In this episode Director john. a. powell talked to Tracy K. Smith about her new book, To Free the Captives. powell and Smith discussed Smith's term as a Poet Laureate for the United States and how she has used poetry to create feelings of belonging. powell and Smith also discussed how To Free the Captives was born out of the nation's racial reckoning in 2020, and how Smith used that moment of pain to discover how the United States can recover its soul, even in the midst of institutional racism.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to City Arts and Lectures, a season of talks and onstage conversations with some of the most celebrated writers, artists, and thinkers of our day. Recorded before an audience of the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco.This week, our guest is Tracy K. Smith. From 2017 to 2019, she served as United States Poet Laureate, traveling the country to encourage a greater appreciation for poetry. Her collections include Wade in the Water, The Body's Question, and Life On Mars, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. Her newest book is a memoir and biography. It's called To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul. And Smith wrote it as a way to navigate what she calls the din of human division and strife embodied in particular by the assaults on Black life in America.
On November 10th, 2023, Smith came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk to civil rights expert, John A. Powell. Join us now for a conversation with Tracy K. Smith.
john a. powell:
I wanted to, we hadn't planned this. I mean, this is somewhat extemporaneously, but how do you have a poet laureate and not have her read one of her poems? So, I want to introduce you to Tracy K. Smith and also to invite Tracy for you to say hello and maybe share one of your poems.Tracy K. Smith:
Of course, thank you so much for the warmth and generosity of your introduction, and I'm so excited for our conversation. And thanks for asking me to read a poem. It's nice to bring that side of my voice into this space. And because it was like a last-minute thing, this is what I'm going to be reading off of. So, don't call me while I'm reading.I have one new poem that I just pulled up and I'll tell you, it's a poem that emerged from something I witnessed in a dream. I dreamt that I saw each of my three children in a tiny little raindrop or a little egg, and it felt like a message. And so, this is a poem that allowed me to revisit that. And it is also a palindrome, so you'll hear it coming and going.
Everybody's autobiography. I find myself most alone when I believe I am striving for glory. These times, cool and sharp, a monument of moon white stone lodges in place near my heart. In a dream, my children glisten inside raindrops or teardrops. Like strangers, like seeds of children, I will only be allowed to claim them if I consent to love everyone's children. If I consent to love everyone's children, only then will I be allowed to claim them. My strangers, my seeds of children glistening inside raindrops or teardrops in my dream, children lodged in place near my heart, a monument of moon white stone, cool and sharp. I believe I am striving for glory when I find myself most alone.
john a. powell:
So, again, many of you haven't had the advantage of having read her most recent book, To Free the Captives. And one of the things about the book, Tracy, you share that 2020 in particular and maybe shortly after, was a really hard year for you. It was pivotal. It was a lot of grief and a lot of pain. And you said in some ways it changed you, including how you did your poetry. And we'll come back to the poetry and the writing.But I want to start off by, I was reading the book and the major criticism I have of the book is that it ended, so I hope you'll fix that. But how are you? I mean, the book is really ... She shared some really intimate things and we'll talk about some of them, but I almost felt a little embarrassed knowing so much being with you in the birthing room when you had your twins. And literally, I cried when I read about you trying to get to your father before he died. And so, I just want to know how you are now.
Tracy K. Smith:
What a beautiful question. I feel really full and grateful. 2020 was a crucible for all of us in different ways, many of the same ways. And there was a dimension of public grief, private grief. And I think maybe I haven't phrased it to myself this way, but I think it was the first time I felt betrayed personally by the country. So much of what I had grown up believing was that my parents' generation had resolved so much of the angst and that I was the beneficiary of that work. And to see the evidence that that was a misconception or a naive vision felt in some ways like a personal betrayal.Writing this book, which started some of the first bits of prose that I was trying to write in this direction, started in that same year. And it began to feel like a healing, like moving from one notion into a fuller sense of what I actually belonged to. And a large part of that had to do with really claiming a sense of the palpable presence of the people I love who are gone, my parents, but also people who love me who are gone that maybe I didn't ever know, like my father's mother died about a year before I was born.
And so, this notion of the world I live in has really changed. It's grown, it's swelled, and I think it's galvanized me to do my work with other parts of myself, not just my brain, not my intellect, not even merely my artist self, but what I really think is the soul, the fullness of consciousness. And that feels like an inexhaustible kind of resource to have and to share. So, I'm still kind of brimming with that feeling, that sense of possibility and purpose.
john a. powell:
Thank you. One of the things that I took away from the book and still sort of ruminating on is you got this sort of the highest acknowledgment for your poetry, but I feel like you really are a spiritual teacher, that there's something really quite profound in your work. And from my perspective, an unusual spiritual teacher in the sense that you don't shy away from dealing with social issues. You don't shy away from talking about race. You don't shy away from talking about sort of the scourge of America, but you do it in a way that's both real, but also opening.One of the passages in your book, you say something like, I'm paraphrasing, "To be Black in America, you realize death knows your name," and could you say what you meant by that?
Tracy K. Smith:
Yeah, I think that comes from a passage where I am remembering an email that a student of mine wrote to me during 2020 when all that first semester when students were sent home from college and had to go about their academic lives at home, whatever that was, wherever that was.And I got an email from a young man who lived in DC, a young Black man, and he said, "I live on the corner across from the hospital in my neighborhood, and there are these sirens going all day, all night, people being brought in, bodies being brought out. And to be in my room looking out that window, it's just unbearable. I don't really know how to comprehend what I'm witnessing."
