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" 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
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" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat. "
Tracy K. Smith
Kind
Retreat
Writer
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious. "
Tracy K. Smith
Open
Us
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. "
Tracy K. Smith
Believe
Doubt
Struggle
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" I feel like it's a gift for any writer to be recognized like this. "
Tracy K. Smith
Writer
I Feel Like
Gift
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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