Tracy K. Smith's Poetic Journey: Exploring Loss, Belief, and Identity, Schemes and Mind Maps of Poetry

Download Tracy K. Smith's Poetic Journey: Exploring Loss, Belief, and Identity and more Schemes and Mind Maps Poetry in PDF only on Docsity! the iowa review 173 claire schwartz “Moving toward What I Don’t Know”: An Interview with Tracy K. Smith “Is God being or pure force? The wind / Or what commands it?” begins “The Weather in Space,” the opening poem in Tracy K. Smith’s 2011 collection, Life on Mars. These boldly roving ques- tions characterize Smith’s work. In three books of poetry and a memoir, Smith explores how loss and birth and belief and desire make blurry life’s edges. Her poems play those edges in strange music. Tracy K. Smith was born in 1972 in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard and an MFA from Columbia. As an undergraduate, Smith joined the Dark Room Collective, a black reading series and writers’ group that fostered the diverse aesthetic summoned in their unofficial motto: “Total life is what we want.” Smith’s first collection of poetry, The Body’s Question (2003) was selected by Kevin Young for the 2002 Cave Canem Prize. Her sec- ond book, Duende (2007), won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2008 Essence Magazine Literary Award. Smith’s most recent collection, Life on Mars, was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Smith is also the librettist for A Marvelous Order (2016), an opera about urban planners Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. She is translating work by the Chinese poet Yi Lei. Among her many honors and awards are an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, a Whiting Award, and a Rona Jaffe Award. She is a professor at Princeton University. I spoke with Smith in Brooklyn in May of 2014, at Princeton in March of 2015, and by e-mail in December of 2015. The spaces between our conversations were punctuated by steep changes: the birth of her twins, a move from Brooklyn to New Jersey, her appointment as Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton, and the publica- tion of Ordinary Light. Claire Schwartz: What do you hear that you feel summoned by, that provokes a rise in you? 174 claire schwartz Tracy K. Smith: The mark of a poet or writer. Sometimes coming together with other poets feels almost the way church is supposed to feel. There’s something about that community that I really claim. Maybe it’s because I believe that to be a poet means we’ve chosen a different kind of listening. A different kind of empathy guides us. Sometimes I feel like one of the struggles I have as a person and as a writer is to figure out my relationship to faith, which is one of those things that I feel marked by and belong to. I have a lot of ambivalence, and, in a lot of ways, the memoir is really an exploration of that. But when I come into a conversation with somebody else who is willing to acknowledge belief in some way, I feel kinship there. What else? I do think that race is one of those things, but it’s very layered and nuanced. In working on my memoir, one of the big things that I kept coming back to is how to describe this feeling that I’ve had for so long. I couldn’t put it into language as a child. I think, really, it’s empathy; but it caused me a kind of fear or silence around the events in American history that my parents or my grandparents would have been a part of—the things that would have hurt them. The history of Jim Crow is a big part of the history that I come from. But I’m thinking, too, about the ways that we now are treated. The language is different, but—considering all of the verdicts that have come down in these past years—it’s the same kind of thing. When I think about black Americans, I feel a real kinship. When I think about being called as an American, it’s almost the oppo- site feeling. I feel marked by that, and reluctant. I feel implicated in so much of what we as a nation have set into motion—even in terms of the things that feel comfortable on our side of the table. CS: The issue of Americanness seems present in all of your poetry collections, but differently so. The Body’s Question refracts it primarily through a lyric “I.” Duende calls up the question of the nation explic- itly and immediately in the long opening poem “History.” Life on Mars exceeds not only the country, but the planet. Yet this collection some- how feels most deeply engaged with the question of America. TKS: Absolutely. That was one of the driving forces behind the poems in Life on Mars, before they started picking out their own interests. I wanted to write dystopic poems as a way of thinking about America and the future that America is laying the tracks for. So poems like “The Universe Is a House Party” or “The Museum of Obsolescence” are really, as I see them, poems about America. And then, of course, there are the iowa review 177 But I also remember not wanting to talk much with people about the fact that she’d had surgery because the way they reacted made me feel nervous, like, “Maybe there’s more to this story that I’m not able to grasp, or that I don’t want to live with.” So in some ways I felt like it was a little bit of a secret until the end of my time at Harvard, when the cancer came out of remission. At that point, I was forced to come more to terms with what this would mean. CS: What did