And my understanding of that is that it was the general fear of the pandemic and a more specialized or specific fear that had to do with being a Black person in America, vulnerable in so many different vocabularies, so many different ways, and to have a visual reminder of that.
But I think it's knowledge that we do carry to know that we are observed or scrutinized in ways that make us automatically vulnerable. We are bearing the burden of America's centuries-long practice in judging us, peremptorily, doubting our testimony, doubting our right or deservingness of being where we are. And I think that's indexed to our mortality in a lot of ways to be the subject of a gaze that is also expecting us to not last.
john a. powell:
Thank you. So, I want to read one passage and have you comment on it. There are a couple. You can see it. The book is well-marked but, "The scale of Black hope has never been content with a single person's freedom or even a single people's freedom. Rather, it is grounded in the wisdom that genuine freedom brings with it, the transformation, the true liberation of all humankind. It aims to save every us, every them, every you. How useful soon becomes in managing such a scale." Could you comment on that passage?Tracy K. Smith:
I'll tell you that that framework came to me when I was teaching a class called the Black Lyric for the first time a couple springs ago, and it's an examination of 20th and 21st century African American poetry. And I'm looking in that class at an elder poet, someone like Gwendolyn Brooks or Langston Hughes alongside a contemporary poet.And I started that class by saying Black poets have always made space for a we in a form that we typically think of as deeply individual and rooted in an I. and the more I started thinking about the poetic tradition that I descend from, the more I realized it is a practice that has liberation as its goal. So, what do we mean by that? We mean the big thing we talk about when we're thinking about blackness and freedom. But then I was thinking these poems also give us a very honest, useful portrait of the wider culture we belong to.
And that's because we're affirming for ourselves what we know, but we're also offering this portrait to that culture itself to see its reflection and maybe reflect upon that image. Why is that? I think it's because that sense of power is a form of captivity. It's something that contains what could be larger. And so, that notion that this is a project that's about human liberation became really emphatic in my mind and to bring that into this context where I'm thinking not about art, but about life and to the extent that it's possible for me about politics that felt emphatic. It felt like news that could be useful.
john a. powell:
Thank you. So, one of the themes in your book is a mention of distinction between the free and the freed. And what you do with that is to basically say the freed for the most part are never really free. The freed are not the same as the free. And in fact, it may be some blowback if you take on that stance of being free. So, could you expound on that? What do we mean by the free and the freed?Tracy K. Smith:
Well, I see the free as people in this country who appear to descend from histories of power, of ownership, of authority or dominion over others and in this country that's attached to whiteness because of our history, but it comes wrapped in this mythology, which is that this freedom is an innate state, something that is indistinguishable from one's very person. History tells us that it was claimed through acts of violence like war, like forced relocation, like enslavement, and that it's been maintained by similar acts of violence or oppression.On the other side of the coin are the people like me who appear to descend from histories of violence or subjugation, people who historically have been acted upon by those who deem themselves free. And there's a ceiling on what the freed are allowed to expect. There is a ceiling upon what the freed are tolerated in terms of the critique or criticism. And my thinking about this is that this is a system in which everyone is captive, because those who posit themselves as the top of hierarchies are nevertheless struggling to maintain and defend this freedom that is indivisible from who they are.
I think about the Jim Crow laws in the South. My parents grew up in Alabama in the '30s and '40s, and those are laws that are designed to keep Blacks in their place. And the fact of this dynamic creates a kind of rage in those whose place is seemingly at the top of this scheme because of the threat of encroachment, even the threat of an imagination that seems to be encroaching upon this other space.
And so, my sense is it's an immense waste of energy and that we could choose to reconstruct the system that we belong to if we can recognize what it is currently. And it was awful to have that framework become visible and to have language to contain it and to think, "Oh, this feels credible to me. I feel it to be familiar to my understanding of this country and my experience of it." But it also seemed important to say these are pretty clear terms. Do you like them? Because I really do not like them.
john a. powell:
Right. And just growing up, you grew up in this incredible family and I share with Tracy that I was in Utah earlier this week and someone came up to me having looked at some of my work and said, gave me a hug and said, "I hope you don't mind, but I love you." And I told Tracy, that's how I feel about her. She never said whether she mind or not, but.But your work is so intimate and it's almost embarrassing in some respects. And your mom and your dad, again, just really incredible people. So, tell us a little bit about your family and tell us you have siblings and I want to hear about them, but really I want to hear about your mom and your dad.
And at one point you say you had conversations with your mom, for example, about death and you had very few of those conversations with your dad. And it sounds like, at least from my reading is that your dad was a little bit more of a mystery to you and maybe a little more stoic. You said he never complained even when apparently, he was slighted because of race. Could you talk about that and how that shows up in your life?
Tracy K. Smith:
Sure. I have some siblings here somewhere and I think they'll agree that we did have really loving wonderful parents. Both of our parents came from Alabama. My dad was in the Air Force, and so our family moved around quite a lot. I ended up growing up mostly here and my siblings in various places.And I think my parents' experience of family in that place and time was really fortifying. It was a site of community that said, "You matter. We love you. You can do anything that you set your mind to. And when you struggle, when things are difficult, we're here to help." And I think that love is something that many Black families are bound in and by, and it's something that's kind of one of the chief inheritances. And I think we really benefited from that.
