>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:04 ^M00:00:22 >> Jane McAuliffe: Good evening. >> Evening. >> Jane McAuliffe: I'm Jane McAuliffe, the Director of National and International Outreach here at the Library of Congress, and I'd really like to welcome you to tonight's event, which concludes the first term of our 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, Tracy K. Smith. As I'm sure you know, the Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, has appointed Tracy Smith to a second term as Poet Laureate. And she was eager to do so because Tracy has already accomplished a great deal in her signature laureate project. With this project, Tracy seeks to bring more poetry to rural communities, communities like Fairfield, California where she grew up. This spring, with pilot trips to New Mexico, South Carolina, and Kentucky, Tracy developed the model for how she plans to spend her second term. And also on behalf of the Library, I'd like to thank Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico, Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, and their staffs, of course, and the Kentucky State Center for the Book. I'd like to thank all of them for making Tracy's spring trips so incredibly successful. Tonight, in a talk entitled "Staying Human, Poetry in the Age of Technology," Tracy will tell you more about her project. She'll also make the case for poetry as a reprieve from the noise of the 21st century life. And she'll read a selection of her work, including some poems from her new anthology, "American Journal, Fifty Poems for Our Time," which is being published jointly with the library. After that, Ron Charles, Editor of the Washington Post's Book World and the host of our Life of a Poet series, will talk with Tracy about her poetry and her plans for the next year as Poet Laureate. I'm very happy that all of you could be with us for this special evening, so please join me in welcoming our United States Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. Thank you. ^M00:02:52 [ Applause ] ^M00:03:04 >> Tracy K. Smith: Thank you. Good evening. It's such a delight and an honor to be back here in this wonderful, wonderful building. I wanted to talk about why poetry feels so important to me now and a little bit about, you know, what taking this sense of mission into other parts of the U.S. has felt like. And I look forward to continuing that conversation with Ron Charles the second half of the program. 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. But poetry, which awakens our senses, frees us from the tyranny of literal meaning, and assures of the credible reality of emotional truth, puts us in touch with something bigger than language, something I believe each of us was perhaps fluent in before the moment when language became our chief vehicle for meaning. Before I go any farther, let me say that this lecture, like the poetry I write, is the product of a particular imagination, one as informed by belief in a vast and mysterious, and yet orderly and purposeful, universe as by a deep curiosity about the voices and lives of strangers. Furthermore, I'm operating on the notion that poetry can save me from disappearing into the narrow version of myself I may be tempted to resort to when I feel lazy or defeated, or when my greedy ego takes over. I'm operating on the belief that poetry can restore me to the large original self I haven't yet fully learned to recognize. Poets have different names for that self. Stanley Kunitz called it a, quote, "pool of energy that has nothing to do with personal identity, but that falls away from self, blends into the natural universe." Emerson believed it lived in the same place the inner voice does, and that it had access to the large whole of which each of us are but small parts, what he called the oversoul, quote, "the silence, the universal beauty." Elizabeth Bishop's view of such oneness, at least in her famous poem, "In the Waiting Room," is less consoling, "Suddenly, from inside came an oh of pain, Aunt Consuelo's voice, not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised. Even then, I knew she was a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me, my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all, I was my foolish aunt. I -- we were falling, falling." 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. Now I feel strongly about poetry for what it offers in these terms, but I also, more and more, recognize its value as a remedy to the various things that have bombarded our lines of sight and our thought space, and that tamper with our ability, or even our desire, to listen to that deeply-rooted part of ourselves. I'm talking about the many products, services, networks, trends, apps, tools, toys, as well as the drugs and devices for remedying their effects, that are pitched at us nonstop in our browser sidebars, in the pages of print media, embedded in movies and TV shows, on airplanes, and taxis, and trains, and even toilet stalls. I guess more and more, I see the technology we live listening for and peering into as the primary and most effective vehicle of that sales pitch, so much so that I now wonder