The New Yorker Radio Hour - As Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith Hit the Road

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

Tracy K. Smith was named Poet Laureate in 2017, at the beginning of the fierce partisan divide of the Trump era. She quickly turned to her craft to address the deep political divisions the election laid bare, putting together a collection called “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.” Then she hit the road, visiting community centers, senior centers, prisons, and colleges, and reading poems written by herself and others for groups small and large. “It was exhausting, and exhilarating, and it was probably the best thing I could have done as an American,” she told The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Kevin Young.   This segment originally aired July 5, 2019. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Over the decades, there have been some very high-profile investigative panels that have looked into national and political crises. The Keefebauer Committee famously looked into organized crime. The Warren Commission in the early 60s investigated the Kennedy assassination, and the Senate held its Watergate hearings, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. And yet, arguably, none of those committees has had to tackle a political emergency as profound as the January 6th attack on the Capitol. The basic contours of what happened at the Capitol

have never really been in doubt, yet the Select Committee had fundamental questions it needed to answer. Was Trump's in action during the rioting a failure of leadership, or a real strategy, a way of fomenting chaos to retain power. Were groups like the oathkeepers, just a bunch of angry white nationalists, or were they in fact the armed vanguard of a coup? The committee has just released its official report, and the New Yorker is publishing it in book form, partnering with Celadon books. The report is comprehensive, let's say, long, in other words, and taking in every ugly detail of Trump's attempt to delegitimize this election is honestly. a challenge to the spirit. But as one member of the committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland told me,

the committee's work here was to establish a definitive historical record, and the rest is up to the Justice Department and the courts. One thing is clear from this report, we cannot afford to look away. Democracy remains under attack. And as I wrote it in the introduction to the volume, a citizenry that can no longer bring itself to pay attention to such an investigation, or to absorb its astonishing findings, risks moving even farther toward a post-truth, post-democratic America. We have more about the January 6th report at New Yorker.com slash report. Now, you might think that 2017 was an inauspicious time to become the poet laureate. The country was still reeling from the most divisive election in memory, at least until the next one.

So what was poetry going to do about it? All the while, Tracy K. Smith decided not to keep a low profile. When she was appointed poet laureate, she wanted to engage with the American people, as many of us as she possibly could. Smith appeared in front of audiences everywhere from senior homes to prisons. She estimates that she traveled one to two nights per week for two years, and at the same time, she put together a collection of topical poems called American Journal that she read from while on the road. Here's Tracy K. Smith reading one of those poems by Joy Harjo, a poet from the Muskogee Creek Nation, who also succeeded Tracy as Poet Laureate. The poem's title is simply, no. Yes, that was me, you saw, shaking with bravery with a government-issued rifle on my back. I'm sorry I could not greet you, as you deserved my relative. They were not my tears. I I have a reservoir inside.

They will be cried by my sons, my daughters, if I can't learn how to turn tears to stone. Yes, that was me, standing in the back door of the house in the alley with fresh corn and bread for the neighbors. I did not foresee the flood of blood, how they would forget our friendship would return to kill the babies and me. Yes, that was me whirling on the dance floor. We made such a racket with all that joy.

I loved the whole world in that silly music. I did not realize the terrible dance in the staccato of bullets. Yes, I smelled the burning grease of corpses, and like a fool, I expected our words might rise up and jam the artillery in the hands of dictators. We had to keep going. We sang our grief to clean the air of turbulent spirits. Yes, I did see the terrible black clouds as I cooked dinner,

and the messages of the dying spelled there in the ashy sunset. Everyone addressed Mother. There was nothing about it in the news. Everything was the same. Unemployment was up. Another queen crowned with flowers. Then there were. the sports scores. Yes, the distance was great between your country and mine. Yet our children

played in the path between our houses. No, we had no quarrel with each other. Tracy K. Smith reading Joy Harjo's poem, no. In 2018, while she was poet laureate, Smith sat down with the New Yorker's poetry editor, Kevin Young. So I love that line. We made such a racket with all that joy. Yeah. Rockett's a good word for, you know, what we are producing right now. I read this poem in Alaska, in the tundra, which is a region that is accessible by small plain. A lot of native Alaskan communities are accessible along rivers by boat. In the winter, you can drive across the river. So it was great to engage with Joy Harjo's work there.

How great. Tell us about the project. for those who might not know already? Well, it's called American Conversations, celebrating poems in rural communities, and it involved traveling to small communities in different parts of the country where there isn't a college or a reading series

and having readings. I'd read some of my own work and talk about it, but mostly I handed out copies of this little anthology, American Journal, and we would read it. I felt in some ways like a hymnal, you know, like let's turn out. to page 68 and see what we find here. I'd read a poem. I'd ask somebody else in the audience to reread it so we could hear it in a different way. And then the conversation sort of just got started.