Both our parents were faithful. I think the Black church is another one of those institutions that is a kind of care, a source of care, and that was a big part of our upbringing as well. And so, that's where the vocabulary for me of eternity and of the soul come in into my poetry and into this book. And I think it's a form of possibility, but it also, what I like is that it means we're accountable beyond the human systems that we are bound, seemingly bound by. It means we're not really bound by them, ultimately.
I learned that my dad, when we finally sold the house that we had grown up in, I was the person who got a lot of the boxes of papers and files and my dad's military commendation records and medals. And I also had a lot of the paperwork that he received. And so, I learned that in 1977, he got a letter from the government that said, "You owe the US military $1,030 for overshipment of household goods." What that meant was someone of his rank should only have had a certain number of belongings, a certain amount of bulk to ship from one military assignment to another. We were a family of five.
And so, I never heard any talk of this growing up, but I can imagine the feeling of anxiety, the feeling of having been misjudged as somebody who was trying to swindle the government. And I see the notes and the forms by which he made his case, which his commanding officer corroborated. And so, that chapter resolved neatly. But I think of the psychic toll of that accusation. I don't know how many other challenges my dad and my mom met, but I know there were some. I'm a parent. I know it's hard.
And to know that we grew up without having to worry about those things is also a sign to me of the seriousness with which they took their job, which was to help us form in a full way without the kinds of, I don't know, shadows that could stunt us in some way. And so, I think that is the greatest gift somebody can be given as a child, the space to grow without excess worry, the space to focus on. For me, it was like my inner life, my little inner life as a little kid. And to imagine that that could be something that that was my job.
john a. powell:
Well, you talk about struggles in your life in a way that's not pretty. You talk about struggling with alcohol and you talk about your mom and dad, particularly your mom turning to God to sort of reground in prayer. And you have a deep spiritual life. You actually have spirits come to you. In one passage, Tracy says, "I wonder if this spirit is actually just a figment of my imagination or if it's real." And then you say that logic is actually interfering with this process. So, tell us about your spiritual life. Apparently, you haven't exactly followed your mom and dad, but you do have a deep spiritual life connected to those who've already gone.I think you say you still have a relationship with your dad, even though he's gone. I believe there are some friends here who've lost people. But tell us about your spiritual life and what grounds you.
Tracy K. Smith:
Well, when I was growing up, it was really kind of like the straightforward Christian doctrine that I got going to church with my family. So, you want to go upstairs, it's God. Close your eyes and you're praying to God. Don't worry about other spirits, other ghost stories. Just go to the source.john a. powell:
Ouija board?Tracy K. Smith:
Yeah, none of that was permitted. And then after my mother died, I felt obedient to that. I missed her. And I had actually been a student in grad school of the great poet, Lucille Clifton, who has written extensively about her engagement with the spirit realm through conversations with her deceased husband and mother, and also messages that she believed herself to have received from the other side. And I was always fascinated by that, but I always thought, well, I'm not supposed to commit to that. That's not the view of eternity or of the afterlife that I've been allowed to claim.And then after my father passed away, I felt him. I felt like he was just around. I could see things through his eyes and I felt like that was because he was saying, "Look. Look at that bird." It's often birds.
And in 2020, one of the things that became really helpful for me was meditating. And so, I was just under a lot of stress and first it was prayer. And then it was the desire to be answered back. And I started to feel myself to enter into dialogue. The first few poems that I wrote during that season of my life were actually call and response, question and answer almost verbatim to a dialogue that I could feel in my mind's ear is how I think of it. And I've just become more bold about that connection.
And a lot of those exchanges were useful to questions not just of my own life or my own emotions, but I believe my ancestors were saying, "We are here and we're even stronger than we were, and so we'll help you. We can guide you. We can console you. We can answer some of your questions in ways that might be useful to where you are." And some of those visions and exchanges feel useful to nationhood and they make their way into the book.
A lot of that dialogue had to do with moving beyond the insular sense of us that I feel most committed to in thinking about the stakes of our plight as a nation, but it's probably bigger than nation as well. And I feel like I was encouraged to understand that the outcomes we are laying the groundwork for are not just coming to me or us and us that I claim, but to all.
And so, I think the charge, I have it on good information that the charge is to get it together and understand that we no matter who we see ourselves to be on these hierarchies need to regard one another, to reconfigure our sense of what we belong to so that we understand it's everyone.
