Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Believe
Doubt
Struggle
" 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
" 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 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 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
" 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 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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Me
Inspire
Think
" 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
" 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
" 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
" History is a heavy thing everywhere. "
Tracy K. Smith
Heavy
History
Thing
" Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it. "
Tracy K. Smith
Me
Losing
Parents
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat. "
Tracy K. Smith
Kind
Retreat
Writer
" 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 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 had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books. "
Tracy K. Smith
Her
Books
Second
" 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
" 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