>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, DC. >> Jane McAuliffe: Good evening. >> Evening. >> Jane McAuliffe: I'm Jane
McAuliffe, the Director of National and International
Outreach here at the Library of Congress, and I'd
really like to welcome you to tonight's event, which
concludes the first term of our 22nd Poet
Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Tracy K. Smith. As I'm sure you know, the
Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, has
appointed Tracy Smith to a second term
as Poet Laureate. And she was eager to do so because Tracy has already
accomplished a great deal in her signature
laureate project. With this project, Tracy
seeks to bring more poetry to rural communities,
communities like Fairfield, California where she grew up. This spring, with pilot trips
to New Mexico, South Carolina, and Kentucky, Tracy developed
the model for how she plans to spend her second term. And also on behalf
of the Library, I'd like to thank Senator
Tom Udall of New Mexico, Congressman James
Clyburn of South Carolina, Congressman Brett Guthrie of
Kentucky, and their staffs, of course, and the Kentucky
State Center for the Book. I'd like to thank all of them
for making Tracy's spring trips so incredibly successful. Tonight, in a talk
entitled "Staying Human, Poetry in the Age
of Technology," Tracy will tell you
more about her project. She'll also make the case
for poetry as a reprieve from the noise of the
21st century life. And she'll read a selection of
her work, including some poems from her new anthology,
"American Journal, Fifty Poems for Our Time," which is being published
jointly with the library. After that, Ron Charles, Editor of the Washington
Post's Book World and the host of our Life of a Poet
series, will talk with Tracy about her poetry and her plans for the next year
as Poet Laureate. I'm very happy that all
of you could be with us for this special
evening, so please join me in welcoming our United States
Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Tracy K. Smith: Thank you. Good evening. It's such a delight and
an honor to be back here in this wonderful,
wonderful building. I wanted to talk about why
poetry feels so important to me now and a little
bit about, you know, what taking this sense of
mission into other parts of the U.S. has felt like. And I look forward to
continuing that conversation with Ron Charles the
second half of the program. Poetry is not the
language we live in. It's not the language of our
day-to-day errand running and obligation fulfilling,
not the language with which we are asked to justify ourselves
to the outside world. It certainly isn't the language to which commercial
value has been assigned. But poetry, which
awakens our senses, frees us from the tyranny
of literal meaning, and assures of the credible
reality of emotional truth, puts us in touch with
something bigger than language, something I believe each
of us was perhaps fluent in before the moment when language became our
chief vehicle for meaning. Before I go any farther, let
me say that this lecture, like the poetry I
write, is the product of a particular imagination, one
as informed by belief in a vast and mysterious, and yet
orderly and purposeful, universe as by a deep
curiosity about the voices and lives of strangers. Furthermore, I'm
operating on the notion that poetry can save
me from disappearing into the narrow version
of myself I may be tempted to resort to when I
feel lazy or defeated, or when my greedy
ego takes over. I'm operating on the belief
that poetry can restore me to the large original
self I haven't yet fully learned to recognize. Poets have different
names for that self. Stanley Kunitz called it
a, quote, "pool of energy that has nothing to do
with personal identity, but that falls away from self, blends into the natural
universe." Emerson believed it lived in the
same place the inner voice does, and that it had access to
the large whole of which each of us are but small parts, what
he called the oversoul, quote, "the silence, the
universal beauty." Elizabeth Bishop's
view of such oneness, at least in her famous
poem, "In the Waiting Room," is less consoling, "Suddenly,
from inside came an oh of pain, Aunt Consuelo's voice,
not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised. Even then, I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman. I might have been
embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by
surprise was that it was me, my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all,
I was my foolish aunt. I -- we were falling, falling." One of poetry's great effects, through its emphasis upon
feeling, association, music, and image -- things we
recognize and respond to even before we
understand why -- is to guide us toward the part
of ourselves so deeply buried that it borders upon
the collective. Now I feel strongly about
poetry for what it offers in these terms, but I also, more
and more, recognize its value as a remedy to the
various things that have bombarded our lines
of sight and our thought space, and that tamper with our
ability, or even our desire, to listen to that
deeply-rooted part of ourselves. I'm talking about the many
products, services, networks, trends, apps, tools, toys, as
well as the drugs and devices for remedying their effects,
that are pitched at us nonstop in our browser sidebars, in
the pages of print media, embedded in movies and TV
shows, on airplanes, and taxis, and trains, and even
toilet stalls. I guess more and more, I see the
technology we live listening for and peering into as the primary
and most effective vehicle of that sales pitch, so
much so that I now wonder which came first, the device, or
whatever the device is urging us to click on and pay for? The glib, facile, simplistic,
and prefabricated language by which we as consumers are
constantly surrounded is a language that flatters us, that
urges us to indulge ourselves, to get away from it all,
to be unique by opting in, talking back, liking us on
Facebook, leaving a review, sharing, retweeting, etcetera. It's a self so smooth that
its terms have infiltrated the language of other facets of
daily life, that of education -- Rate Your Professor -- does
she make the material relatable and easily digestible? Or did you have to work
to learn something? [Laughter] What are the job
outcomes and earning potentials of your intended major? Individual selfhood has
taken on a different tenor. We brand ourselves. What an awful herb, aligned
as it is with the practice of burning the owner's
initials into flesh. We vie for followers
on social media. We turn our experience into
content that can be assimilated and liked quickly
and reassuringly by others in our network. Friendship is different
now, too. We have allowed conversation
to be splintered and atomized by the devices we invite to
interrupt and distract us. We aren't listening to what
or whom we think we are. I go so far as to say
that much of the time, perhaps as an unconscious
comping mechanism, we aren't listening at
all, not to other people, and least of all, to ourselves. We can't afford to. What does this have
to do with poetry? Well, as a writer, I'm convinced
that one of the only defenses against the degradations of
our market-driven culture is to cleave to language
that fosters humility, awareness of complexity,
commitment to the lives of others, and a
resistance to the overly-easy and the patently false. Poetry is one vehicle for this
humanizing, reanimating version of language, because
the features of a poem insist upon a
different values system. Rather than numbing or drowning
out the difficult-to-describe but urgently-sensed feelings
that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them
out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate
thought and strange impulse. Rather than putting up a
buffer between ourselves and those outside our immediate
sphere, poems devise means to contemplate those others and
to take in their perspectives. Rather than solving,
side-stepping, or denying problems,
poems bear witness to dark facets of experience. They give us vocabulary for the
terror, the shame, the regret, as well as the terms
of hope resulting from the choices we make