And that's interesting when you think about history because it's difficult not to say. "Here is harm that's been done and here is harm that's been received," but to understand that the work of being human is to move to a place where there's no division. That's what's really interesting and chastening in a lot of ways, too.
john a. powell:
And you cite Baldwin for that proposition in part where Baldwin talks about the people who hurt you are your younger brothers and sisters. Could you say a little bit about that?Tracy K. Smith:
Oh, yeah. I love that. It's from My Dungeon Shook. It's the letter to his nephew on the 100th year of the emancipation. And so, he's writing this letter to his nephew who has his same name, and he's saying, don't let your understanding of the truth of this dynamic which is incorrect make you angry and small. Our work is to, if we want to survive, if we want to heal, we have to understand that our aggressors are like our younger brothers who are misguided. And how do you teach your younger brother? Not with rage, but with love.And I feel like that's a really helpful reminder and it's not an easy one to embody, but I think he's right in most of the things that he says.
john a. powell:
And sort of love rather than rage sort of on the big picture. But actually, you've dealt with this on a very intimate level. As I understood, the father of your children is white, and there's one part of the book where you're wondering if he can understand the kind of slights and challenges that the kids who are perceived maybe as not white will go through. So, could you talk about that a little bit?Tracy K. Smith:
Yeah. Oh, I would love to read that passage, but I don't remember what page it's on. Do you have a sense?john a. powell:
I think I might be able to find it.Tracy K. Smith:
Maybe I'll read you three paragraphs if that's okay.john a. powell:
Sure.Tracy K. Smith:
I'm a Black woman married to a white man. The happy white families cycling past our house on weekend mornings, the ones trailing each other in descending size order, laughing at some giddy words the father has tossed back toward the dutiful queue, when they cross my path, my whole life wants to hide. This is preceded by a couple of scenes where my young sons are having meltdowns and like a grocery store or playground and the feeling of being, what I say, floodlit by stranger's judgment when someone comes up and says, "Can I help you? Can I do anything?" Which often feels like a question like, "What do you think you're doing here? Why is this happening here in this space?" So, that's what I'm referencing here.Even if I know those families, even if I wave, smiling, rattling off their names, the sight of them is a reminder that something about my family refuses to blend in. Naomi raises ahead. Her brothers shout to her to wait up. We gobble up the sidewalk, like a needle on a seismograph. One boy will insist that his father mitigate some rift. The other will cry, high held notes trembling out like a soprano's, plump tears leaping from his cheeks. Each is a fountain of feeling. A font of emotion and need.
One needs to be hoisted onto his father's shoulders. The other must be appeased with a joke or a treat. And there goes, our daughter tugging us in an uncharted direction, demanding that we follow, which sets her brothers off. The weeping. The gnashing of teeth. To step out of our house is to play roulette with a thousand urgencies. Chief, I believe is the need to be seen. Next is the need to be heard. We are always out of bounds. I am always made to feel, by our drama, and the strangers at attention, that we are transgressing a prescribed border.
What feeling does the sight of these orderly white families incite in my husband? Does he notice with what authority they claim the road and how the road can be seen to oblige? Does he notice the youngest there wobbling behind on the smallest, the most gestural of bikes, and understand without a doubt that nothing will befall him, no missed light, no car horn, no rain clouds, no stern crossing guard, no divot in the pavement, nor sprung leak of any kind? Beyond a doubt, beyond dispute, everything will make sure he survives.
And if these thoughts occur to my husband, as they occur to me, do they cause his conscience to cloud over, angry at himself for begrudging some deserving child the certainty that he will live out his childhood in safety? The certainty that everything in our neighborhood, our nation, our history has been laid out in such a way to deliver that child to wherever he may seek to go.
Sometimes at night I ask my white husband to see things for a minute through the eyes of his Black wife. To hold our children in his mind and admit that something, some specter or ghost, has been let loose to circle them, to sniff and bellow. Some apparition trained to follow children like ours, wherever they might go. And he knows. He knows.
For years now I have watched him, born free, cradle his children's freedom, different. He knows. He knows, from what's been allotted to him. It is like an infant. He rocks it in his arms, rounding his back, curling his shoulders in, protecting it from cold, sheltering it against wind and other forces waiting to infringe. He leans down to whisper in its ear. There's nothing he hasn't agreed to take from himself and give to them. If the world will let him.
john a. powell:
That's so beautiful.Tracy K. Smith:
Thank you. Thanks for asking, asking about that.john a. powell:
We have about, I think five or 10 more minutes between the two of us and then we'll open it up to all of you as well. Reading that, the beauty of it, and this is part of the complexity that I love in your work, you talk about not being a single identity, not just being Black, not just being, you talk about moving through multiple identities and the space to do that, which I think might be surprising to people. I think one of the things that happen when you see someone that you think of as different is certainly if you think of them as less than to not see their complexity.And you come from a very complex background. So, how does that show up? How do you actually hold on to all of those parts? There's one passage we talked about where someone says, so who are you? And they're demanding to categorize you. They're demanding to put you in certain boxes. And you're conflicted about that because even as you know they're doing it, you also feel on some sense that you have to comply. You talk about that tension, that dance of being in someone else's gaze.
Tracy K. Smith:
Yeah, I mean, we all are complex. We all have different ... You know now, Kimberlé Crenshaw has given us the term "intersectionality" and we understand that these different regions of identity inform us and we move around within them. And the intersections make us, I don't know, attentive, sensitive, invested in many different things. But when you're looking across lines of difference, sometimes you forget that that's true on the other side as well. And if you live in a country that has authorized you to forget about that possibility, then it happens even when you don't want it to.john a. powell:
Basically, how do you move and claim your multiple identities when sometimes the institutions, as you call them, society, people, the person that Tracy talks about is here in the Bay Area, which is also interesting, right? It's not Alabama or whatever, it's the Bay Area still putting you in your place. How do you deal with that? And how do you then hold on to your multiple identities and not get reduced?Tracy K. Smith:
Well, I think it doesn't always feel in the moment like you have the wherewithal to put things right. I love and wish that I admire people who can, and maybe I'll get better at that. But sometimes, it's about reflecting and then going to a place where, or even a dynamic with other people where you can unpack that and say, "This is what happened. This is how I felt. Let's laugh at it a little bit. Let's get bigger than it, but let's also talk about the feelings that ensue in response to that."I think community in any form is restorative and allows us to build ourselves back into a fuller sense of who we are. And even when we don't see that community can say, "But look at you. This is who I know you and understand you to be." And so, that's really important.