which came first, the device, or whatever the device is urging us to click on and pay for? The glib, facile, simplistic, and prefabricated language by which we as consumers are constantly surrounded is a language that flatters us, that urges us to indulge ourselves, to get away from it all, to be unique by opting in, talking back, liking us on Facebook, leaving a review, sharing, retweeting, etcetera. It's a self so smooth that its terms have infiltrated the language of other facets of daily life, that of education -- Rate Your Professor -- does she make the material relatable and easily digestible? Or did you have to work to learn something? [Laughter] What are the job outcomes and earning potentials of your intended major? Individual selfhood has taken on a different tenor. We brand ourselves. What an awful herb, aligned as it is with the practice of burning the owner's initials into flesh. We vie for followers on social media. We turn our experience into content that can be assimilated and liked quickly and reassuringly by others in our network. Friendship is different now, too. We have allowed conversation to be splintered and atomized by the devices we invite to interrupt and distract us. We aren't listening to what or whom we think we are. I go so far as to say that much of the time, perhaps as an unconscious comping mechanism, we aren't listening at all, not to other people, and least of all, to ourselves. ^M00:10:17 We can't afford to. What does this have to do with poetry? Well, as a writer, I'm convinced that one of the only defenses against the degradations of our market-driven culture is to cleave to language that fosters humility, awareness of complexity, commitment to the lives of others, and a resistance to the overly-easy and the patently false. Poetry is one vehicle for this humanizing, reanimating version of language, because the features of a poem insist upon a different values system. 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. Rather than putting up a buffer between ourselves and those outside our immediate sphere, poems devise means to contemplate those others and to take in their perspectives. Rather than solving, side-stepping, or denying problems, poems bear witness to dark facets of experience. They give us vocabulary for the terror, the shame, the regret, as well as the terms of hope resulting from the choices we make and those we consent to. In other words, poems say, "Hey, come here, let me tell you what it was like." And they ask us to submit to another experience of reality. They disorient us from our home base, and they teach us to admit and submit to the feeling of vulnerability, to act upon empathy and curiosity, and to follow along, allowing sense to accrue at its own pace and upon its own terms. If you do that enough times with a poem, you might begin to think differently about actual strangers. You might also begin to recognize that there are new possibilities of feeling and awareness available to you, ones that take you far beyond those pitched to you by the marketing teams, the corporations whose products are, at the moment, enjoying a good run. In case I haven't said it clearly, the language circulating upon the surface of the 21st century is in the business of pulling us away from the interior, the reflective, the singular, the impractical, and the unsummarizable. In such a current, the language of poetry is a radically-rehumanizing force, because it is one of the only generally-accessible languages that rewards us for naming things in their realness and their complexity. And despite what social media would have us believe, it is not the language of sharing and following or buying and wearing, but rather, that of bearing deep and unabashed witness to the urgencies and upheavals of lived experience that comes closest to brining us into visceral proximity with the lives and plights of others. That's not just distraction, and it's not a luxury. It's a means of self-preservation, a way of affirming commitment to the belief that our lives can and should matter to one another and to ourselves. So this might be a good time for a poem. Can we listen to Laura Kasischke read her poem "Heart/Mind"? >> "Heart/Mind," A bear batting at a beehive, how clumsy the mind always was with the heart, wanting what it wanted. The blizzard's accountant. How timidly the heart approached the business of the mind, counting what it counted. Light inside a cage, the way the heart. Bird trapped in an airport, the way the mind. How it flashed in the floor of the phone booths, my last dime. And this letter I didn't send, how surprising to find it now, all this love I must have felt." >> Tracy K. Smith: I love how that sounds like a landline phone call from long distance. And sometimes maybe that's what poems are like, they return us even just to the recent past that feels so remote and real. I think any successful poem teaches you how to read it -- in this case, hear it. And Laura Kasischke's poem "Heart/Mind" provides a roadmap to that process, beginning with the title. You don't have it in front of you, but heart slash mind. So the first thing a reader might ask is what is that slash meant