coming to terms look like? TKS: After I graduated, I went home to California for a year. I knew that I needed to go home and be with my mom because she was coming to the end. And then I stayed because I hadn’t made any plans. Partly it was about knowing I needed to go home and thinking, “What’s the point of coming up with other things to do?” But I think that’s the smaller part of it. The larger part was that I knew poetry was important to me, and I knew that I wanted it to be the central thing in my life. That was what I wanted to do. That was the vocation I’d chosen. But I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know how you went about living that life. Although I had teachers and I saw that they taught, I didn’t know how they’d got- ten to that point exactly. I had one or two friends who had MFAs, so I knew that must be part of it. But I hadn’t taken the time to figure out how I would do it. So going home was really about not having decided how I was going to make that wish real. While I was at home, I ended up applying to grad school. The next year I went to Columbia. In California, I also realized how much writing and reading poetry was helping me to deal with the inevitability of my mom’s death, and then the grief. I was a mess, but if I could go upstairs to my room and read—or I had some audiocassettes with poets reading, and I would lis- ten to their voices—I felt centered in a way. I’d grown up in a household where we went to church. We would pray. I did that, too, but what really spoke to me was the voice of poetry. CS: Who were some of the poets you were holding close during that time? TKS: Seamus Heaney. He was the person who really made me want to start writing, so his books were like bibles to me. I would read his poems and try to imagine creating that kind of presence through words, 178 claire schwartz but I’d also just be grateful for what he’d done. “Clearances,” a sequence of elegies for his mother, was so important to me during that time. Who else? Larkin. I had his collected poems. And Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa. They were the two contemporary poets who made me really want to become part of the African American poetry tradition. I remember Thomas and Beulah and Magic City. Those were the books that I had, of hers and of his. I felt like I could access those poems effort- lessly. In fact, I remember writing a lot of poems in my workshop that were kind of imitations of the poems in Thomas and Beulah. I didn’t really know my grandparents, but I could imagine my parents as young people, and writing about them helped me to start thinking about craft. CS: And Seamus Heaney had been your teacher at Harvard? TKS: Yeah, and that’s another reason why those poems were important. Everything people say about him is true. He was so generous and kind and jovial. We were writing our poems, and I, for one, was so serious about it. I think I wanted to perfect my poems because I felt like I didn’t have control over much else. I didn’t have material. I wasn’t writing about my mom. I was kind of just writing. So much seemed to be at stake. And he was such a gentle, loving teacher: “That’s an interesting image. What would happen if you did this to it?” Kind of nudging me— and probably everyone else—toward our own material. You always worry about finding your own voice, and I know that in that class I was trying to imitate him—not because I wanted him to know that, but because his were the poems that I loved so much. And he was really good at coaxing us toward something that might feel more authentically our own. For our last class, he took us all out for dinner, and I remember just being so sad. “Is it going to be okay? What’s going to happen?” “It’s going to be okay. Don’t worry, it’s going to be okay.” He signed my copy of Seeing Things, which was, I think, his current book at the time, with a quote from Yeats: “And wisdom is a butterfly, and not a gloomy bird of prey.” I felt chastened, but also like, “He’s right! I’m going to try and be joyful about this. I’m not going to be so gloomy.” Poetry is work, but it’s work that feels like fun. I always try to remind myself of that, and it’s his voice that I’m trying to remind myself of. CS: How did the Dark Room Collective figure into your making of a writing life? the iowa review 179 TKS: That was a big factor in poetry sticking for me. I met Tom Ellis in Cambridge. I thought, “Oh, here’s this young guy who calls himself a poet. I’m supposed to be a poet.” At first, I had that sort of angry feeling that you get when somebody else is doing what you want to do. And then I said, “Wait. He knows how to do this. Look at all these books he’s showing me. He knows where poetry is.” I learned that he was part of the Dark Room reading series, and I started going to those readings. Then I started doing lighting at the readings, so I was there all the time. I was thrilled by the chance to hear poets read their work. And after- ward, I would go out to dinner and eat with them and laugh with them and try to be at ease, even though I was nineteen. You’re never really at ease at nineteen. Oh! A big, big important fact was that Dark Room was writers of color—mostly black writers, but there were other writers of color that came to read in the series as well. That did something so important to counterbalance the voices that I was