I think writers are also writers because a lot of the work of finding the right thing to say happens way after the fact, and only because you can put the words down on paper and move them around. And I know that's true for me, working things out. There's not a shelf life on clarity. So, sometimes taking that time is it's okay because you get to something that might be a tangible feeling or durable feeling.
john a. powell:
Okay, great. So, I have two more questions and I could go to the book for one, but I'll try to paraphrase it. You say something like, it's not simply that Black people belong, we're also the instruments of belonging as I understand it is that we have, so it's not a passive thing. We actually contribute to the belongingness that happens or should.And as I thought about that phrase, and I can find it if it's helpful, it seems to be a little bit in tension with blacks being freed but not free. It seems to suggest a greater than greater agency, greater possibility that we're not defined by this narrow sense that we don't belong. Then not only do we belong, we're the instruments of belonging.
Tracy K. Smith:
Yeah. There's a moment toward the end of the free and the freed where I say we are the leverage by which no one in this country would ever have been free without which no one in this country would ever have been free.And so, in some ways, that's a loud grievance, but it's also I think, yeah, a declaration of what has been made and made possible by our presence, and not only by dint of having been acted upon, which we have talked about, but also the wonderful contributions we've made in every form and especially in helping to make ever so slightly more perfect understanding of what democracy could be in this country. And so, that's not a passive thing at all.
john a. powell:
So, the title of this book is To Free the Captives. And again, are we doing it? How do we do it? How do we free the captives? And earlier statements, you suggested that while there's a difference between those who may think of themselves as free and those who are freed, they were all captives. How do we free the captives?Tracy K. Smith:
Well, we're captive because we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded by this notion of ascent, the ladders, the hierarchies. And if we can climb up, if we can leverage a little bit greater altitude, we'll benefit, we'll be happier, we'll be freer. And you might have to step on a few people in order to do that, but you'll get there. That's a construct that is imprisoning.I guess there are two things I want to say. One is that when I think about how freedom has operated, even among the people I've been calling the freed, it is given away. And so, I think about what my parents, what their parents, what their grandparents offered to the people they were responsible for and the community that they were committed to, it was not about hoarding something, but about handing it, handing it down, giving it toward others and watching it grow in that respect, like seeds that can be planted.
And then the other thing I think if that seems hard to imagine doing, I think one of the chief tools by which it can become more fathomable is the imagination. And that is the mechanism by which we can find new terms for thinking about who we are, what we're doing here, and what we might mean to one another or come to mean to one another. But we have to step out of another form of imprisonment, which I think has to do with language. It has to do with the speed at which we're almost now commanded to operate. So, that nuance, well, there's not time for it.
And looking up from what we're doing towards somebody else who seems to be either doing something different or doing the same thing but in another position, we don't have time for that either. Because what if they get close and want to take what we have? There's so many dynamics that we've sort of been initiated into, but I think we can unlearn them and I think we can begin to build a different vocabulary for what we're doing here. And it's not our institutions that are going to do that for us. They're busy preserving themselves.
But I think the imagination is a good starting point. I mean, how rude? I brought my phone up here, but I think and I know there's some people who work for Apple here, but I think this is one of the things that is diminishing us, not just because we're looking down with the notion that we're looking in, but because we're receiving so many shortcuts. Our imagination is becoming algorithmized, algorithmic.
john a. powell:
We're being hacked.Tracy K. Smith:
Yeah. And so, I can preempt your presence simply by categorizing you and then swiping away. And I think everything about us becomes smaller and less capable when we allow that kind of the shortcuts to overtake that slow thought process that must take time to take root.john a. powell:
Well, two things I want to share, and you can comment if you like it, but you don't have to. Then we'll welcome the audience then. One is the role of soul. Again, this book in some ways is a very personal political, but a deeply soulful spiritual journey. And you say at one point you say, we approached the large and the far by means of the near and the small. So, to me, I love that phrase right, because I think sometimes, things seem so big and beyond us, and you're saying the near and the small is how we can do this work. So, I don't know if you want to comment or if we should turn it to the audience.Tracy K. Smith:
I like to bring the soul into the space. I just think that as I felt the limitations of the vocabulary we share for collective work, I've longed for other terminology to become useful. Love was one. What if citizenship was something that actually engaged with questions and terms or practices of love. That might change what it feels like to live together with others. And I also think that the soul as a capacity is something that we might begin to spend time thinking about and claiming because it's larger than what contains us.john a. powell:
Yeah. Thank you. So, we're going to pivot now and accept questions or comments from you, but I'll ask you, there's a mic going around, because this is being recorded. And tell us your name.Giselle:
Giselle. As a fellow teacher of the humanities, my big question for you, I'm a big prose person myself, expository text. So, when poetry comes into the board, I always get a little discombobulated. So, how did you decide that that was going to be your big outlet there?Tracy K. Smith:
I felt what it did to me when I was reading it and when I was younger, I thought I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't have a sense of what the form would be. And when I started reading poetry in college, I understood that it worked upon all of me. It wasn't confined to cognition. It made feelings. It produced feelings in my body. It produced memories. And it felt like a way of encountering another person, another voice, and going on a journey with them.It also allowed me to pay attention in such a way that I could teach myself things. And that felt so useful. It felt like I could finally have time and have the wherewithal to be fully present and to move around until I could glean what was needed from life or as a reader from this text on the page. And I just wanted to do that. I wanted to be able to write poems that taught me things, that allowed me to go back in time and revisit memories, even people who were gone.