and those we consent to. In other words, poems
say, "Hey, come here, let me tell you what
it was like." And they ask us to submit to
another experience of reality. They disorient us from our home
base, and they teach us to admit and submit to the
feeling of vulnerability, to act upon empathy and
curiosity, and to follow along, allowing sense to accrue at its
own pace and upon its own terms. If you do that enough times
with a poem, you might begin to think differently
about actual strangers. You might also begin
to recognize that there are new
possibilities of feeling and awareness available to you, ones that take you far
beyond those pitched to you by the marketing teams, the
corporations whose products are, at the moment, enjoying
a good run. In case I haven't
said it clearly, the language circulating
upon the surface of the 21st century is in the
business of pulling us away from the interior, the
reflective, the singular, the impractical, and
the unsummarizable. In such a current, the language of poetry is a
radically-rehumanizing force, because it is one of the only
generally-accessible languages that rewards us for
naming things in their realness
and their complexity. And despite what social
media would have us believe, it is not the language of
sharing and following or buying and wearing, but rather,
that of bearing deep and unabashed witness to
the urgencies and upheavals of lived experience that
comes closest to brining us into visceral proximity with
the lives and plights of others. That's not just distraction,
and it's not a luxury. It's a means of
self-preservation, a way of affirming commitment
to the belief that our lives can and should matter to one
another and to ourselves. So this might be a
good time for a poem. Can we listen to Laura Kasischke
read her poem "Heart/Mind"? >> "Heart/Mind," A bear
batting at a beehive, how clumsy the mind
always was with the heart, wanting what it wanted. The blizzard's accountant. How timidly the heart approached
the business of the mind, counting what it counted. Light inside a cage,
the way the heart. Bird trapped in an
airport, the way the mind. How it flashed in the floor of
the phone booths, my last dime. And this letter I didn't send,
how surprising to find it now, all this love I must have felt." >> Tracy K. Smith: I
love how that sounds like a landline phone
call from long distance. And sometimes maybe
that's what poems are like, they return us even
just to the recent past that feels so remote and real. I think any successful poem
teaches you how to read it -- in this case, hear it. And Laura Kasischke's poem
"Heart/Mind" provides a roadmap to that process,
beginning with the title. You don't have it in front
of you, but heart slash mind. So the first thing a
reader might ask is what is that slash meant to signal? Is the poem called
heart slash mind? Is it heart mind? Or as a participant in a
conversation that I had recently at a men's addiction
rehabilitation center in Kentucky pointed out,
perhaps it is heart over mind, an emotional reversal of the common notion
of mind over matter. So the poem invites you
to question and theorize, and then it begins to tell
you what it thinks of itself. In this poem, the early stanzas
-- I'm going to repeat them -- with metaphors that
unfold into concrete and surprising visceral examples
over the span of a few lines, they set up a pattern
that becomes useful to the reader once the poem
becomes more spare and gestural. So I'll read the first
few stanzas again. "A bear batting at a beehive,
how clumsy the mind always was with the heart, wanting
what it wanted. The blizzard's accountant. How timidly the heart approached
the business of the mind, counting what it counted." I love what happens when
I get these strange images that give me an intense,
you know, like feeling. "A bear batting at a beehive." Not only do we have all
those really fun Bs, but you have an image of
this big animal angrily and hungrily swatting
at something. And you have a sense of danger
on both sides of the equation, threat and counterthreat. So the poem begins
with this strange sense of fraught balance. And then "How clumsy," which
characterizes that bear. So it's not such a threat,
it's just ham-fisted. "How clumsy the mind
always was with the heart." And suddenly, the
heart is the hive. There's something in
there that is wanted and also worth protecting. "Wanting what it wanted." So those first four lines of
the poem guide you into a sense of all of the potential
registers of emotion that are making this
metaphor happen. And the second -- or the
third stanza, rather, does the same thing, "The
blizzard's accountant." Now I don't have a
way of picturing that. I'm already kind
of like on alert from having had some senses
activated by the first metaphor, but I've got to let this next
stanza show me what to see. "How timidly" -- okay,
maybe that's the accountant in the stanza -- "How timidly
the heart approaches the business of the mind." Of course, what kind of math
would suffice in the face of a blizzard's worth of snow? And yet, "Counting what it
counted," the heart persists. By the time in the poem
that we reach the lines, "Light inside a cage,
the way the heart" -- which ends with a dash --
"Bird trapped in an airport, the way the mind," dash, we can instinctively see
the little drama that is to be played out in
our imaginations. Those lines become a
shorthand for a process that we are now educated and
equipped to complete on our own. Yet, even having taught us how
to work with what we've come to expect, the poem still
manages to surprise us. I love this. I think every poem -- every
fully-realized poem finds a way to surprise its reader. Moreover, as a poet,
I understand that a poem is only
finished, only fully-realized, if it succeeds in alerting me to something I couldn't
have been capable of seeing at the outset, something
I couldn't have known to say were it not for all of
the things that the process of writing the poem
has led me to say. Kasischke's poem moves
through images of the heart as an indomitable beacon,
something uncageable, and then the image of
the mind as trapped, bumping up against invisible
barriers, forever barred from where it seeks to go. And then she leaps from there
to the sense of frustration and desperation in that image
of the last dime on the mucky, disgusting phonebooth floor. Speaking of technology,
let me concede that there are some things that have definitely
been improved upon. All of the visceral feelings
that the poem draws upon from its very opening
work to invest its arrival with a palpably-felt urgency. I don't believe it was a plan,
something outlined and plotted from the start, but rather than
moving through the register of those different distinct
feelings created the momentum that pulled Kasischke to
the poem's closure which, incidentally, resists metaphor. Perhaps by now, the poem is free
from the need for corollaries, invested as it is
in the confluence of newly-activated feelings. These are the final
lines of the poem, "This letter I didn't send,
how surprising to find it now, all this love I must have felt." And how does this poem
speak to my concerns about market-driven language? Well, I think about it this
way, we don't read poems only for the rhetorical
stance they take or for the arguments they
may actively or subtly make about their conscious material. We also -- and I'd
argue mostly -- read the for how they
direct our attention in ways that are antithetical
to mere utility. In "Heart/Mind," Laura Kasischke
is no making editorial-like claims against the language of
the marketplace or of commodity, but in urging us to think
and respond as it does, the poem persuasively
unsettles the unthinking or automatic ways we
often experience content, language, and narrative. It is in this manner that this and other poems invite our
dissatisfaction with the view of the world as a place
mad up mostly of resources to exhaust or consume. Let's listen to another poem. This is called "Music from
Childhood" by John Yau. >> "Music from Childhood," You
grow up hearing two languages. Neither fits your fits. Your mother informs you moon
means window to another world. You being to hear words mourn
the sounds buried inside their mouths. A row of yellow windows
