No. We had no quarrel with each other.

Male Speaker: Tracy K. Smith reading Joy Harjo's poem, No. In 2018, while she was poet Laureate, Smith sat down with The New Yorker's poetry editor Kevin Young.

Kevin Young: I love that line, we made such a racket with all that joy.

Tracy K. Smith: Racket's a good word for what we are producing right now. I read this poem in Alaska in the Tundra which is a region that is accessible by small plane. A lot of native Alaskan communities are accessible along rivers by boat. In the winter, you can drive across the rivers. It was great to engage with Joy Harjo's work there.

Kevin Young: How great. Tell us about the project for those who might not know already.

Tracy K. Smith: It's called American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities. It involved traveling to small communities in different parts of the country where there isn't a college or a reading series and having readings. I'd read some of my own work and talk about it, but mostly, I handed out copies of this little anthology, American Journal and we would read it.

I felt in some ways like hymnal, like let's turn to page 68 and see what we find here. I'd read a poem, I'd ask somebody else in the audience to reread it so we could hear it in a different way. Then the conversation just got started.

Kevin Young: What made you want to do this travel? You could have just stayed and written poems in that beautiful space of the Library of Congress or wherever you felt. What made you want to go out there?

Tracy K. Smith: Well, I'd been thinking a lot about the national conversation and how it's characterized by a really awful sense of division. This shrill railing against one another based on our differing perspectives. I'd been saying to myself, poetry could help us get past that. I bet if somebody would start a reading series where they went, brought poets from one part of the country to another, poetry could get past that, that sense of a divide. Then I got this call asking if I wanted to serve in the position and I said, I do. I know exactly what I want to do. I want to test out this theory.

Kevin Young: It sounds like that worked well. You went how many different places?

Tracy K. Smith: Oh, gosh. The official trips from the Library of Congress, I think there were eight, maybe nine, including Puerto Rico. Within each of those states that we visited, there were three different or four locations but also, because I'd been talking so publicly about this desire, I got a lot of invitations from rural communities. I was traveling probably every single week, one or two nights. It was exhausting and exhilarating, but it was probably the best thing that I could have done as an American because I felt so worried sitting home and listening to the news and so confident that we'll figure this out when I was out there meeting people and just listening.

Kevin Young: What are some of your most vivid memories of it?

Tracy K. Smith: They're different kinds. Some of them have to do with the types of settings. There were the public events that we did and in each place, there was a curated event, so something in a retirement home or a rehab facility. I visited women's prison in Maine and talking with women there about how poems gave them a new language for describing themselves to themselves. Then there was another experience in a home for Veterans and pioneers in Alaska, people who had been part of the Homestead movement. I went in and I had the anthology and I started by talking a little bit about why I love poetry.

There was one person who was really really talking with me, responding to the poems. Then I noticed that hardly anybody else was talking. Sometimes we'd read a poem and then I'd hear somebody just moan or somebody might just clap or something but there wasn't a conversation and I was thinking, am I bombing here? What's going on? Are these poems not speaking to people?

Then afterward some of the caretakers came up and said, this was incredible. A lot of the people in this room are members of the Alzheimer's award and they're nonverbal. To hear some of them making noises or moving their bodies was incredible. I don't know how to explain how powerful that was for me. It affirmed that poems, they called us something that's deep within us. There are many, many different ways of answering that.

Kevin Young: That's incredibly powerful. I'm getting chills just thinking about that. I understand in South Carolina you visited Somerton High School, which was integrated as part of the Brown V Board desegregation ruling. The decision from 1954. What was that visit like? Did that have a particular resonance?

Tracy K. Smith: It was really moving because the people in the audience were alumni. I also happened to be reading a number of poems that weren't rooted in the history of desegregation, but civil war poems that also spoke to questions of race and America. Talking about those poems in a place where people had lived through this really monumental chapter of history was meaningful.

Kevin Young: Is there part of that Civil War piece that you might share with us?

Tracy K. Smith: Sure. The long sequence is called, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. It's a poem that's made up entirely of letters and deposition statements by Black soldiers and veterans of the Civil War and their family members. This is one section that I think of as a chorus. It's made up of many voices excerpted.

Excellent sir, my son went in the 54th regiment

Sir, my husband who is in Company K, 22nd regiment, U.S. colored troops

And now in the Macon Hospital at Portsmouth with a wound in his arm

Has not received any pay since last May

And then only $13.

Sir, we the members of Company D, of the 55th Massachusetts volunteers

Call the attention of your excellency to our case.

For instant, look and see that we never was freed yet.

Run right out of slavery in to soldiery and we hadn’t nothing at all.

And our wives and mothers, most all of them is a perishing all about.

And we all are perishing ourself.

I am willing to be a soldier and serve my time faithful like a man.

But I think it is hard to be put off in such doggish manner as that.

Will you see that the colored men fighting now are fairly treated?

You ought to do this and do it at once.

Not let the thing run along. Need it quickly and manfully.

We poor oppressed ones appeal to you and ask fair play.