And now, I feel like poetry is a mode of research. I think through poetry to get a better grounding in history or in questions like what we've been talking about that have to do with our civic dynamics. Poetry has helped me figure out what I think the afterlife is about. And it also allows for change because most things stay true only for a time, and then they need to be re-understood. And poems are great at coming back to the same questions in different ways.
Yvette Fagan:
My name's Yvette Fagan, and I know you went around the country reading your poems and different communities. And what's your takeaway from that experience?Tracy K. Smith:
Oh, it was the best thing I could have done from 2017 to 2019. I visited rural communities, where there isn't a lot of ongoing literary programming. And I read some of my own poems, but mostly I brought an anthology that I edited of 50 poems by 50 different living American poets.And so, I'd get into a space like this and I would read a poem once and somebody else would read it and their voice, and then I would say, "I don't know what you've been taught about poetry, but all you really need to do is think about what you notice in a poem. And we can go quite a distance just talking about the things we notice, what were led to remember or wonder and response to those things, what feelings emerge."
And so, we were talking about everything, every facet of life by way of these poems. Somebody who was writing about end of life, somebody who was writing about being a stranger in a community where they didn't speak the language and we were talking about issues, but at the skin level, the heart level. And it was wonderful. It was also exciting to be in a space where people who had maybe a little skepticism or apprehension about poetry realize they had the authority to make really wonderful observations. And we taught each other a lot of things in that way.
It made me very, very hopeful about us as a nation that we could sit in a space and talk quietly and vulnerably and honestly about life. And everything I go home to read about us says the opposite, that we don't speak the same language, we're yelling. We don't believe the same things are true and there's no remedy for this.
I feel like I have proof that that's not the case, but we have to fashion opportunities not just to be repeating all the things that are kind of spewed at us and not just spouting these vehement opinions in a match with others, but actually coming to a place where we're interested in what other people have to say. And you've been doing that too, right?
john a. powell:
Trying to, yes. Thank you.Speaker 6:
Step back.Amina:
Hi, I'm Amina and I'm 18. So, I just wanted to know what advice you'd give your 18-year-old self specifically as it comes to being artistic and a writer?Tracy K. Smith:
Oh, I love that question. I'm happy that you're 18. That's like nice, you have lot of things to look forward to. I would say just read as much as you can, learn from what you read, name the things that these other, let's say poems or stories do, and see if you can do them in your own material. And I felt like I had encouragement to commit to poetry in my schooling because I was in programs where there were 12 poets and there were 12 fiction writers and we were kept apart. I don't think that happens as much, but I would also say move around if you like to write language is your form. It's not a genre.And then the other thing that it took me a long time to learn was that what I knew and what I was certain of wasn't the material. It was what I wondered or doubted or questioned. And so, if you can get to a place where what you're doing is not only talking about what you know, but helping you to ask different kinds of questions and move into them, even if you're moving into them in ways that contradict one another, sometimes that's okay, too, but that'll be a really great guarantee that your work is full of discovery. And if you can feel that you're learning and discovering something, your reader will feel the same way.
john a. powell:
We have the gentleman up here, I don't know if you've seen him. He's been trying to get in for a while. No. One more. One more.Speaker 8:
Could you talk a little bit about, on a personal level, how your kids respond to poetry, how you try to, what if poetry you try to bring to your kids now that they're getting to be teenagers and are they writing any poetry and are you encouraging them to write, and what poems do you share with them?Tracy K. Smith:
Oh, I love that question. My kids have all grown up reading a lot of poetry. We read to them and sometimes it's ... Well, my boys really liked listening to a podcast that I did for a while that's now being done by poet, Major Jackson called The Slowdown. And so, that has poems that are preceded by a little reflection, and then there's a poem read. And so, my boys liked listening to that and also children's poetry. I remember a long period of time where we were reading a lot of A.A. Milne because it's so rhythmic and playful and funny. Emily Dickinson, very different kind of poet, but some of those poems also get in you.And yeah, my son, Sterling, writes poems. He's a poet and he gives himself different pen names. Every April in schools, the kids will do a poetry lesson. And so, he finds that Sterling Huffman was one of his pen names. But he's great. He's a great young poet. And I think all the kids love reading. And if I push too much with my daughter who's the oldest, she pushes back. So, I try and just trust that it's in there and she knows how to get to it if she needs it.
I think poetry is something kids are fluent in and we ask them the wrong questions about poetry as they get older. Not you, but other teachers. "What is this poet trying to say?" I don't know. A single poet whose hackles don't get raised when someone says, "What is the poet trying to say?" Because poets say things and they make things happen that produce effects. Even if they're not rooted in cognitive function, they have effects.