and a painting of them. Your mother informs you moon
means window to another world. You decide it is better to step
back and sit in the shadows. A row of yellow windows
and a painting of them. Someone said you can see a blue
pagoda or a red rocket ship. You decide it is better to step
back and sit in the shadows. Is it because you saw a black
asteroid fly past your window? Someone said you can see a blue
pagoda or a red rocket ship. I tried to follow
in your footsteps, but they turned to water. Is it because I saw a black
asteroid fly past my window? The air hums -- a circus
performer riding a bicycle toward the ceiling. I tried to follow
in your footsteps, but they turned to water. The town has started sinking
back into its commercial. The air hums -- a circus
performer riding a bicycle toward the ceiling. You grow up hearing
two languages. Neither fits your fits. The town has started sinking
back into its commercial. You begin to hear words mourn
the sounds buried inside their mouths. >> Tracy K. Smith: So this
poem behaves quite differently. Firstly, you probably noticed
a little bit of repetition. Not enough to make you confident
of a pattern that you were going to be able to anticipate. So this poem is a pantoum,
which means the second and fourth lines of the poem
occur further down, only once. And then the next
stanza, the lines that sit in that place will
occur further down. And so it creates this sense
of eerie deja vu a little bit. It's almost like you're
being gaslighted -- do -- did I hear that? Do I know that? How do I know that? -- which I think serves some of the other behavior
in this poem, right. You probably notice there are
statements that don't finish, and there are shifting pronouns. There's a you that's
being addressed that seems like may be the speaker
talking to himself. Then later, that you seems
to become a specific person, "I tried to follow
in your footsteps, but they turned to water." There are visual
images in the poem. There's a sense of place. But none of it feels anchored so that I could confidently
say these are the terms of this person's life. What I do feel confident of is
what seems to accrue emotionally through the poem, this sense
of searching, of turning back, or recalling something
that's partially clear. There's even an interesting
way that some of the -- you don't have the line
breaks in front of you, so you have to trust
me -- but the lines -- you know, one line leads
into another in a way that almost feels
linear and logical, and then something shifts. So in the second stanza of
the poem, this beautiful line, "You begin to hear words
mourn the sounds buried inside their mouths." I can't tell you exactly what
that means, but mourn, sounds, buried, mouths creates a kind
of authority for the line that I'm going to dell
upon a little bit more. And I think of loss, I think
of language and voices. But then the next line -- so
"Buried inside their mouths. A row of yellow" -- and
maybe this is just me, but after mouths, and I see "a
row of yellow," I think, "Okay, maybe teeth or something
is what I'll see next." But now, "A row of
yellow windows, and a painting of them." So suddenly we go from
this almost philosophical, mournful perspective to
a shifted gaze of looking out -- maybe looking out. Maybe it's just a
painting of someone -- something that is
looked out upon. So it's a poem that's not
going to guide you by the hand, but if you surrender to it, you get to feel many
different things. I come away from this poem
thinking about maybe someone who really did grow up
in a household with more than one language, but I also
feel the sense of interiority and privacy that's so active
in this poem that I feel that any person anywhere
is living in two languages, the language of the
self and the language that comes from outside. I shared this poem at Cannon
Air Force base in Clovis, New Mexico with men and women
enlisted in the Air Force, and airbase employees,
and military spouses. So it's the kind of poem, as
I mentioned, that requires you to let go of that wish
for linear narrative and respond instead to the
tone, the accrual of images, to the almost haunting effects of hearing every line
repeated once and no more. I asked what people noticed. That's the question I ask
the students in my classrooms as well as the audience members who have attended readings
I've given in rural communities in New Mexico, South
Carolina, and Kentucky over the last several months. And just ask with the
Kasischke poem, which in a room of men working to overcome
addiction activated very specific memories of struggling
with similar questions of mind over reason -- or reason
versus feeing or urge, John Yau's poem reminded airmen
of their time in the service, of seeking, perhaps, to follow
in the footsteps of a parent or family member, and
then finding themselves in their own lives,
lost at times without a clear model or guide. The poem, with its
sense of rootlessness, of struggle to make sense
of disparate languages, also reminded people of
displacement, the kind one feels in childhood or adolescence, as well as the kind one feels
upon being deployed say, or being uprooted
again and again by assignments in
different places. One audience member spoke
about the occasional feelings of social or racial isolation he
sometimes feels in the service. Just as none of the addicts
felt the need to argue that Kasischke's poem
is about addiction, nobody at the men's rehab
center felt the need to say Yau's is a
poem about being -- I'm sorry, nobody at Cannon Air
Force Base felt the need to say that Yau's is a poem about
being in the armed forces. But in both cases, the
poems afforded listeners with new images, new metaphors,
and new vocabularies for living with the feelings indigenous to
their lives, whoever they were. That's one of the
remarkable things poems do, one of the ways poems
lead us first more deeply into ourselves, and then more
naturally toward the areas of common feeling we
share with others. That's how poems teach us to
recognize that there are forms of community that exist
across or in spite of the obvious dividing lines
we're taught to respect. My rural outreach project,
even in just three pilot trips, has awakened a belief
in the real possibility that we might learn to
become open to participation in real-time communities
forged along varied and sometimes unlikely lines. And it's urged a powerful
submission to feelings of shared vulnerability,
humility, doubt, and trust. It's been a privilege to
share my own work and the work of other contemporary
poets with strangers -- strangers that crowd-sourcing
algorithms tell me I ought to have nothing in
common with -- and to hear people say
things like, "I'm white. You're black. I'm from this place. You're from another. And yet, when you talk
about your father, you restore my own
father to me." This happens again and
again, though the vocabulary for connection is
different from person to person and poem to poem. I think my interest in such
a project is an extension of my own belief or
wish that Americans of all backgrounds might
have something quietly urgent and humanizing to
offer one another. But in order to get to it, we
have to turn down the volume on all the many sources
seeking to sell us on the notion of an unmendable divide, because
that's what they're doing. They're selling us on a
product, which is strife. In order to get to community,
we have to go quiet, slow down, allow ourselves to be
both vulnerable and brave, and approach one another with
an idea as simple as, "I'm me. You're you. We're not the same. And yet, perhaps we can feel
safe here together talking abut something as simple as a poem." Poems encourage the notion that
your life must be as important to you as mine is to me. And they encourage the
more difficult notion that your life must
be as important to me as my own life is, that
I can only truly honor and protect myself by
honoring and protecting you. Now maybe that last
bit is a distant dream, the purview of a few great poets and philosophers,
but I hope it isn't. Either way, I believe that
poetry helps bridge the gap between self-centeredness, and
tribalism, and true compassion. Poems do this in myriad ways. One of them is by helping to