hearing in my classes. I didn’t read Yusef Komunyakaa or Rita Dove in my classes. I read them because of the Dark Room. And so by the time I started taking poetry workshops, those were the voices that were really active in my ear. That was an important moment in history, too. It was the early ’90s. The canon, as far as I could tell, in terms of contemporary voices, was W.S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Louise Glück, and Jorie Graham. The Academy of American Poets was such a homogenous organization. I remember very clearly when Lucille Clifton was inducted as one of the Chancellors of the Academy. I remember the outcry that led to that. Now, I feel like American poetry is so much more—not just represen- tative, but dynamic. As far as I’m concerned, the revolution in African American poetry has saved American poetry from sameness and stasis and irony and a lot of things that are deadening. CS: Did the Dark Room Collective still feel nascent when you came into it? Was there a sense that it would become the crucial literary incubator that it did? TKS: Well, it was not until 1992 that I got connected to Dark Room. So it was already up and running; in fact, it had already moved out of the house that it started in, where a lot of the Dark Room members lived together. It was in the Boston Playwright’s Theater at BU, and then it went to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. So it was kind of grown-up. It wasn’t a fledging collective anymore. 182 claire schwartz ated a really active sense of material for me—and also, permission. If I could manage a life with all of these different variables, then I felt like I also had the ability to come back to my poems and make them do what I needed them to do. So I gave myself permission to say things that speakers in poems say but I’d never thought I could say—to tell stories that weren’t necessarily my own stories, and to let pieces of myself come into those other stories. When I found that there were gaps in what I knew, or even in what I could imagine, I would let myself fill in the gaps because I was begin- ning to have powerful experiences and questions and certain ideas that resembled answers. So, it was an interesting arc. My first years of writing poetry were really about learning how to build solid poems. It wasn’t until much later that the real material and my own courage to explore it came in— to give shape to some of the ideas of craft that I had developed. CS: You say that some of your poems failed because they were trying to undo the non-undoable. Did you have an idea of what success meant? TKS: I remember I had a meeting with Alice Quinn, who was one of my teachers. She’s wonderful. I showed her some poems, and she said, “You’re writing about your mother’s death, but every one of your poems is trying to line things up neatly. It doesn’t necessarily need to be that way. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way.” She said, “Maybe it’s too soon to be writing about this.” When she said that, I pulled down the shutters: “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” But I think she was right. I needed time in order to approach the material with a lighter hand. The few poems in my first book, which I wrote during that time, were beginning to understand that I could allow unresolution to anchor the poem; or, I could change the facts in a way that it would be clear to the reader that that’s what I was doing. In The Body’s Question, there’s a sequence of elegies called “Joy.” And one of the elegies—one of the last poems I wrote at Columbia—is remembering a moment by the fire with my mom when I was a child. I couldn’t figure out how to end that poem, and then I realized that I could not only change the verb tense; I could reverse the direction of time. And so that poem ends, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. We never left the room. the iowa review 183 The wood was never spent. I realized then that I could let need determine how things happen in a poem. Not in a way that was undoing what happened, but in a way that calls into question that very need to undo. I felt really excited by that. That felt like a huge discovery. CS: At what point did you have a sense of writing The Body’s Question? When did you start thinking about your work as toward a book? TKS: After I got that thesis report, I couldn’t even look at the manu- script because I knew it needed so much work. So I tried to forget about those poems altogether. They were just sitting in my computer. I didn’t even print them. And then, one day I was just sitting in my apartment in Brooklyn and said, “You know what? I’m tired of hiding from these poems. I want to look at them and see.” They were all unfinished. I printed them, and I spread them out. I sat there and finished each poem. It was really liberating because I didn’t have anybody to show the work to, none of those voices that can stay in the back of your mind and hinder the choices you make. I was on my own in this apartment deep in Brooklyn. And it was almost as if I had this adrenalized intuition, this great collision of all the voices from my past that had been trying to help me. Suddenly, I understood what they wanted to say, and I could apply those lessons. I said, “Oh my god. I think I might have a book here.” CS: How did you think about the architecture of The Body’s