In our ongoing celebration of local poets during National Poetry Month, we’re turning the spotlight on Falmouth native Tracy K. Smith.
She credits another local poet, Emily Dickinson, for her pursuit of the medium. In an interview with Columbia Magazine, Smith said she was 11 years old when she first connected with Dickinson, reading her poem, " I’m Nobody! Who are you?" Smith said the poem read as if Dickinson was talking directly to her. She said that she felt understood.
“I wanted to be able to think and communicate in that way,” Smith reflected.
She followed through on that calling, becoming a two-term U.S. poet laureate and winning a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for her book " Life on Mars."
Smith recently sat down with Open Studio host Jared Bowen to talk about her latest book, " Such Color: New and Selected Poems," and why poetry seems to be having a moment.
She thinks the power of poetry lies in its ability to ask you to slow down and see things in a different way. That is an especially powerful tool during stressful and trying periods.
“When you encounter a poem, there's a voice on the page who seems to be stopping you where you sit, saying, ‘Can I talk to you? Like, there’s something really wonderful, really strange and really big that you need to hear,'" she said, explaining how that voice guides a reader through a process of seeing, feeling and associating with the material.
Smith said her poems typically arise from a sense of imbalance or unrest, and she is then able to process those emotions and thoughts through words.
In "Such Color," Smith addresses enslavement, the Civil War and the violence that can interrupt everyday life. She said using history as a distancing device allows her to both address issues of the past and grapple with the present.
“Even a love poem for me begins with me thinking ‘This is so powerful. How can I get a grip on it?’" she said. "And so, there's a great sense of relief and momentary consolation that comes from finding my way to some glimmer of insight in a new poem.”
The most recent poems in "Such Color" are ones that Smith wrote in 2020, during the pandemic. Unlike her earlier work, she said these words felt urgent to her because they were addressing newer and more immediate concerns.
"I wrote a lot of poems sitting in my backyard and feeling the weight of the ages, asking for help and courage and clarity," she said.
Those backyard moments became a meditative practice for her, and she said it felt like there was something speaking back. One of those experiences inspired Smith's poem " Mothership." It is a testament to the power, protection and wisdom mothers offer; something she had to reckon with when she was 22 years old and her mother died of cancer.
“I remember sitting in my backyard one day and I was thinking about a friend whose mother had died. Her mother had recently passed, and my mother's gone, and 2020 was the year when I needed her," she said. "I was wondering that maybe my mother and her mother know each other now, and if they can help us, that's great. They understand what we can't yet fully understand. “
Smith then imagined everyone’s mother who is now gone, sitting together at a vantage point to the rest of the world.
“This poem was a way of saying, OK, what do they see? What do they know?" In writing this, Smith says she found "a little bit of hope.”
Watch: Tracy K. Smith reads 'Mothership' on Open Studio