inoculate us against the catchy, inescapable,
strategically-biased language of the market firing away
at us from every direction in its ceaseless ploy
to be the only language. Thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you. [ Applause ] Okay, thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you. I want to welcome Ron
Charles up to the stage. I want to welcome Ron
Charles up to the stage. [ Applause ] >> Ron Charles: That
was such a beautiful, inspiring defense of poetry. >> Tracy K. Smith:
Oh, thank you. >> Ron Charles: This
is on, so -- >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Okay. >> Tracy K. Smith: No more
-- no secrets up here now. >> Ron Charles: Thank
you, thank you. Just get this for my
Instagram followers. [ Laughter and Applause ] That's going to be a big hit. A few years ago in an essay
you asked with a certain degree of exasperation, why is there
a vast majority in this country that suspects poetry has nothing
to do with the real world? What is the source
of that suspicion? >> Tracy K. Smith:
Well, I am biased. I think it has to do with
fear, because the question that often follows that
is why is it so hard? >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: And
I think, you know, it -- part of it probably
has to do with the way that we're taught to,
you know, want to be able to summarize things, prove
that we've comprehended, demonstrate our knowledge
and expertise. Part of it, I think,
has to do with the way that tests produce
a lot of anxiety. And so we think, "This
poem is out to get me." >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: Some of it
has to do with a question -- that awful question
that many people ask, "What do you think this
poem is trying to say?" >> Ron Charles: Yes. Do you know what it would mean to America's high
school students to see the Poet Laureate of
the United States stand there and say, "I don't know
exactly what that means"? It's such a rebuke
of 1000 horrible high school experiences. Yeah, the position of the
Poet Laureate is tantalizingly undefined, isn't it? >> Tracy K. Smith: It is. Yeah, which is a kind
of freedom, you know. >> Ron Charles: And terror. I mean, it's a strange position. It's [inaudible] and funded
by the federal government, but not officially answerable
to the federal government. You don't have to write a poem
for Donald Trump's birthday or any other occasional
things like that. [ Laughter ] He's not here, is he? [Laughter] What inspired
you to go on the road with this project? >> Tracy K. Smith: I had this
wish to test out this idea that if we can stop trying to tell ourselves what other
people think, and just talk, we can maybe find ourselves not
yelling, not, you know, enraged, and maybe hearing
something that's useful and that resonates somehow. I grew up going to church,
and I remember feeling that. I remember feeling,
"I love these people. I see them, but I don't agree
with them on everything. And yet, somehow this is
a community that works." And I think families
are like that, too. And so why can't a
nation be like that? So I had this fantasy
that poetry could be one of these topics that urges
us to be quiet and, you know, all of the adjectives
that I talked about. And I said that, "I wonder if it
would be possible to, you know, go out there and say something
meaningful to each other through the vehicle
of this artform? And then the opportunity
presented itself. >> Ron Charles: Why did
you focus on rural areas? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, as a
writer, I spend most of my time in -- you know, going to
cities or college towns. And then I feel like
there's this tendency to divide our sense of what
America is into two regions. I mean, it's silly because
it's such a big place. But we have, you know,
the urban, coastal region, and then the rural center. And so I thought, "Well, I spend
a lot of time in these urban, coastal places -- or
places where people who will soon graduate from a
college will probably go to." >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: "So
why not see what happens if I can cross that
line somehow." >> Ron Charles: And when you
went to these towns, who came? Were they, you know,
beret-wearing hipsters? Or were they people
that surprised you? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, some
of the towns are so small that it was people
who were aware that an event was happening,
and that's something that doesn't usually happen. >> Ron Charles: Nice. >> Tracy K. Smith: So a
pretty healthy cross-section. When we were in South
Carolina, the locations that Representative Clyburn
had kind of curated for us -- because he was excited
to sort of take ownership of his district -- were
connected historically. They had a strong
sense of participation in the Civil Rights Movement. And I think that meant
that many of the people who came were members
of a black church that we visited, and they came. There were alumni and community
members of the school -- Old Summerton High School,
which was one of the schools that was desegregated
during the group of suits around the Brown v.
Board of Education. So there were members of that
graduating class who came. Many people in those communities
came out because they said, "Oh, there's a black woman
doing something on this national scale. I want my kids who are
black to see this." Similar thing happened, but in
the opposite terms when I was in another community -- it will
come to me sometime tonight. That's the problem with
doing things so quickly -- where it was a white
family who said, "We live in a town that's
really racially divided, and I want my kids to be
able to cross that line. So I want them to come here
and hear what you have to say." >> Ron Charles: Just coming
is a crossing of barriers. Did you get responses
that surprised you, that you hadn't expected at all? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, I
don't know what I was expecting. I was like a little
bit just curious. So anything felt useful. There were people
who wrote poetry, who in some places said,
"I'll read a poem." You know, so we have
some great recordings. Not here tonight, but of people
saying, "Here's a chance. I'm going to read a poem." There was someone at Cannon
Air Force Base who said, "I write poems in
this secret journal that I don't want
anybody to see, but I'll read you a couple now." >> Ron Charles: Wow. You read a variety of poems, not
just your own -- other people's. What kinds of poems
went over well? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, the two
that I shared tonight are two that I've read before. And I felt like going over
well means people, you know, listen and have theories about
the poem, or even just want to talk about what the
poems remind them of. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: So those -- and there are two others that like perhaps
we'll hear tonight -- >> Ron Charles: Yes, we will. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- that are
-- behave in different ways. You know, one that
goes back to childhood and narrates a somewhat-familiar
experience, and then aligns it, I think, with a larger sense. And another that's
a family story about addiction within a family. Yeah, people are -- if they
know I'm bot going to test them, if they know that I -- and this
is something that I kind of go out of my way to say
is I'm just curious. This is what I say
to my students. What do you notice? Anything that you notice
is useful and valuable to talk about, maybe it will
activate somebody else's feeling of something else
that they noticed. So just let's hear it. Maybe it's because
it's a community where people know each other, but there hasn't been
a sense of timidity. People -- so in some ways, most of the poems I've
gone over because -- >> Ron Charles: That's great. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- people have kind of
wanted to talk about them. >> Ron Charles: That's -- now you have a new
collection coming out, "Wade in the Water,"
next Tuesday? >> Tracy K. Smith: It's out. It's been out for a
couple of Tuesdays. >> Ron Charles: Tuesdays? Okay. It's a beautiful
collection. I wonder if you'd read
