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All Quotes by author - Tracy K. Smith
" A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea. "
Feeling
Chance
Experience
" A poem, necessarily, sits at a register that's different from our usual conversational voices. You have to listen more actively to get to the heart of what's being said, what you as a reader or listener are being asked to feel or notice. "
Said
More
Listen
" A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point. "
Believe
Doubt
Struggle
" As I've been teaching longer and longer, I realize I learn so much from the voices I'm naturally drawn to, the writers I love on an instinctive level - but I also learn so much from the writers that I have to work to grasp. "
Much
Realize
Learn
" Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat. "
Kind
Retreat
Writer
" For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit. "
Kind
Opportunity
Myself
" For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense. "
Death
Writing
Child
" History is a heavy thing everywhere. "
Heavy
History
Thing
" I am keenly aware that in writing about my mother, I am writing about my aunts' sister, and that in writing about my grandmother, I'm writing about their mother. I know that my honesty about how my view of these people has changed over the years may be painful. "
Honesty
People
Sister
" I don't know how anyone can see the Hubble 'Deep Field' image and not feel like something else is going about its business out there. "
Deep
See
Feel
" I feel like it's a gift for any writer to be recognized like this. "
Writer
I Feel Like
Gift
" I feel most alive, most electric with faith, breath, and courage, when I think of God as a current that runs through all that is. Not by will or by choice. Not as a benediction but because there are laws even God must obey. "
Courage
Think
Faith
" I feel that, as a person of color, I've always been interested in the stories that are quiet and the stories that often get overlooked. "
Quiet
Feel
Always
" I first got caught up in this marvelous feeling of being spoken to in that very direct, private, magical way by a poem when I was really young. I was in grade school and had found an Emily Dickinson poem in a textbook. "
Young
Feeling
Magical
" I go to a lot of writers conferences and literary festivals that tend to be in college towns or cities, and I'm eager to see what happens if those same texts and those same questions move outside of those areas to smaller rural communities where there are surely people who read and love poetry. "
Questions
Love
People
" I grew up in northern California in a town called Fairfield, which is kind of exactly between San Francisco and Sacramento, a small suburb. And I'm the youngest of five children. "
Small
California
Children
" I had to say to myself, 'I haven't written enough about blackness, yet it's part of my consciousness and my lived experience.' I had to get over that anxiety of 'I haven't done this before.' "
Myself
Say
Anxiety
" I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books. "
Her
Books
Second
" I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking. "
Early
Life
My Life
" I have this belief that we are so vulnerable when we open ourselves up to literature. We're reminded of these real parts of ourselves. "
Real
Up
Open
" I have three kids, so children's literature is a big part of my life. "
Big
Three
My Life
" I know my curiosity as a writer and as a person makes me really interested in moving to parts of the country that I haven't explored through writers' festivals or through the kind of campus visits that I do on a regular basis and engaging with people who may be readers of poetry and may not. "
People
Moving
Me
" I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life. "
Sad
Alien
Life
" I think humans have always felt watched back by whatever is out there flickering in the distance. What excites me is what the imagination creates, not simply in explanation of what is there but also to explain or justify the feeling of awe and attachment that the heavens inspire. "
Me
Inspire
Think
" I think the way poems are taught to high school students is completely counterintuitive; it sets up this sense of being the poem's adversary. The poem is sort of sneakily trying to outsmart you. "
Think
Trying
School
" I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to. "
Day
Poetry
Me
" I want to just go to places where writers don't usually go, where people like me don't usually show up, and say, 'Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?' "
You
Speak
Say
" I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them. "
Work
Parents
Poetry
" Jacqueline Woodson's books are such a gift to parents and children for their poignant subtlety and lyricism and their willingness to let a reader dwell in the pangs of realization that we sometimes try to protect our children from. "
Parents
Gift
Sometimes
" Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated. "
Space
Thinking
Poetry
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