Poetry

to her post in 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden saluted her for producing poetry “so big and sprawling in its themes, and at the same time laser-focused in its words.” In her four collections of poems, Smith has conjured a cosmic David Bowie, “dragging a tail of white-hot matter,” and compared the eldest of her three children (8-year-old Naomi, who joined her on this trip) to an “incongruous goat” tethered to a lone tree atop an island of rock. In perhaps her most celebrated poem, Declaration, she applied an erasure technique to the Declaration of Independence, strategically deleting passages to reveal an audit of the nation’s founding promise:

In every stage of these Oppressions We Have Petitioned for

Redress in the most humble terms;

Our repeated

Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.

Raised in a Northern California exurb by an Air Force father and a prayerful mother, both with Alabama roots, Smith longed to break free. As a schoolgirl, on her first trip to camp, she gaped at a forested landscape that bristled with “the potential for some sort of magic,” as she put it in her 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light.

On her final night in Alaska, Smith paid an after-hours visit to the edge of Mendenhall Glacier, a river of ice creaking in the darkness. Returning to town, the minivan’s headlights picked up a critter—black eyes rimmed in white fur—crossing the road. Smith shrieked. The thunk of the raccoon dampened whatever spirit of adventure remained.

“Do you think he survived?” asked Naomi. Face buried in her hands, Smith seemed exhausted, having at last absorbed as much of America’s outer limits as she had shared.

“Back in the city, someone will ask, maybe very innocently, ‘So what’s it like? What’s rural America like?’ ” said Smith, who planned to chronicle her travels on the Library of Congress’ “American Conversations” website. “It isn’t a single thing. It is every person and every place, and that’s something we could all be more aware of.”