the title poem for us? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure. >> Ron Charles: On page 15. >> Tracy K. Smith: Thanks. [ Laughter ] So this poem narrates
an encounter. I hope it's somewhat clear, but I'll tell you I
attended a ring shout, and that's where this
scene that occupies most of the poem took place. "Wade in the Water" for the
Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters. One of the women greeted me. "I love you," she said. She didn't know me,
but I believed her, and a terrible new ache rolled
over in my chest like in a room where the drapes
have been swept back. "I love you, I love
you," as she continued down the hall past
other strangers, each feeling pierced suddenly
by pillars of heavy light. I love you, throughout
the performance, in every hand clap, every stomp. I love you in the rusted iron
chains someone was made to drag until love let them be
unclasped and left empty in the center of the ring. I love you in the water
where they pretended to wade, singing that old blood-deep
song that dragged us to those banks and cast us in. I love you. The angles of it
scraping at each throat, shouldering past the swirling
dust motes in those beams of light, that whatever we now
knew we could let ourselves feel knew to climb. Oh, woods. Oh, dog. Oh, tree. Oh, gun. Oh, girl, run. Oh, miraculous many gone. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, is this love
the trouble you promised? >> Ron Charles: What
does it mean in this poem to say I love you to a stranger,
which seems so much at the heart of what you're talking about? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, that's
the question that set that poem into motion, because someone
did greet me and say that, and it felt like such a gift,
and it hurt at the same time. And it allowed so
much to come out -- so many conflicting feelings. And -- >> Ron Charles: And not because
you doubted here sincerity? >> Tracy K. Smith: No,
I didn't, actually. She -- I could have,
because she said it to every single person
that she met. But there was no doubting it. >> Ron Charles: No. >> Tracy K. Smith: It was like a
really genuine, beautiful thing. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: You
know, vulnerable-making for both people gesture. And so I wanted to just go
back to that and try and figure out what -- where that came
from and what it had given me. I don't know what it means, but
I have a feeling that we kind of need to learn what it means. >> Ron Charles: Yes. Yes, in these times. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: What does
it mean to be Poet Laureate in these contentious times when
everything from what's decent to what's science is a
matter of such hot debate? [ Laughter ] >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, I
feel like it's added urgency to my belief that we are better
when we're more attentive, when we can sort of say,
"I'm not going to accept this like word package without
parsing it and testing its like validity in whatever
terms that are valid, you know, like emotional or otherwise. And I've got to move -- I'll
be better equipped to just be in this world if I'm
willing to move away from what I'm certain of -- >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: --
and say there's got to be something I
can stand to learn, got to be something I don't
recognize about myself that could somehow, if
I can face it, help. >> Ron Charles: Your example is
quite different than the role that many writers are
playing in this era, which is to be very
political -- very political. You're being political
in a very different way that I think is really
provocative. Last year you said
in an interview, "Poetry helps me contend
with the smallness of spirit, the greed, the dishonest,
the disregard for the lives of others at the root
of American politics." Now fortunately, we've
moved beyond all that. [ Laughter ] In your introduction
to "American Journal," which is an anthology you'll
be bringing out this fall, you say that you, "hope these
poems might make us a little less alien to each other." That's such a great goal. How can a poem do that? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, you
know, it does it in a lot of small ways that I
hope add up to something. One, it says, well, I'm
sitting here in this chair where I'm comfortable, and
I'm reading about something that makes me have to sort
of start from scratch and try and understand, because
I want to. I want to do that work. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: Oh, this
is something that's connected to a voice, a theoretical
person. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: Somehow, I'm
moving away from my own sense of being and into
another person's. That -- I do believe
that's good practice. >> Ron Charles: Right,
modeling the way we should be as citizens more. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Would you
read a poem called "Refuge"? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure. >> Ron Charles: In your
new book on page 73. Can they buy these books
out there in the lobby? >> Yes. >> Ron Charles: Okay, good. >> Tracy K. Smith:
Product placement. [ Laughter ] "Refuge," Until I can
understand why you fled, why you are willing to bleed, why you deserve what I
must be willing to cede, let me imagine you are my
father in Montgomery, Alabama, walking to campus rather
than riding the bus. I know what they call you. I know what they try to
convince you you lack. I know your tired ankles, the
sudden thunder of your laugh. Until I want to give you what I
myself deserve, let me love you by loving her, your sister
in a camp in Turkey, 16, deserving of everything. Let her be my daughter who
has curled her neat hands into fists, insisting
nothing is fair, and I have never loved her. Naomi, lips set in a scowl,
young heart ransacking itself. Let me lend her passion to
your sister and love her for her living rage, her need
for more, and now, and all. Let me leap from sleep
if her voice sounds out afraid from down the hall. I have seen men like your father
walking up Harrison Street now that the days are
getting longer. Let me love them as I loved my
own father whom I phoned once from a valley in my life to say what I feared I'd never
adequately said, voice choked, stalled, hearing the silence
spread around us like weather. What would it cost
me to say it now, to a stranger's father
walking home to our separate lives together? >> Ron Charles: It's
just a gorgeous poem which reenacts the
Golden Rule at the center of all the world's
faiths, at the center of every ethical system is that we should feel what
someone else is feeling. "Until I understand
you," the poem begins, which is a pretty
hopeful line, that we will if we make the effort. >> Tracy K. Smith: Or we'll be
like those kids at the table like 12:00 after
everyone's to bed still with like a couple
Brussels sprouts. But either way, there is time. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, that -- it's just such a
poem for this moment. We've got a recording of a poem
called "Second Estrangement." Can you set that up for us? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure, this
is a poem by Aracelis Girmay, a poet who -- it comes from
her most recent collection, which is called "Black
Mariah," and it's thinking about the African diaspora in
different parts of the world. I think those are the
large, thematic questions. But more urgent or salient
is the sense of displacement that maybe any person
can have field access to. So this is a poem
that kind of builds that in these really familiar
and very visceral terms. >> "Second Estrangement," Please
raise your hand, whomever else of you has been a child,
lost in a market or a mall, without knowing it at
first, following a stranger, accidentally thinking he is
yours -- your family or parent, even gabbing for his hands, even
calling the word you said then for father, only to see the
face look strangely down, utterly foreign, utterly
not the one who loves you. You, who are a bird,
suddenly stunned by the glass partitions
of rooms. How far the world you
knew, and tall, and filled, finally, with strangers. >> Ron Charles: What I
love about that poem is that it reenacts that sense of
alienation and fear in a way that makes us feel
like everyone else. It overcomes the very