Kevin Young: I can listen to that all day. It's incredible. There's a line that I loved that you read for instant, much better saying, than for instance, and I love that play with language that you also are capturing in the please.

Tracy K. Smith: There's so many of those. The one that made me realize that I didn't need to write over these voices with my own was a mother who wrote to Abraham Lincoln, and she said. My son is gone. He was the only help I had. Now I am old, and my head is blossoming for the grave.

Kevin Young: That's powerful.

Tracy K. Smith: What more could you want?

Kevin Young: I think there's something in the work both that you've done as poet laureate but also in your own work. Giving voice is the wrong word, but singing through history. How do you think about history in your own work, and then in your work as poet laureate?

Tracy K. Smith: For me, history is a way of trying to make better sense of the present. I feel like history is hot on our trails. All the things that used to feel when I was younger, they lived in newsreels and chapters from books. They feel like they've woken up, and they're present, and they're telling us you haven't solved me. This isn't over. Turning to history right now, for me, is a way of saying what can I learn that somehow we've overlooked?

Kevin Young: Well said, I think that for me, your American Journal, the anthology you did speaks to that very question of talking about now but thinking about history. Tell us what you were thinking when you were making it.

Tracy K. Smith: Well, American journal is a 50 poem anthology. It includes one poem each by 50 different living American poets. I wanted to gather up voices that might be helpful to me on these trips. I didn't want to just be talking about my own work, I wanted to be a reader with others. I said, oh, there are poems that are new that speak to life as we are currently experiencing it, from place to place, perspective to perspective that could be really useful.

I wanted poems that could meet someone where they are, that wouldn't feel intimidating. I think the sense of 50 voices felt so small, but I wanted to celebrate the range of voices and traditions here in America. I wanted this whole project, which is about exploring America, to acknowledge that there are many Americas, and they need not be exclusive of one another or there's no hierarchy that we need to respect.

Kevin Young: Were there other things that came about from the Anthology for you? Had you done an anthology before?

Tracy K. Smith: I had never done an anthology before. I realized that I had to write an introduction. That was one of the first acts as a poet laureate that I did even though--

Kevin Young: I'm not just picking. Well, I happen to have some language from that introduction where you say, it is an offering for people who love poems the way I do. It is also an offering for those who love them in different ways and those who don't yet know what their relationship with poetry will be. I hope there is even something here to please readers who, for whatever the reason, might feel themselves to be at odds with poetry.

These 50 poems welcome you to listen and be surprised, amused, consoled. For the time that you are reading them, and even after, these poems will collapse the distance between you and 50 real or imagined people with 50 different outlooks on the human condition. That's beautifully said. I hope you write a book about poetry because you're so good talking about what it means and what it's up to. I'd love to read that book too. I want to end with where your work is headed, all of this, it sounds like has changed your own work.

Tracy K. Smith: I've written one poem this whole time. I am thinking now that what I'd really like to do is just take some time to reflect on these two years, which have been so packed and surprising and instructive and consoling. I need to go, I think, by way of prose into those questions a little bit more and talk about America, and what poetry has to do with it. I hope that's the next project that I dig into and then I also want to trust that there's some poems waiting for me as well.

Kevin Young: Sure. Well, thank you so much for talking with us.

Tracy K. Smith: Thank you.

Male Speaker: Tracy K. Smith spoke with Kevin Young in 2018 while she was serving as poet laureate of the United States. Kevin Young, in addition to being the New Yorkers poetry editor, is director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Tracy read one more poem for us from her collection, Wait In The Water. The poem is set in Texas, and it's called Hill Country.

Tracy K. Smith: [reading Hill Country By Tracy K. Smith]

He comes down from the hills, from

The craggy rock, the shrubs, the scrawny

Live oaks and dried-up junipers. Down

From the cloud-bellies and the bellies

Of hawks, from the caracaras stalking

Carcasses, from the clear, sun-smacked

Soundlessness that shrouds him. From the

Weathered bed of planks outside the cabin

Where he goes to be alone with his questions.

God comes down along the road with his

Windows unrolled so the twigs and hanging

Vines can slap and scrape against him in his jeep.

Down past the buck caught in the hog trap

That kicks and heaves, bloodied, blinded

By the whiff of its own death, which God—

Thank God—staves off. He downshifts,

Crosses the shallow trickle of river that only

Just last May scoured the side of the canyon

To rock. Gets out. Walks along the limestone

Bank. Castor beans. Cactus. Scat of last

Night’s coyotes. Down below the hilltops,

He squints out at shadow: tree backing tree.

Dark depth the eyes glide across, not bothering

To decipher what it hides. A pair of dragonflies

Mate in flight. Tiny flowers throw frantic color

At his feet. If he tries—if he holds his mind

In place and wills it—he can almost believe

In something larger than himself rearranging

The air. He squints at the jeep glaring

In bright sun. Stares a while at patterns

The tall branches cast onto the undersides

Of leaves. Then God climbs back into the cab,

Returning to everywhere.

Male Speaker: Tracy K. Smith reading Hill Country. The latest collection Such Color came out in 2021.

[music]

[00:18:58] [END OF AUDIO]

 

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