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" History is a heavy thing everywhere. "
Tracy K. Smith
Heavy
History
Thing
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Thought
Feelings
Language
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Work
Parents
Poetry
" We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer. "
Tracy K. Smith
Language
Know
Think
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Questions
Love
People
" So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us. "
Tracy K. Smith
Thinking
Distance
Poetry
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Space
Thinking
Poetry
" I feel like it's a gift for any writer to be recognized like this. "
Tracy K. Smith
Writer
I Feel Like
Gift
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Parents
Gift
Sometimes
" 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.' "
Tracy K. Smith
Myself
Say
Anxiety
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
People
Moving
Me
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Quiet
Feel
Always
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Small
California
Children
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Sad
Alien
Life
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Young
Feeling
Magical
" A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea. "
Tracy K. Smith
Feeling
Chance
Experience
" Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect. "
Tracy K. Smith
Place
Enough
Long
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Honesty
People
Sister
" One of my main wishes in wanting to write about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explore our relationship, think about the different versions of myself that I was with and without her. I also had the really strong wish to bring her to life for my children, who were born after she was gone. "
Tracy K. Smith
Life
Mother
Children
" You want a poem to unsettle something. There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do, which is to say, 'This is what you think you're certain of, and I'm going to show you how that's not enough. There's something more that might be even more rewarding if you're willing to let go of what you already know.' "
Tracy K. Smith
Know
Say
Interesting
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Real
Up
Open
" When I first became brave enough to tell people that I wrote poems, so many people would rave to me about Edna St. Vincent Millay's work. I was embarrassed not to have read her, and I think that put me off from reading her for a long time. So many of her poems are just impeccable. "
Tracy K. Smith
Time
Brave
Me
" I have three kids, so children's literature is a big part of my life. "
Tracy K. Smith
Big
Three
My Life
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Much
Realize
Learn
" Listening to music and lyrics and watching movies, I think, uses a lot of the same muscles we use in reading and experiencing poetry - and yet we somehow forget that we have those when it comes to sitting down with a book of poems. "
Tracy K. Smith
Music
Poetry
Reading
" Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious. "
Tracy K. Smith
Open
Us
Listen
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Value
Live
Poetry
" What excites me is that I'm an ambassador for poetry, which is something that I wholeheartedly believe in and that has been an anchor and a force of stability and consolation throughout my life. I think that's good news. "
Tracy K. Smith
Poetry
Me
Life
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Said
More
Listen
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Deep
See
Feel
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Day
Poetry
Me