problem it enacts, which is incredibly clever. >> Tracy K. Smith: I love
the way it kind of guides you into that, too, because
you don't know that's where you're going. I mean, the title might
alert you to something, but it's also "Second
Estrangement." But it begins, "Please
raise your hand." I think that's the first line. And I -- you know,
I'm a good student. I want to do it. And then, you know,
"Whoever else among you." And then we descend step by step
into this feeling of, you know, first you're just
alone in a mall. Or then you're lost. And then you're without
this person. And then we realize, you know,
there's a private language, "The word you used
then for father." Again, it almost could behave
like that John Yau poem. Maybe there's a real
language barrier, or maybe it's just I'm
not at home anymore. And that image of the bird -- birds in the wrong places
come up in poems, I guess. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith:
But it creates that feeling of abrupt shock. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: And
so all of the, you know, willingness that we
have demonstrated to follow this poem leads us to
that same place of being lost, and scared, and stuck. And the poem can sort
of speak to that. >> Ron Charles: And I --
just -- we've all felt that. There is a connection. As much anxiety as
there's been recently about the political
contention of our age, it's not the worst
it's ever been. We've got the Civil
War back there. And several of your poems
are inspired by the Civil War and draw actual text from the
Civil War in fascinating ways. Can you tell us about that and read a poem called
"Declaration"? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure. The Civil War kind of
got drawn into this body of work by the Smithsonian. I was invited by the National
Portrait Gallery in the year that was leading up to the 150th
anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War to contribute
a poem for an exhibition. There were going to be
portraits and poems. And I had to sort of say I
want to do this because I want to write a poem, but I don't
know how to make myself want to write about the Civil War -- >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- which
I've never liked learning about. I was talking with another
black writer recently about how every time we
would get to that moment in history growing up where it
was slavery and the Civil War, we as the black kids in
the classroom were made to feel ashamed like how could
this have happened to us? >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: And so I
was conditioned to feel like, "Ugh, here we go again." But I wanted to do
it, so I said, "What would black soldiers have
experienced in this conflict?" And I found a couple
of really great books that just contain all
these primary documents that prevented me from
doing what I wanted to do, which would be to write
something in my own voice, and urged me simply to
listen and bring these voices into conversation
with each other. >> Ron Charles: What
were these documents? >> Tracy K. Smith:
Letters that soldiers and their families had
written to each other and to Abraham Lincoln. >> Ron Charles: Okay. >> Tracy K. Smith: And
depositions that veterans, and their widows, and
descendants had given after the war, well into the
20th century in an attempt to get the pensions that they as veterans should
have been entitled to, but that they were denied
because, having been born into slavery, they didn't
have birth certificates, marriage licenses. They didn't have anything
attesting to the fact that they had changed their
names after emancipation. And so they got stiffed,
basically. >> Ron Charles: Oh, wow. >> Tracy K. Smith: So
that's where that came from. And then suddenly, this
history felt so alive, and active, and relevant. >> Ron Charles: Right,
because you were hearing voices that are usually
suppressed in history books. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, or that
get -- yeah, they're suppressed, or they're just absent,
you know, or they're -- they get reduced to well,
this happened to these people. And so then I said, "I want
to go deeper into this." So then the document
of the Declaration of Independence seemed like
another source to say, "Well, what would it say to now if
I could have my way with it?" So this is the poem that came
from that, and it's an erasure. So there are what I think of as
the specific terms that clarify that this is a, you know,
complaint against the King of England, and suddenly it
felt like it was large enough to include other voices. "Declaration," He has
sent hither swarms of officers to harass
our people. He has plundered our, ravaged
our, destroyed the lives of our, taking away our,
abolishing our most valuable, and altering fundamentally
the forms of our. 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. We have reminded them of the
circumstances of our immigration and settlement here,
taken captive on the high seas to bear. >> Ron Charles: You
said very briefly as you began it's an erasure. Can you explain that
a little more? >> Tracy K. Smith: Oh, sure. So if I looked at the whole
document, and deleted most of it, and tried to
hear a quieter voice under that official voice. And I didn't set out to do
that really, I don't think. I was reading it to
see okay, what can I -- I was actually trying to write
a poem about Thomas Jefferson, so I was reading it to see
what I could get from him. And then I heard this other
thing saying, "Forget about him. Listen to this." >> Ron Charles: Would
you read the poem called "I Will Tell You the
Truth About This"? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure. >> Ron Charles: And maybe
explain the background of that poem. >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure, so
this is the Civil War poem that I was talking about. And it's just a collection
of letters, some almost in their entirety, written by these black
soldiers and their families. And then there are a couple of
sections -- it's a long poem, so I'll read you
those two sections, do you think, or just the one? Oh, you want me to
read the first letter? Okay. >> Ron Charles: Is this a single
letter, or a composite of -- >> Tracy K. Smith:
This is one letter. All of these are
just actual letters. And even the spelling I left
because it seemed urgent. "I Will Tell You the Truth
About This, I Will Tell You All About It," Carlisle, Pennsylvania, November
21st, 1864. Mr. Abraham Lincoln, I want
to know, sir, if you please, whether I can have my son
released from the Army? He is all the support
I have now. His father is dead,
and his brother that was all the help I had,
he has been wounded twice. He has not had anything
to send me yet. Now I am old, and my head
is blossoming for the grave. And if you do, I hope the
Lord will bless you and me. They say that you will
sympathize with the poor. He belong to the eight
regiment colored troops. He is a sergeant. Mark Welcome is his name. >> Ron Charles: Did you know
that these letters existed? >> Tracy K. Smith: Uh-uh, no. I'll tell you the book
that they are collected in. I'm sure they're probably
here in this great building. But this is how I found
them, "Families and Freedom, a Documentary History of
African American Kinship in the Civil War Era," which
is edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. And that was published
in 1997 by the New Press. And then the depositions
are collected in "Voices of Emancipation, Understanding
Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction Through the
U.S. Pension Bureau Files," edited by Elizabeth Regosin
and Donald R. Shaffer. >> Ron Charles: They're
just incredibly poignant. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I mean,
I feel like it should be -- this is what we should have
been reading in those classes -- >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- where I
felt so called out, you know -- >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- because
they do what so little does, which is to restore the sense
of humanity and actually like blood, and life, and
voices, and stories to history. You know, I mean,
I shouldn't say so little else does,
