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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. On the last day of the three-part poetry series we've been doing this week, we'll end the show today hearing some new and selected poems for Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and former US Poet Laureate. In addition to being the editor of the anthology The Best American Poetry 2021, she has a new collection out of her own work. It's called Such Color: New and Selected Poems. Hi, Tracy. Thanks for doing this one more time to go into the weekend.

Tracy K. Smith: Hi, Brian, thanks so much.

Brian: By the way, a background before you read, in selecting poems for this new collection or writing them, were you surprised by anything you found in some of your older work or what you're thinking about now?

Tracy: Well, the poems that I wrote over the last year were really wrestling in different ways with questions of racial justice. I was heartened to find that there's a theme of that that runs sometimes quietly, sometimes more audibly through even the earliest poems that I've published. It was exciting to gather those poems up together and ask them to sort of speak as a chorus.

Brian: I see you're going to read one from your debut collection, The Body's Question, published back in 2003. You want to set-up this one? Which is called-- I think it's Gospel: Jesús.

Tracy: Yes. This is the last poem in a sequence of poems about immigration, and it moved across very voices. It's called gospel, because in some ways, I feel that the narrative of migration or immigration is kind of the Central American story. Gospel: Jesús.

I'd like to smash a Goblet in my fist

Instead I watch my hands baptize each piece

Making piles of the things I have watched myself make new

I watch my hands until I am watching out from my hands.

Now in air, now water, each element, a shadow of the other

Brian: Practically a haiku, it's so short.

Tracy: In some ways, yes. I think the story of people moving from one place to another out of desperation or need is-- it's a heavy, meaty story but, sometimes, it causes us not to think about those moments of quiet reflection that we all have. This poem kind of ends that, that sequence, where someone is just contemplating [crosstalk].

Brian: I was wondering if, for an English language reading audience, you were trying to make that connection to immigration and Latino immigration in particular, by pairing those words in the title Gospel. Of course, the English language, I is going to read it first as Jesus, and then see, “Oh, it's got the accent over the u. Maybe it's Jesús. Were you doing that on purpose?

Tracy: Absolutely. My editor and I were saying, “Should we put the accent or not?” I feel like these are holy voices, in a way, all of our voices are holy, and the habituated American perspective often forgets that. I wanted to play with the sense of the disciples, and there's not a gospel of Christ in the Bible that I grew up with, but this is a poem that invites us to imagine, what if there were?

Brian: What if there were. The next one that I see you'll read is It & Co., from your third collection from 2011, the one called Life on Mars. Borrowed from the David Bowie song, that title Life on Mars?

Tracy: Yes, absolutely. This is a book, the Life on Mars that was really thinking about science fiction but also the afterlife, and the universe, and theology. This is a poem that kind of puts all of that together and says, what is it? What do we belong to? It & Co.

We are a part of It. Not guests.

Is It us or what contains us?

How can It be anything but an idea,

Something teetering on the spine

Of the number I? It is elegant

But coy. It avoids the blunt ends

Of our fingers as we point. We

Have gone looking for It everywhere:

In Bibles, and bandwidth, blooming

Like a wound from the ocean floor.

Still, It resists the matter of false versus real.

Unconvinced by our zeal, It is unappeasable.

It is like some novels:

Vast and unreadable.

Brian: That's the first-- go ahead. What were you going to say about it?

Tracy: I still marvel-- there's so many questions we have about the mystery of the universe. Every time I think about the fact that it's not apart from us, we're in it, I'm sitting at my desk right now, I'm in the universe, and you are too, it kind of boggles my mind. I like the way that a poem can allow us to enact scale shifts that let us test out different kinds of proximities to the things that feel far away, when, really, perhaps they're not.

Brian: This is not what I plan to ask you today, but did you have a reaction to William Shatner's emotional reaction to perceiving the Earth from space in the context of what you were just saying?

Tracy: Oh gosh, I don't know what his reaction was. I hate to say that I did grow up, admiring him as captain Kirk, and I actually loved the idea that he got to jettison out to where he always seemed to exist in my imagination. What was his reaction?

Brian: He was struck by what he considered sort of the vast death of space, because there's no life form up there. Then looking down at the Earth, just teaming with life, all kinds of life, but seeing it from afar like that and in the context of space, where there was no life. It’s actually not a take that I had heard from an astronaut before.

Tracy: That's really fascinating.

Brian: The last poem we will hear from you today, I see is a new poem of yours called Logos, written for this collection.

Tracy: Yes. Well, it's an uncollected poem I've had for a little while. As I was saying, a lot of my work is thinking about questions of justice, which we bring the imagination, but also various kinds of logic to bear and trying to decipher, trying to argue for. But I had to be honest and say, a lot of my work is also hoping that something beyond logic might be useful. Logos as divine word or as the word that brought creation into being is what this poem is hoping to nudge up against. Logos.

Safe and the light along the bank

Being in believing

No name, only being

On the bank, radiant and blank

Safe, watching and seeing. On the brink

Of the light, blank, no blame in being

Waiting, then seeing, breathing in being

Let my voice, let my voice

On the banks along that brink

After the blaze of knowing

That singing

Some of the poems this poem sits near are thinking about these tragic but frequent deaths of unarmed Black citizens. There's a poem called Rapture, just a page or two before this, that's imagining those departures in brutal, but also spiritual ways. I hope this poem maybe invites the reader to dwell outside of logic and feeling, and belief, and the space that we don't have a lot of language for.

Brian: Tracy K. Smith, the former US Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019 is the author now of Such Color: New and Selected Poems--those are her own work-- and the editor now of The Best American Poetry 2021. These have been such wonderful ways to end the show the last three days. Thank you for doing this mini-series, and let's keep looking for ways to put your voice in your work on the radio.

Tracy: I'd love that. Thanks so much.

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