An intrepid poet spreads the words
OUR MOST INTREPID POET TRAVELS CROSSCOUNTRY TO IGNITE THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION, FOR BETTER AND FOR VERSE
ASAMINIVAN shuttled her to a gala at the Alaska State Library in Juneau, the capstone of her first visit to America’s northernmost frontier, the poet Tracy K. Smith stared out the window and soaked up the vastness. The cloud-topped slopes, dense forests, the marshy channels—it was all so free and untamed, especially compared to life on the Princeton University campus some 4,000 miles away.
“Bear!” yelled the driver, a Library of Congress escort. “Wow!” cried Smith, the Poet Laureate of the United States.
Over her three-day trek across Alaska, Smith had marveled at all manner of taxidermy, from the stuffed moose standing sentry in the middle of the Anchorage airport to the buffalo head staring down at her as she read poems at an assisted-living facility in Palmer. But here was the real thing: a black bear, jaunty and unabashed, loping through a Mendenhall Valley subdivision at the edge of Glacier Highway in broad daylight.
“Oh, wow— wow,” said Smith, who considers her “spirit animal” to be her rescue dog, a chocolate Lab retriever named Coco. “I don’t know if I could live like this.”
Reinventing what a PLOTUS (the Library’s acronym) can aspire to, Smith had chosen the wilds of Alaska to launch her “American Conversations” tour, a bardic barnstorm she devised to bring the “humanizing power of poetry” to corners of the country typically left off the literary map. Like a poetic Johnny Appleseed, she has been sowing verse—coaxing
readers, donating books—in communities unaccustomed to visits by Pulitzer Prize winners from the Ivy League. In an earlier version of the roadshow, Smith had shared her poems (and invited her audiences to share their interpretations) at a Methodist church in South Carolina, an Air Force base in New Mexico and a garment factory turned cultural center in Kentucky. By the end of this year, she will have added more whistle stops, in South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana.
In this age of social media fury, Smith relishes the opportunity to educate and be educated. “We’re so trained to just talk and explain and, you know, argue and outmaneuver other people,” said Smith, 46, director of the creative writing program at Princeton. “We need more practice being in rooms where we don’t know what someone’s thinking, where we have to actually listen to get a sense of what might be going on.”
Whether reciting a poem about the unimagined costs of suicide at a juvenile detention facility or a meditation on the unresolved legacy of slavery at an indigenous cultur-