Question? TKS: That was something we had talked about a lot at Columbia. I had even taken a class on the architecture of first books. I was really mindful of how sections work, that there’s a journey that the book as a whole is mapping out. I just said, “I’ll start with other people’s stories, and maybe that will allow me to move toward my own material.” So that book goes through all of the persona poems—the immigrant voices and the poems that are imagining other people’s lives in Mexico and in New York—to the poems about my mother to the poems about the life I was living at that point. Those other voices in the first section gave me the courage to write poems that were true to my own experience. It’s not coincidental that my mom is in the middle of the book. So much of what I wanted to say when I was writing the book were things that I wanted to say to her. She passed away when I was still a child—or 184 claire schwartz still acting like a child and hiding the facts of my life from her. So, in a way, having her as the center allowed me to feel like I was speaking to her. In specific moments, the poems become conscious of that. But I also love thinking about things like the first and last line of each poem. I’ll put the poems in order, and I’ll just read the first and last line of every poem to see what the connection between one and the next is— where one poem leaves you and the next poem picks up. Or, I’ll think about the very first line of the book and the very last line of the book and what kind of gesture they represent. Is it a gesture toward hope? Is it a gesture toward something bleak? CS: How do you want the reader to move through the book? TKS: I want someone to move through the book sequentially. Ideally, all in one sitting. I want the reader to just listen. That’s the way I read. I just want to hear the story, hear what the speakers are telling me, trust that they’re saying “come here” for a reason. But I don’t think about a reader when I’m writing poems. This is what I believe: if a poem is realized, then the speaker or the poet’s invest- ment—and I think there’s a little bit of a gap between those two things, though in some ways they align themselves with one another—is trans- ferred to the reader. And if I can trust that to be true, then I can dwell in the process of writing—moving toward what I don’t know and toward the discoveries that poems, I believe, are constantly making. Of course, there also comes a time when I want to make sure the reader understands what’s going on. But I like to think of the encounter between me as the poet and the language that becomes the poem as utterly private. In this space, I can ask anything of the poem. CS: What did you learn between The Body’s Question and Duende? TKS: I learned that I didn’t need to anchor everything in the “I.” When I finished The Body’s Question, I felt, “I’ve told my story. I’ve gotten this off my chest. I’m tired of myself. I’m going to let go of the first person.” Of course, I didn’t. But “History,” the long poem at the beginning of Duende, was really an attempt to do something else. To satisfy a differ- ent kind of urge about space and history and society that felt, to me, epic. That contracts back to the local and private. I think that’s because poetry is really good at excavating spaces that are at once intimate and immense. the iowa review 187 I wouldn’t want to write prose that reaches outside of language, but because I think a poem speaks to a different part of the mind and self. While the prose in my memoir drew from more than just the knowledge part of the mind, it spoke through that. Poems resist prioritizing knowl- edge, I think. At least, the poems I find myself drawn to resist that. CS: Maybe there’s something about the compression of the poem—how it can hold immense distances in very little space. TKS: Yeah. And as we’ve discussed, I think poems live in questions— even when they’re recreating things that are known. And maybe because the paragraph is driving toward arrival, there’s something absent in prose that the poems have to generate. It’s a different relation- ship between the tangible and intangible. CS: Are there lessons from poetry that equipped you to write Ordinary Light? TKS: I think the lesson from poetry that was most useful to me in writing this book had something to do with starting without a plan or course of action and seeing where the text itself led me. That’s how I embark on a poem, and it means that I’m constantly going back to see what I’ve said and what clues it might house as to where I ought to go next, what I ought to say next. The funny thing about that process in terms of narrative is that it subverts the primacy of the narrative thread; it suggests that the plot-based story is not the only or even the main story, that something else will emerge as central or unifying. That was really helpful to me, because it took me several tries in each chapter, let alone each draft, to get to what felt like the real heart of the matter. I started out cleaving to the rudimentary narrative, asking myself, “What happened? And what happened next?” But it was the accumulation of “extra-narrative” threads—of nuance, of images, of subtle trends and themes—that allowed me to gather something useful from the events of my life. Writing Ordinary Light taught me so many things about my life. Initially, I thought