What made you want to do this travel? I mean, you could have just stayed and written poems in that beautiful space of the Library of Congress or wherever you felt. What made you want to go out there? Well, I'd been thinking a lot about the national conversation and how it's characterized by a really awful sense of division, this shrill kind of railing against one another based on our differing perspectives. And I'd been saying to myself, poetry could help us get past that. I bet if somebody would start a reading series where they went, you know, brought poets from one part of the country to another, poetry could get past that, that sense of a divide. And then I got this call asking if I wanted to serve in the position. And I said, I do.

I know exactly what I want to do. I want to test out this theory. And it sounds like that worked well. I mean, you went how many different places? Oh, gosh. Well, the official trips from the Library of Congress, I think there were eight, maybe nine, including Puerto Rico. And within each of those states that we visited, there were three different or four locations. But I also, because I'd been talking so publicly about this desire, I got a lot of invitations from rural communities. And so I was traveling probably every single week, you know, one or two nights. And it was exhausting and exhilarating. But it was. probably the best thing that I could have done as an American because I felt so worried sitting home and listening to the news and so confident that we'll figure this out

when I was out there meeting people and just listening. We're listening to Tracy K. Smith in conversation with Kevin Young. We'll continue in just a moment. What are some of your most vivid memories of it? They're different kinds. And some of them have to do with the types of settings. So there were the public events that we did in. And each place there was a kind of a curated event, so something in a retirement home or a rehab facility.

I visited a women's prison in Maine and talking with women there about how poems gave them a new language for describing themselves to themselves. Then there was another experience in a home for veterans and pioneers in Alaska, people who had been part of the homestead movement. And I went in and I had the anthology and I started by talking a little bit about why I love poetry. There was one person who was really talking with me, responding to the poems. And then I noticed that hardly anybody else was talking. Sometimes we'd read a poem and then I'd hear somebody just kind of moan or somebody might just clap or something, but there wasn't a conversation. And I was thinking, am I bombing here, what's going on, or these poems not speaking to people?

And then afterward, some of the caretakers came up and said, this was incredible. A lot of the people in this room are members. of the Alzheimer's ward and they're nonverbal. And to hear some of them making noises or moving their bodies was incredible. And that was, I don't know how to explain how powerful that was for me. It affirmed that poems, they call to something that's deep within us. And there are many, many different ways of answering that. That's incredibly powerful.

I'm getting chills. Just thinking about that. I understand in South Carolina, you visited Summerton High School, which was integrated as part of the Brown v. Board, desegregation ruling, the decision from 1954. What was that visit like? Did that have a particular resonance? It was really moving because many of the people in the audience were alumni. I also happened to be reading a number of poems that weren't rooted in the history of desegregation, but Civil War poems. that also spoke to questions of race and America. So talking about those poems in a place where people had lived through this really monumental

chapter of history was meaningful. Is there part of that Civil War piece that you might share with us? Sure. So the long sequence is called I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. It's a poem that's made up entirely of letters and deposition statements by black soldiers and veterans of the Civil War and their family members. This is one section that I think of as a chorus. It's made up of many voices excerpted. Excellent, sir. My son went in the 54th

regiment. Sir, my husband, who is in Company K, 22nd Regiment, U.S. colored troops, and now in the Macon Hospital at Portsmouth with a wound in his arm, has not received any of the second regiment. any pay since last May, and then only $13. Sir, we the members of Company D, of the 55th Massachusetts volunteers, call the attention of Your Excellency to our case. For instance, look and see that we never was freed yet. Run right out of slavery, in to soldiery, and we hadn't nothing at all, and our wives and mother, most all of them, is a perishing all about, and we all are perishing ourselves. I am willing to be a soldier and serve my time faithful like a man, but I think it is hard to be put off in such dogish manner as that. Will you see that the

colored men fighting now are fairly treated? You ought to do this and do it at once. Not let the thing run along. Meet it quickly and manfully. We poor oppressed ones appeal to you and ask fair play. Wow. I can listen to that all day. That's incredible.

