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" 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
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" 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 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Early
Life
My Life
" 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?' "
Tracy K. Smith
You
Speak
Say
" 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 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
" 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 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 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 have three kids, so children's literature is a big part of my life. "
Tracy K. Smith
Big
Three
My Life
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Why
Us
Poetry
" History is a heavy thing everywhere. "
Tracy K. Smith
Heavy
History
Thing
" 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
" 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
" 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
" My hope is to create spaces where people of all stripes can come together and speak at a lower decibel level. We make more sense that way. We sound more like our real selves that way. "
Tracy K. Smith
Together
Speak
Create
" 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
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Courage
Think
Faith
" 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
" 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
" Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious. "
Tracy K. Smith
Open
Us
Listen
" 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
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Think
Trying
School
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat. "
Tracy K. Smith
Kind
Retreat
Writer
" 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
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Death
Writing
Child
" I feel like it's a gift for any writer to be recognized like this. "
Tracy K. Smith
Writer
I Feel Like
Gift
" For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit. "
Tracy K. Smith
Kind
Opportunity
Myself