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" Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious. "
Tracy K. Smith
Open
Us
Listen
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" For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit. "
Tracy K. Smith
Kind
Opportunity
Myself
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 feel like it's a gift for any writer to be recognized like this. "
Tracy K. Smith
Writer
I Feel Like
Gift
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" History is a heavy thing everywhere. "
Tracy K. Smith
Heavy
History
Thing
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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 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
" 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
" Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat. "
Tracy K. Smith
Kind
Retreat
Writer
" 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
" 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 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