There's a line that I loved that you read, for instant. Much better saying than for instance. And I love that kind of play with language that you also were capital. in the pleas. There's so many of those. There's one. The one that made me realize that I didn't need to write over these voices with my own was a mother who wrote to Abraham Lincoln and she said,

you know, my son is gone. He was the only help I had. Now I am old and my head is blossoming for the grave. Wow. Wow. That's powerful. What more could you want? I think there's something in the work both that you've done as poet laureate.

but also in your own work, giving voice is the wrong word, but, you know, singing through history. And how do you think about history in your own work and then in your work as poet laureate? For me, history is a way of trying to make better sense of the present. I feel like history is hot on our trails. All the things that used to feel when I was younger, like they lived in newsreels. and chapters from books, they feel like they've woken up and they're present

and they're telling us, you haven't solved me, this isn't over. And so turning to history right now for me as a way of saying, what can I learn, that somehow we've overlooked. Well said. I think that for me,

your American Journal, the anthology you did, sort of speaks to that very question of sort of talking about now but thinking about history, Plus what you were thinking when you were making it. Yeah, well, it's American Journalism. It's a 50 poem anthology.

It includes one poem each by 50 different living American poets. And I wanted to gather up voices that might be helpful to me on these trips. I didn't want to just be talking about my own work. I wanted to be a reader with others. And so I said, well, there are poems that are new, that speak to life as we are currently experiencing it from place to place, perspective to perspective, that could be really useful. I wanted poems that could meet someone where they are that wouldn't feel intimidating. And, you know, I think the sense of 50 voices felt so small, but I wanted to celebrate the range

of voices and traditions here in America. I wanted this whole project, which is about exploring America, to acknowledge that there are many Americas, and they need not be exclusive of one another, or there's no hierarchy that we need to respect. Were there other things that came about from the anthology for you? Had you done an anthology before? I had never done an anthology before,

and I realized that I had to write an introduction. that was one of the first acts of as I had as Poet Laureate that I did. You're like, oops. I'm not just picking. Yeah. Well, I happen to have some language from that introduction where you say, it is an offering for people who love poems the way I do. It is also an offering for those who love them in different ways

and those who don't yet know what their relationship with poetry will be. I hope there is even something here to please readers who, for whatever the reason might feel themselves to be at odds with poetry. These 50 poems welcome you to listen and be surprised, amused, consoled. For the time that you are reading them, and even after, these poems will collapse the distance between you and 50 real or imagined people with 50 different outlooks on the human condition. I mean, that's beautifully sad.

I hope you write a book about poetry, because you're so good about talking about what it means and what it's up to. I'd love to read that book too. Oh, wow. I want to end with where your work is headed. What, you know, all of this it sounds like has changed sort of your own work. I feel, I haven't written, I've written one poem this whole time. I am thinking now that what I'd really like to do is just take some time to reflect on these two years,

which have been so packed and surprising and instructing. and instructive and consoling. And I need to sort of go, I think, by way of prose into those questions a little bit more and talk about America and what poetry has to do with it. I hope that's the next project that I dig into. And then I also want to trust that there's some poems waiting for me as well.

Sure. Well, thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you. Tracy K. Smith spoke with Kevin. Young in 2018 while she was serving as Poet Laureate of the United States. Kevin Young, in addition to being the New Yorker's Poetry Editor, is director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Tracy read one more poem for us from her collection, Wade in the Water. The poem is set in Texas, and it's called Hill Country.

He comes down from the hills, from the craggy rock, the shrubs, the scrawny, live oaks, the Ronnie live oaks and dried up junipers, down from the cloud bellies and the bellies of hawks, from the Kara-kara's stalking carcasses, from the clear sun-smacked soundlessness that shrouds him, from the weathered bed of planks outside the cabin where he goes to be alone with his questions. God comes down along the road, with his windows unrolled so the twigs and hanging vines can slap and scrape against him in his Jeep. Down past the buck caught in the hog trap that kicks and heaves, bloodied, blinded by the whiff of its own death, which God, thank God, staves off. He downshifts, crosses the shallow,

trickle of river that only just last May scoured the side of the canyon to rock, gets out, walks along the limestone bank, castor beans, cactus, scat of last night's coyotes. Down below the hilltops, he squints out at shadow, tree backing tree, dark depth the eye glides across, not bothering to decipher what it hides. A pair of dragonflies mate in flight. Tiny flowers throw frantic color at his feet. If he tries, if he holds his mind in place and wills it, he can almost believe in something larger than himself, rearranging the air. He squints at the jeep, glaring in bright sun, stares a while at patterns the tall branches cast onto the undersides of leaves. Then God climbs back into the cab, returning to everywhere.

Tracy K. Smith reading Hill Country. Her latest collection, such color, came out in 2021. I'm David Remnick. I hope you have a terrific holiday and the best for the new year. This is the New York Radio Hour. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Breda Green, Calalea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabwele.

Along with Adam Howard, Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Mike Cuchman, Meher Batia, and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.