And so, learning to just describe them, talk about them is a great way. And kids can do that really well. And kids know. Kids live in metaphor, so it's great if they can be encouraged to dwell there and not put it away and then have to relearn it again.
Speaker 6:
This question's to your right.Ian:
Hi, my name's Ian. And my question is this that I think as I've grown older, I've learned that passion is a poor substitute for compassion. And I think in a lot of fighting, people have a very strong point of view that they're trying to force through. And it seems like you embody that principle, that it's the compassion that needs to come through rather than having a point of view you're trying to push across. And I just wondered how you might reflect on that.Tracy K. Smith:
Well, that's a nice thing to hear. I think that a lot of writers are really curious about other people, and I think that leads you to want to listen and observe in different ways. And it's hard sometimes to observe someone and not feel like, "Oh, right, I feel that way too sometimes." I wrote a poem once in which I was passed this woman on the street who was just almost aggressively miserable. And the poem, I had to describe her so meticulously, and then I was like, "Why am I doing this?" And I was like, "Oh, because I feel like her sometimes."And so, sometimes being able to close the distance between another person and yourself as a way of finding something in yourself that's present, but that you don't always focus on. And that feels really useful to me. I think a lot of writers do that. I think that's how characters in some way become credible. Thanks.
Speaker 6:
This is on your left in the front.Naomi:
Hi, my name is Naomi, like your daughter just pronounced differently. I'm in community with some friends who are West African Yoruba people and in a very memorable dinner party with them a few years ago. A couple of them were talking about their experience of how in our shared community, white Americans calling the ancestors and they were just laughing, goodheartedly, but they were saying, "Americans are only speaking to the ancestors and they don't wait to hear back."Tracy K. Smith:
Oh.Naomi:
So, my question for you is how does one a poet, but also just how does a human being cultivate the kind of soulfulness that allows us to listen for the ancestors to speak back?Tracy K. Smith:
Oh, I love where your question went. I can give you practical, a practical answer to that because it really is connected to that meditative process, which is new for me. I think what is difficult for Americans to do in listening back is to turn down the volume on logic, self-consciousness and ego to say, "I can speak out, but to hear back, that might not make sense." And then when it begins to happen, you doubt and you say, "I must just be making this up. This doesn't happen to me. I don't know. I'm in doubt with this capacity."But whenever I start to feel that, then I know I'm getting close. And I think that what we should become more comfortable in doing is putting logic in its place and saying, "Right now you're not needed. Something else is happening. Something else is possible here." And it's remarkable how easy it is to hear when you can go through ... The hard part is going through that whole process. But when you get to the other side of it and when you begin to trust it, there's a lot the ancestors or whoever they are eager to share.
And so, I think it's something worth doing. I think it's something worth learning to practice. And one side effect of it is that you understand that the logic part of your mind and the ego, those aren't the biggest parts of you. Those aren't the most useful parts in every context. And we need that lesson, I think.
john a. powell:
And one of the things you talked about, Tracy, in your book is the learning from and being in relationship with other life expressions, whether it's other animals or trees. So, not entirely human-centric. And I think that's important to remember as well. We are sharing this wonderful place with a lot of other life expressions.Tracy K. Smith:
Yeah.Speaker 6:
This is to your far right, towards the back.Tracy K. Smith:
Hi.Linda:
Hi. My name is Linda. I'm a high school student. I just want to say that your poetry and writing has inspired me to write very much my sophomore year. I just want to say thank you for that. My question is often when I write from my experience when I'm writing, I think something that often comes up is this fear of being vulnerable, of being too much, being too emotional, being too political. I was just wondering what are your thoughts on that?Tracy K. Smith:
I think vulnerability is part of the goal, but I understand that, too, T-O-O part of your question. And for me, that's where the rigor and the restraint of craft become very helpful because it's not useful in most cases only to spill, to spew. You can do that in part, but it needs to be bolstered by something else usually. And I think that's where thinking about form and modulation and writing can be really helpful. Things have to be interrupted and replaced with other patterns in order for a poem not to be monotonous.And sometimes those moments where deep vulnerability happens are places where something has made that possible, a form of tightness that can be ruptured. And so, maybe thinking about mapping different characteristics through the work. Even if you allow yourself to write the vulnerable, vulnerable, and then you go back and you think about where different forms of pressure can be applied, that could be a helpful thing. But I wouldn't say holding back initially is the way to do that.
Speaker 6:
This is on your left to the front.Spalding:
Oh, thank you. Hi, I'm Spalding. And many years ago, I was a religious studies major. So, I'm enjoying the spiritual and soulful nature of the conversation. I was really taken by the poem that you started with this idea that we can't claim our own children until we embrace all children. And I'm a teacher. I teach at the secondary level, science public schools. So, this is what I've been doing for 30 years.But the thing that just hit me, of course, is what's going on in the world. I just immediately thought the children of Gaza, the children of the people that are trapped by this political dynamic that really resembles the concept of free and freed. So, you don't have to answer this, but I'm just curious how you think Black liberation relates to other liberation struggles such as that of the Palestinians?