to signal? Is the poem called heart slash mind? Is it heart mind? Or as a participant in a conversation that I had recently at a men's addiction rehabilitation center in Kentucky pointed out, perhaps it is heart over mind, an emotional reversal of the common notion of mind over matter. So the poem invites you to question and theorize, and then it begins to tell you what it thinks of itself. In this poem, the early stanzas -- I'm going to repeat them -- with metaphors that unfold into concrete and surprising visceral examples over the span of a few lines, they set up a pattern that becomes useful to the reader once the poem becomes more spare and gestural. So I'll read the first few stanzas again. "A bear batting at a beehive, how clumsy the mind always was with the heart, wanting what it wanted. The blizzard's accountant. How timidly the heart approached the business of the mind, counting what it counted." I love what happens when I get these strange images that give me an intense, you know, like feeling. "A bear batting at a beehive." Not only do we have all those really fun Bs, but you have an image of this big animal angrily and hungrily swatting at something. And you have a sense of danger on both sides of the equation, threat and counterthreat. So the poem begins with this strange sense of fraught balance. And then "How clumsy," which characterizes that bear. So it's not such a threat, it's just ham-fisted. "How clumsy the mind always was with the heart." And suddenly, the heart is the hive. There's something in there that is wanted and also worth protecting. "Wanting what it wanted." So those first four lines of the poem guide you into a sense of all of the potential registers of emotion that are making this metaphor happen. And the second -- or the third stanza, rather, does the same thing, "The blizzard's accountant." Now I don't have a way of picturing that. I'm already kind of like on alert from having had some senses activated by the first metaphor, but I've got to let this next stanza show me what to see. "How timidly" -- okay, maybe that's the accountant in the stanza -- "How timidly the heart approaches the business of the mind." Of course, what kind of math would suffice in the face of a blizzard's worth of snow? And yet, "Counting what it counted," the heart persists. By the time in the poem that we reach the lines, "Light inside a cage, the way the heart" -- which ends with a dash -- "Bird trapped in an airport, the way the mind," dash, we can instinctively see the little drama that is to be played out in our imaginations. Those lines become a shorthand for a process that we are now educated and equipped to complete on our own. Yet, even having taught us how to work with what we've come to expect, the poem still manages to surprise us. I love this. I think every poem -- every fully-realized poem finds a way to surprise its reader. Moreover, as a poet, I understand that a poem is only finished, only fully-realized, if it succeeds in alerting me to something I couldn't have been capable of seeing at the outset, something I couldn't have known to say were it not for all of the things that the process of writing the poem has led me to say. Kasischke's poem moves through images of the heart as an indomitable beacon, something uncageable, and then the image of the mind as trapped, bumping up against invisible barriers, forever barred from where it seeks to go. And then she leaps from there to the sense of frustration and desperation in that image of the last dime on the mucky, disgusting phonebooth floor. Speaking of technology, let me concede that there are some things that have definitely been improved upon. ^M00:20:07 All of the visceral feelings that the poem draws upon from its very opening work to invest its arrival with a palpably-felt urgency. I don't believe it was a plan, something outlined and plotted from the start, but rather than moving through the register of those different distinct feelings created the momentum that pulled Kasischke to the poem's closure which, incidentally, resists metaphor. Perhaps by now, the poem is free from the need for corollaries, invested as it is in the confluence of newly-activated feelings. These are the final lines of the poem, "This letter I didn't send, how surprising to find it now, all this love I must have felt." And how does this poem speak to my concerns about market-driven language? Well, I think about it this way, we don't read poems only for the rhetorical stance they take or for the arguments they may actively or subtly make about their conscious material. We also -- and I'd argue mostly -- read the for how they direct our attention in ways that are antithetical to mere utility. In "Heart/Mind," Laura Kasischke is no making editorial-like claims against the language of the marketplace or of commodity, but in urging us to think and respond as it does, the poem persuasively unsettles the unthinking or automatic ways we often experience content, language, and narrative. It is in this manner that this and other poems invite our dissatisfaction with the view of the world as a place mad up mostly of resources to exhaust or consume. Let's listen to