but so often -- >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- it's not
the first version of history that you get as a student. >> Ron Charles: No, right. Now you were in South
Carolina and Kentucky, places where debates about how to memorialize the Civil War
are still running pretty hot. Did that subject come up? >> Tracy K. Smith:
Well, this poem came up. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith:
And it was something that I think people heard in
a way that's really similar to how I heard those voices. It was something that, you
know, people would come up to me afterward -- so when
I'm reading my own poems, I don't always say,
"Okay, what do you notice?" Because that seems
wrong [laughter]. So if somebody notices
something, maybe they'll say it afterward. And this is the poem that people
want to talk about because, you know, it does that for
them, too, in some way. When we were in South
Carolina, we were in a place where I think the 55th
Massachusetts Volunteers had fought, and that
was commemorated. And so there was, you know, a
sense of this is our history. This is here in a way, too. >> Ron Charles: Right, yeah. You're going to read a poem
called, "The Political Poem." >> Tracy K. Smith: Okay. >> Ron Charles: What
is the function of a political poem
in an age like ours? It seems different than it
was during the Vietnam War, during the Civil Rights era. What is a political
poem nowadays, and how does this poem you're about to read answer
that question? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well,
I think a political poem in any age is valuable if it
can challenge the easy sense of us versus them. So political poems that
fail don't do that. They say, "I'm on the
us, which is good." >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: "And I'm
going to call out these thems." >> Ron Charles: Just
propaganda, rallying cry. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, even
if you're thinking in terms of justice, you're making
bad art if that's the way that you're going to do it. So I think a good
political poem says okay, perhaps this is what
I as a person believe, but I've got a question, and
I'm going to have to explore it in ways that are going
to put that on the line, and call it into question, and move me toward an
uncomfortable sense of perhaps complicity
or implication in part of the problem as I see it. I want to do an organic kind
of like walkthrough and think about what I'm made
to acknowledge. I feel like there are lots
of poems that do that. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: I
liked adding the title "Political Poem" to this
poem because that's -- makes you feel like, "Oh, God. What is going to come at me?" >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: And this is
a poem that wasn't even written with politics in mind. >> Ron Charles: Really? >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Because it
definitely plays with that theme and plays with its title in
a very witty, conscious way. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. No, this was a poem
that I wrote thinking about like -- I was in Vermont. I was -- I actually was having
a dream that I was in a room where there was a poem on a -- like as a mural on a wall that
I was reading aloud to somebody. And then I said, "This is
not a poem by somebody else. If I wake up, this
can be my poem." So I got up and sat
-- I was in Vermont, so I think Robert
Frost's, you know, mowers were probably in the air. And I recaptured to the
extent that I could that poem. And I published it, and it
was called, "The Mowers." >> Ron Charles: Oh! >> Tracy K. Smith: And then
later I read it, and I said, "I think this is going
to make more sense if I change the title. >> Ron Charles: Yes. Or it makes different sense. >> Tracy K. Smith:
Yeah, better sense. >> Ron Charles: Yes, 54. >> Tracy K. Smith: Okay. "Political Poem," If those
mowers were each to stop at the whim say of a greedy
thought, and then the one off to the left were to let his
arm float up, stirring the air with that wide, slow,
underwater gesture meaning hello and you there, aimed at the
one more than a mile away to the right, and if he,
in his work, were to pause, catching that call by sheer
wish and send back his own slow, one-armed dance meaning yes and
here as if threaded to a single, long nerve before
remembering his tool and sheering another
message into the earth, letting who can say
how long grays passed until another thought
or just the need to know might make him stop
and look up again at the other, raising his arm as if to say
something like still and oh. And then to catch the
flicker of joy rise up along those other legs and
flare into another bright yes that sways a moment
in the darkening air, their work would carry them
into the better part of evening, each mowing ahead and
doubling back, then looking up to catch sight of his echo,
sought and held in that instant of common understanding, the God
and speed of it coming out only after both have turned back to
face the sea of yet and slow. If they could, and if what
glimmered like a fish were to dart back and forth across
that wide, wordless distance, the day, though gone, would never know the
ache of being done. If they thought to, or would,
or even half wanted, their work, the humming human engines pushed
across the grass, and the grass, blade after blade
assenting, would take forever. But I love how long
it would last. >> Ron Charles: How could such a poem help us rethink
the political standoff we find ourselves in? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well,
it's kind of begging, one, to change the scale upon which
we're thinking and say okay, it's easy to get mad at like a
big group of -- a demographic. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: But if
you reduce it to one person out there doing his version of
what you're over here doing, maybe it would feel different. >> Ron Charles: Yes,
that's lovely. It's really, really lovely. There's a whole bunch of people
nearby you need to talk to. In the introduction to "Wade
in the Water," you write, "This is why I love poems. They invite me to
sit down and listen to a voice speaking
thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels
like to be alive. Usually, the someone doing the
talking, the poem's speaker, is a person I'd never
got the chance to meet were it not
for this poem." More and more, the
way we get our news, the way we interact
online through Facebook and other social media, we
only interact with people who think just like we do. We don't see people that
don't think like us. We silence them, we avoid them, we listen to the
right news, etcetera. Could we listen to a poem
called "My Brother at 3 A.M."? And can you tell
us about that poem? >> Tracy K. Smith: Oh, yeah. This is by Natalie Diaz. It's from a collection called
"When My Brother Was an Aztec." And so there's this family
in the center of the book. It's on such a mythic
scale that I don't know if it's a real-life family
or if it's an imagined family that allows a certain
dramatic situation to play out. But there's a brother in that
family who is an addict and is, you know, causing all of this
upheaval, changing the way that the speaker of the poems
thinks about herself, about, you know, what she belongs
to, what the threats are. But it's also a book that
is kind of like testifying to what it feels like to grow
up as a Native American kid in the United States and to
feel, I guess, unseen, unvalued, or seen through a
caricature lens. So there are these -- and then
it's a book that's also got some really beautiful love poems
and poems that kind of play with literary history in
beautiful, moving ways. But this is a poem that
is kind of haunting. >> Ron Charles: Yes, yes. Can we hear that now? >> "My Brother at 3 A.M." He sat cross-legged, weeping
on the steps when Mom unlocked and opened the front door. "Oh, God," he said. "Oh, God. He wants
to kill me, Mom." When Mom unlocked and opened
the front door at 3 a.m., she was in her nightgown. Dad was asleep. "He wants to kill me," he told
her, looking over his shoulder. Three a.m. and in her
nightgown, Dad asleep. "What's going on?" she asked. "Who wants to kill you?" He looked over his shoulder. "The devil does. Look at him, over there." She asked "What are you on? Who wants to kill you?" The sky wasn't black or blue,