Tracy K. Smith:
I think liberation is liberation. And I think that it is urgent when those rigid hierarchies exist and they exist everywhere. Yeah.Speaker 6:
This question's to your far right.Dr. Akilah Cadet:
Thank you. Hello. Thank you both for this wonderful conversation. My name is Dr. Akilah Cadet, a dismantler of white supremacy. My question to you, Tracy, is that you talk wonderfully and beautifully about intersectionality and how it shows up, and we have shared intersectionality as women of color, as Black women in particular. And Black women are given the gift of having to solve the world's problems. So, to you and only for you, how do you tap into softness?Tracy K. Smith:
I have to laugh a lot, and that really helps me climb into, I would want to call it a little bit of largeness larger than the angular, even victimized or upset put upon feelings. And I think that's my mechanism. I need to be able to make sense sometimes by making fun or levity. I think that that's part of our inheritance as Black people in this country. My colleague, Glenda Carpio, has written really wonderfully on humor in Blackness, but that's my, I don't know what the noun is, but that for me is a kind of balm in a way.Cassandra:
Hi, I'm Cassandra. And because you mentioned all the spirituality as a big aspect of the stuff and that listening more to it can help you hear it more in the places that you would, but how can you even begin to start hearing it to be able to practice it more?Tracy K. Smith:
That's a good question. I like that you mentioned other life forces. How did you describe them? Life...john a. powell:
The expressions of life.Tracy K. Smith:
Expressions of life, yeah. Sometimes that's a way I think. To be inside the human experience or the human scheme maybe sometimes it's hard to get to that large or the spirit part of it, but maybe it's witnessable elsewhere. I found that, I don't know, like birds and trees really helped me think in large terms. Maybe part of it has to do with they have very different relationships to time than we do and connection. So, maybe if the human feels a little bit impenetrable in that respect start elsewhere and see if you can feel or sense something like that. I don't know. That's a good hard question.Speaker 6:
This is at the left toward the back.john a. powell:
I think we are getting toward the last questions.Mariana:
Hi. My name is Mariana. Thank you so much for saying everything that you're saying. When you talk about losing your father, that made me think a lot about how in the pandemic, I almost lost mine. He was in the ICU for two weeks. Luckily, he made it out, but it made me think about how unprepared I am for a parent's loss, which is ridiculous. No one's prepared, but also how terrified I was to think about where would dad go in the afterlife if that's where he goes. So, sorry if this question's too out there, but do you have thoughts on what the afterlife looks like or what you want it to look like?Tracy K. Smith:
Yes. I have a book called Life on Mars, and that started as a book grappling with America and science fiction was the tool that I was or the genre I was using to do that. But while I was writing that book, our father became ill and passed away pretty suddenly. And so, all this work thinking about space and the future suddenly became the set on which I was thinking about the afterlife and the universe as a site of the afterlife.And so, I built these poems that allowed me to place my father in a context that I would be willing to surrender him to. And I think that you can do that. I mean, who knows?
john a. powell:
Why not?Tracy K. Smith:
Yeah, I think you can ... For me, what that meant was I could sort of begin to commune with him in these different hypothetical spaces and to imagine him there doing what he would've wanted or what he did in life. And that was very consoling. And a lot of it is stuck. I think some of the schemes I cooked up allowed me to imagine what I think the purpose of being on the other side of this life might be, or what, I don't know.I don't even really know how to finish that sentence, but I think you can take some attempts at building versions and maybe at the very least, it allows you to imagine what your hopes are, what your fears are, and what the wish in terms of maintaining a connection across what I think of as the mortal divide might be.
And I honestly believe that book probably made some of this dialogue now with my dad that I feel so present, if not possible, then credible for me because I'd worked it out in my head, if that makes sense.
john a. powell:
Well, I'm aware of the time. I think we're at time, but I'm looking to the host.Speaker 6:
Yeah, I think that's our last question. Thank you everyone for coming. If you have a copy of the book, Tracy will be signing. If you do not have a copy of the book, Marcus Books is over here selling the new book. So, thank you again. Thank you so much for joining. Tracy and John, thank you.Tracy K. Smith:
Thank you so much.Speaker 1:
You've been listening to poet, Tracy K. Smith, in conversation with John A. Powell. This program was recorded at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on October 10th, 2023. City Arts and Lectures Programs are recorded live in front of an audience in San Francisco, and you can attend. Come spend an evening in the company of today's leading thinkers from journalist Matthew Desmond to Leigh Bardugo, creator of the Shadow and Bones Trilogy, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to Justice Stephen Breyer. To find out more about those guests and many others, visit cityarts.net.These broadcasts are produced by City Arts and Lectures in association with KQED Public Radio San Francisco. Executive producers are Kate Goldstein-Breyer and Holly Mulder-Wollan. Alexandra Blackman is director of Design and Communications. Production and communications assistance provided by Jordan White. Sydney Goldstein Theater Technical Director Steve Echerd. Our post-production director is Nina Thorsen. The recording engineer is Jim Bennett. Theme music composed and performed by Pat Gleason. City Arts and Lectures founding producer is Sydney Goldstein.
City Arts and Lectures Programs are supported by grants for the arts of the San Francisco Hotel Tax Fund. Additional funding provided by the Bernard Osher Foundation, Barry Traub, and the Friends of City Arts and Lectures. Support for recording and post-production of City Arts and Lectures is provided by Robert Mailer Anderson and Nicola Miner. To attend a live program or for a list of upcoming guests, visit our website at cityarts.net. That's cityarts.net.
