One voice speaking, quietly
The new US Poet Laureate wants to reach beyond poetry fans by initiating ‘quiet conversations’.
ON an early June day, Tracy K. Smith looked out the window of her office at Princeton University at a sculpture by Picasso as students and their families prepared for graduation activities. None of them knew that Smith, who was fielding a battery of phone calls, would soon be announced as the 2017 US poet laureate. The Library of Congress made it official earlier this month.
At 45, Smith is unusually young to receive the honour – other young recipients include Rita Dove, Robert Lowell and Natasha Tretheway. Established in 1936 as the consultant in poetry and changed in 1985 by Congress to poet laureate, the position has also been held by Donald Hall, Robert Pinsky, Robert Penn Warren, Philip Levine, and Joseph Brodsky. Smith succeeds Juan Felipe Herrera, the first Latino poet laureate.
From a childhood in Fairfield, California, to winning the Cave Canem poetry prize for 2003’s The Body’s Question and on to being awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her most recent collection, Life On Mars, Smith has shown a singular focus and dedication to her craft. If the role of the poet laureate is, in part, to be an ambassador, Smith will be a representative for listening, quiet, and contemplation.
The poet laureate title often caps off a career, but you’re getting it at 45. What does that mean to you?
There’s a different kind of weight that I’ve been mulling over in that regard. Anytime acknowledgment comes – and this is the greatest acknowledgment that I’ve experienced ever as a writer – it makes me feel like, OK, someone’s listening, and someone wants me to keep doing what I love and need to do. And that feels really good.
Beyond that, I try and push away any sense of the external pressure to be a certain kind of writer, and really focus on the work that sustains me, which is quiet, and it’s private, and it’s contemplative.
I feel really fortunate that Natasha Tretheway is a friend – seeing how her work as a writer continues to grow and change, and she’s pushing herself now into a new genre, I feel heartened that this doesn’t have to be the end point of anything in my career but, rather, a turning point.
Being poet laureate includes a public engagement role. Do you know what you might do?
Luckily I have a little bit of time to formulate a clear sense of what I’d like to do, and what might be still new for the office.
My curiosity as a writer and as a person makes me really interested in parts of the country that I haven’t explored through writers festivals or through the kind of campus visits that I do, and engaging with people who may be readers of poetry and may not.
And listening to what their reactions to this art form sound like, and what kinds of stories within their own set of experiences are spoken to. What stories get activated by that conversation.
I have this idea that this forum of the laureateship might open up inroads to different, quieter kinds of conversations than I’m used to.
When you say “quieter”, what do you mean?
I like to use that word because I feel like a poem draws us into a quieter space, a decibel level that sits below the register of the media that we live with. I’m talking about advertising and the sound bites that we are drawn toward with and without our consent.
I like the way that when you’re reading a poem, it’s one voice talking quietly to you about something that has happened. Something that has made the creator of the poem feel powerfully changed, powerfully present, powerfully alive.
The conversations that come out of that kind of engagement are thoughtful. They’re not about reacting immediately with utter confidence to something, but teasing out something that is nuanced and a little bit unusual.
A poem, necessarily, sits at a register that’s different from our usual conversational voices. You have to listen more actively to get to the heart of what’s being said, what you as a reader or listener are being asked to feel, or notice.
Could you tell me about that experience of reading, listening?
I first got caught up in this marvellous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook that begins, “I’m nobody, who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us! Don’t tell!” Feeling like I was in collusion with someone that knew more about me than I knew about myself, and who I suspected was right. And I liked that feeling.
Then it was a handful of years later when I realised there were poets who were still alive and writing; reading publicly and talking about their work. That’s when I understood that this was a vocation that could be real for me.
It wasn’t just a matter of dreaming about bygone days when people wrote poems but of actually finding communities of people who were still doing that, and who could teach me how to do it.
Do you mean a community like the organisation Cave Canem?
Cave Canem is a yearly retreat for black poets where there are workshops with a group of faculty members and readings.
It’s this really beautiful gathering where a lot of art gets made and a lot of conversations and teaching happen. There’s also a book prize that Cave Canem sponsors for a book of poems by a black poet. So it’s kind of a home for black poetry. What I have seen over the last 20 years is how Cave Canem has, I think, reinvigorated American poetry.
And other organisations have kind of followed suit. Kundiman, which is an Asian-American retreat similar to Cave Canem, has been going for close to 20 years now.
There are other ways that the chorus of American poetry has broadened and deepened in ways that I think are really beautiful, owing in really direct ways to what Cave Canem has done.
You’re a professor at Princeton and chair of its creative writing department, are married and have young children. How do you create the quiet and space to write?
I think that since having kids, it’s really easy. My tolerance for noise has probably changed a lot. For me, quiet and space to create is 8.45 in the morning, everybody’s at school, and there’s just the hum of the refrigerator. That’ll do it for me. That’s my trick. Just close the door and sit down, knowing I only have a handful of hours before it’s going to get noisy again.
The current conversation in the United States is so racially charged. What role do you think poetry can play?
I feel like the responsibility of the poet is to the urges that set the poem into motion. Generally, those urges are for something that is more concrete, more nuanced, more visceral, move observable and more mysterious than the kind of things that are attempting to call our attention to them in the discourse you’re talking about.
I feel like that’s so necessary. It’s so necessary to look away from your computer screen where things are popping up, and where some of your strong opinions – some of which are founded on real, measured thought, but many of which are founded on a kind of gut reaction – are challenged.
What you’re forced to do is listen anew to something. To say that the most successful path through a set of questions is not to go to the simplest, flattest, loudest point and rush out, but to move, with a lot of attention, and with some selfdoubt, and with a willingness to be persuaded through all of the more nuanced facets of the conversation. – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service