I was writing this book just to allow my daughter— now my three kids—to know my parents. I thought I was just going to be telling stories about my parents and creating—or recreating—a sense of my family in those early days when we were all together under one roof. And then I realized that, because the story has to come through me and my experience and my understanding of my experience and my 188 claire schwartz understanding of who these other people were for me, it became my story. That’s not what I intended to do, but it’s really exciting to find meaning that I didn’t know was there. I never have figured out how to talk about race in my poetry in a way that feels authentic and organic, and Ordinary Light is a book in which I’m thinking so much about race. So that’s been really exciting, too, because I feel like I have a lot of ideas about the way race shapes our experience. Things that, as a black person growing up in California, or in America, in this time period—the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s—I probably intui- tively sense and maybe talk about; but writing meant that I had to mine those ideas in a different way. CS: Has your poetic “I” carried through to the memoir? Or is that a completely different first person? TKS: Even if a poem is about my life, I know that people who read poet- ry know what assumptions they should and shouldn’t make. In Ordinary Light, there’s no ambiguity. It’s a completely transparent “I.” The “I” of the memoir is in the past; but it also lives in the present, in terms of what present awareness yields in considering past experience. It’s not completely distinct from the “I” that I might be imagining or listening to when I’m writing a poem, but it’s doing a different kind of work. CS: There’s a passage I love in Ordinary Light: “Pain. The word itself doesn’t hurt enough, doesn’t know how to tell us what it stands for.” In what different ways do you deal with language’s inadequacy in prose and in poetry? TKS: There’s a beautiful Jack Gilbert poem called “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart.” It’s about how language almost suffices for these huge things that we feel and live. Poetry is so great because it can conjure those feelings through association. Images can take over for statements, and they can project feelings onto the reader. Poems can also distort our sense of experience so that it becomes properly calibrated—so that we can receive from a poem things so extraordinary, so unordinary, that they can’t be described in ordinary terms. Prose was good in a really different way because it gave me the chance to approach things from so many different directions in a single paragraph. In prose, I can do the work of thinking something through and saying it—but also responding to it, and trying to understand why it might be. All of that can happen: your initial sense, and then your the iowa review 189 misgivings about your initial sense, and then your retrospection. All of that, in language on the page. There’s overlap between the two forms, but what I really learned while I was writing Ordinary Light is that there are other capacities in prose that might be helpful, and they were. CS: Light—at least in the Enlightenment strain—conjures truth, the way, something extraordinary. It’s a striking contrast with “ordinary.” How did you arrive at the title Ordinary Light? TKS: For years, I had a working title in mind that I liked the sense of, but it was far too long: After Everything That Is Happening Has Happened. I told myself that the right title would present itself when the book was done, but I remember finishing the book and still not knowing what I should call it. One afternoon, I had a conversation with my colleague Edmund White about how he titles his books. He suggested that I look through the manuscript for a quiet, simple image or phrase that might be able to take on some of the weight of the book’s large concerns. When I did that, I realized how frequently images of light occur in the writing. I think my Christian upbringing probably hardwired me to embrace that Enlightenment view of light, but the book is also mostly set in California, where the color scale and the power of daylight really do feel extreme—at least in my nostalgia-tinted recollection. The scene from which I ultimately derived the title takes place soon after my mother’s death, and the urgency and simplicity of the moment made me feel like it might serve as a good anchor for the book. CS: The book’s epigraph is from James Baldwin: “But something deep and watchful in the child knows that this is bound to end, is already ending. In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light.” Why this epigraph? Is the light in the epigraph the light in the title, or is there space between the two? TKS: I’ve loved that Baldwin passage since I read “Sonny’s Blues” as an undergraduate. I think I intrinsically recognized that particular feeling of time, history, and safety that exists in those types of rooms. It’s a feeling made more poignant by all that encroaches upon it—though of course as a child those things are harder to name. So much of the book, for me, focuses on the deep kinds of awareness that inhabit our lives as silence. The sometimes-grim understanding that sits just beneath the surface, just out of the frame. I wanted to invoke that here, and to call