another poem. This is called "Music from Childhood" by John Yau. >> "Music from Childhood," You grow up hearing two languages. Neither fits your fits. Your mother informs you moon means window to another world. You being to hear words mourn the sounds buried inside their mouths. A row of yellow windows and a painting of them. Your mother informs you moon means window to another world. You decide it is better to step back and sit in the shadows. A row of yellow windows and a painting of them. Someone said you can see a blue pagoda or a red rocket ship. You decide it is better to step back and sit in the shadows. Is it because you saw a black asteroid fly past your window? Someone said you can see a blue pagoda or a red rocket ship. I tried to follow in your footsteps, but they turned to water. Is it because I saw a black asteroid fly past my window? The air hums -- a circus performer riding a bicycle toward the ceiling. I tried to follow in your footsteps, but they turned to water. The town has started sinking back into its commercial. The air hums -- a circus performer riding a bicycle toward the ceiling. You grow up hearing two languages. Neither fits your fits. The town has started sinking back into its commercial. You begin to hear words mourn the sounds buried inside their mouths. >> Tracy K. Smith: So this poem behaves quite differently. Firstly, you probably noticed a little bit of repetition. Not enough to make you confident of a pattern that you were going to be able to anticipate. So this poem is a pantoum, which means the second and fourth lines of the poem occur further down, only once. And then the next stanza, the lines that sit in that place will occur further down. And so it creates this sense of eerie deja vu a little bit. It's almost like you're being gaslighted -- do -- did I hear that? Do I know that? How do I know that? -- which I think serves some of the other behavior in this poem, right. You probably notice there are statements that don't finish, and there are shifting pronouns. There's a you that's being addressed that seems like may be the speaker talking to himself. Then later, that you seems to become a specific person, "I tried to follow in your footsteps, but they turned to water." There are visual images in the poem. There's a sense of place. But none of it feels anchored so that I could confidently say these are the terms of this person's life. What I do feel confident of is what seems to accrue emotionally through the poem, this sense of searching, of turning back, or recalling something that's partially clear. There's even an interesting way that some of the -- you don't have the line breaks in front of you, so you have to trust me -- but the lines -- you know, one line leads into another in a way that almost feels linear and logical, and then something shifts. So in the second stanza of the poem, this beautiful line, "You begin to hear words mourn the sounds buried inside their mouths." I can't tell you exactly what that means, but mourn, sounds, buried, mouths creates a kind of authority for the line that I'm going to dell upon a little bit more. And I think of loss, I think of language and voices. But then the next line -- so "Buried inside their mouths. A row of yellow" -- and maybe this is just me, but after mouths, and I see "a row of yellow," I think, "Okay, maybe teeth or something is what I'll see next." But now, "A row of yellow windows, and a painting of them." So suddenly we go from this almost philosophical, mournful perspective to a shifted gaze of looking out -- maybe looking out. Maybe it's just a painting of someone -- something that is looked out upon. So it's a poem that's not going to guide you by the hand, but if you surrender to it, you get to feel many different things. I come away from this poem thinking about maybe someone who really did grow up in a household with more than one language, but I also feel the sense of interiority and privacy that's so active in this poem that I feel that any person anywhere is living in two languages, the language of the self and the language that comes from outside. I shared this poem at Cannon Air Force base in Clovis, New Mexico with men and women enlisted in the Air Force, and airbase employees, and military spouses. So it's the kind of poem, as I mentioned, that requires you to let go of that wish for linear narrative and respond instead to the tone, the accrual of images, to the almost haunting effects of hearing every line repeated once and no more. I asked what people noticed. That's the question I ask the students in my classrooms as well as the audience members who have attended readings I've given in rural communities in New Mexico, South Carolina, and Kentucky over the last several months. And just ask with the Kasischke poem, which in a room of men working to overcome addiction activated very specific memories of struggling with similar questions of mind over reason -- or reason versus feeing or urge, John Yau's poem reminded airmen of their time in the service, of seeking, perhaps, to follow in the footsteps of a parent or family member, and then finding themselves in their own lives, lost at times without