but the green of a dying night. "The devil. Look at him, over there." He pointed to the corner house. The sky wasn't black or blue,
but the dying green of night. Stars had closed their eyes
or sheathed their knives. My brother pointed
to the corner house. His lips flickered with sores. Stars had closed their eyes
or sheathed their knives. "Oh, God. I can see
the tail," he said. "Oh, God. Look." Mom winced at the
sores on his lips. "It's sticking out
from behind the house. Oh, God. See the tail," he said. "Look at the goddamned tail." He sat cross-legged,
weeping on the front steps. Mom finally saw it, a
hellish vision, my brother. "Oh, God. Oh, God," she said. >> Ron Charles: It doesn't seem
like a political poem at all, except that it forces us to do what you hope poetry will
make us do, which is to cross over barriers, to sympathize,
to feel in ways we didn't -- do with people we
didn't think we knew. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, it's
a poem that kind of urges you to say -- to stop saying,
"Well, that's not my problem," and to say, "Oh, I
wonder what that woman" -- >> Ron Charles: The mother. >> Tracy K. Smith:
-- "feels like." >> Ron Charles: Yeah. >> Tracy K. Smith: Or
this kid who's kind of watching all of this. This is one of the poems that --
this was the last poem, I think, that we read in the
men's rehab center. I don't want lead with it
because obvious reasons, but I didn't want to not
read it, because I wanted to know what they
might make of it. And they saw a lot, you know,
of this struggle, this -- you know, this awful
monster that's kind of riding the brother. That made sense to them. His inability to really be able
to translate his experience to the family members, which
I think the poem manages, interestingly, by making that
creature real to the brother and invisible to everybody else. But they also -- I think I'm
not wrong in connecting this to that afternoon --
someone there said, "It's interesting
-- where's the dad? This is the mom. She's bearing all the weight." And so suddenly,
it was an even -- even an opportunity for someone
who maybe had been in a version of this story to empathize with
another figure, you know -- >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- which
seemed really insightful to me. >> Ron Charles: Right,
that opportunity that a great poem gives us
to empathize with people that we don't run
into is a great gift. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah,
I think it's a great gift, and I just don't think it's
one to be taken lightly. I don't think that it's
enough to say, "Oh, yeah, empathy, kumbaya." I think that's one of the things
that creates a sense of toxicity that we are all kind of,
you know, reeling from. We're producing it by
writing off these simple, but potentially meaningful acts. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: And so
I think, you know, okay, read a poem and try and believe
in what it causes you to feel. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: I
think that's actual work. >> Ron Charles: I do, too. You told the New York Times -- that's another newspaper on
the East Coast [laughter] -- "There's a deep and
interesting kind of troubling that poems do." I love that. Tell us what that troubling is. >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, you
know I like that word, right? That -- it's kind of like the
anchor for that title poem. But it -- you know,
which comes from the song and the biblical story of
an angel troubling the water so that it would protect the
Israelites as they were passing to safety, but so that
it would also heal them of any kind of affliction. And so troubling
is a stirring up. But, of course, stirring
up is also trouble. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: And
I think art is something that asks us to do both. >> Ron Charles: Would
you read a poem called "The United States
Welcomes You"? >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Forty-one. >> Tracy K. Smith: Okay. I want to tell you that
this poem is another one of those poems that
got a different title after it was written. >> Ron Charles: Oh. >> Tracy K. Smith: I
was thinking about -- it's placed pretty close on
the wake of the Civil War poem. And I was thinking about what
it feels like to be taken as a stranger in the
country you belong to. And then this title was
the title that I figured out that I wanted to give
it to -- give to the poem. "The United States
Welcomes You," Why and by whose power
were you sent? What do you see that
you may wish to steal? Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies
drink up the light? What are you demanding
that we feel? Have you stolen something? Then what is that
leaping in your chest? What is the nature
of your mission? Do you seek to offer
a confession? Have you anything to do with
others brought by us to harm? Then why are you afraid? And why do you invade
our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute as ghosts? Is there something
you wish to confess? Is this some enigmatic
type of test? What if we fail? How and to whom do we
address our appeal? >> Ron Charles: For
an immigrant nation, this is a really troubling poem. You once said you, "Wish
that more poets were brave or generous enough
to risk failing at something that matters." What matters most
to you as a poet? >> Tracy K. Smith: I
asked a student that once when she was in my office. And we were talking
about her poems, and I was giving her feedback. And she bristled at
every suggestion I made. And I said, "What's
going on here? What's at stake for you? What's in this room with us
right now that's causing this?" And she said, "I just
want to write truth." And she burst into tears. And I love her, you know. And I feel that way, too. I want something that's not just
a testament to me and feeling, you know, proud of this
momentary thing I might be, or something I feel
like I might know. I want to write poems that
are going to push me to kind of touch that big
thing, you know. And you mostly won't, right. That's the failure that I'm
kind of setting myself up for. But the wish is like, "I
want something that's going to make this life
kind of bearable," you know, or something. So I mean, the less kind of like
lofty answer is I'm interested in what we do to each
other in all the contexts that we operate in,
you know, in families, in relationships, in society. And what -- why? What's the follow-up from that and what could we
take from that? >> Ron Charles: It's such an
honor to talk to you tonight and to hear you talk
about poetry. Thank you so much. >> Tracy K. Smith: On, my honor. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Rob Casper: Thank you, Tracy
and Ron for a remarkable event. I'm Rob Casper, the
head of the Poetry and Literature Center
here at the Library, and I have just a few
announcements before I let you go. First of all, a week from today, the center will kick off its
first ever podcast series featuring our 21st poet
laureate consultant in poetry. I know it's technology, but
it's still worth listening to. This is the website,
www.loc.gov/poetry. Give in to your inner techy
self and go there, please. Second, if you haven't already, please fill out the survey forms
you received when coming in. You can drop them off at
the table up in the foyer. Your input helps us improve
events such as these. And we'll have a book signing
in the Whittall Pavilion, which is right next door. The book sales are
outside that room, and we hope you'll
get a signed copy and congratulate
Tracy in person. Finally, this event concludes
the Library's literary season, but I would be remiss if I
didn't tell you that just down the street there's
a big, big, big poetry festival
taking place. Split This Rock is celebrating
its 10th anniversary, and it's blockbuster evening
readings, like this one, are free and open to the public. You can go to their website. You can just look around,
keep your ears open, and you'll hear some
poetry, and it will be great. Enjoy the rest of
National Poetry Month, and hope to see you
back here soon. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