a clear model or guide. The poem, with its sense of rootlessness, of struggle to make sense of disparate languages, also reminded people of displacement, the kind one feels in childhood or adolescence, as well as the kind one feels upon being deployed say, or being uprooted again and again by assignments in different places. One audience member spoke about the occasional feelings of social or racial isolation he sometimes feels in the service. Just as none of the addicts felt the need to argue that Kasischke's poem is about addiction, nobody at the men's rehab center felt the need to say Yau's is a poem about being -- I'm sorry, nobody at Cannon Air Force Base felt the need to say that Yau's is a poem about being in the armed forces. But in both cases, the poems afforded listeners with new images, new metaphors, and new vocabularies for living with the feelings indigenous to their lives, whoever they were. That's one of the remarkable things poems do, one of the ways poems lead us first more deeply into ourselves, and then more naturally toward the areas of common feeling we share with others. ^M00:30:04 That's how poems teach us to recognize that there are forms of community that exist across or in spite of the obvious dividing lines we're taught to respect. My rural outreach project, even in just three pilot trips, has awakened a belief in the real possibility that we might learn to become open to participation in real-time communities forged along varied and sometimes unlikely lines. And it's urged a powerful submission to feelings of shared vulnerability, humility, doubt, and trust. It's been a privilege to share my own work and the work of other contemporary poets with strangers -- strangers that crowd-sourcing algorithms tell me I ought to have nothing in common with -- and to hear people say things like, "I'm white. You're black. I'm from this place. You're from another. And yet, when you talk about your father, you restore my own father to me." This happens again and again, though the vocabulary for connection is different from person to person and poem to poem. I think my interest in such a project is an extension of my own belief or wish that Americans of all backgrounds might have something quietly urgent and humanizing to offer one another. But in order to get to it, we have to turn down the volume on all the many sources seeking to sell us on the notion of an unmendable divide, because that's what they're doing. They're selling us on a product, which is strife. In order to get to community, we have to go quiet, slow down, allow ourselves to be both vulnerable and brave, and approach one another with an idea as simple as, "I'm me. You're you. We're not the same. And yet, perhaps we can feel safe here together talking abut something as simple as a poem." Poems encourage the notion that your life must be as important to you as mine is to me. And they encourage the more difficult notion that your life must be as important to me as my own life is, that I can only truly honor and protect myself by honoring and protecting you. Now maybe that last bit is a distant dream, the purview of a few great poets and philosophers, but I hope it isn't. Either way, I believe that poetry helps bridge the gap between self-centeredness, and tribalism, and true compassion. Poems do this in myriad ways. One of them is by helping to inoculate us against the catchy, inescapable, strategically-biased language of the market firing away at us from every direction in its ceaseless ploy to be the only language. Thank you. ^M00:33:11 [ Applause ] ^M00:33:20 Thank you. ^M00:33:23 [ Applause ] ^M00:33:27 Okay, thank you. ^M00:33:31 [ Applause ] ^M00:33:39 Thank you. I want to welcome Ron Charles up to the stage. I want to welcome Ron Charles up to the stage. ^M00:33:48 [ Applause ] ^M00:33:53 >> Ron Charles: That was such a beautiful, inspiring defense of poetry. >> Tracy K. Smith: Oh, thank you. >> Ron Charles: This is on, so -- >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Okay. >> Tracy K. Smith: No more -- no secrets up here now. >> Ron Charles: Thank you, thank you. Just get this for my Instagram followers. ^M00:34:10 [ Laughter and Applause ] ^M00:34:17 That's going to be a big hit. A few years ago in an essay you asked with a certain degree of exasperation, why is there a vast majority in this country that suspects poetry has nothing to do with the real world? What is the source of that suspicion? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, I am biased. I think it has to do with fear, because the question that often follows that is why is it so hard? >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: And I think, you know, it -- part of it probably has to do with the way that we're taught to, you know, want to be able to summarize things, prove that we've comprehended, demonstrate our knowledge and expertise. Part of it, I think, has to do with the way that tests produce a lot of anxiety. And so we think, "This poem is out to get me." >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: Some of it has to do with a question -- that awful question that many people ask, "What do you think this poem is trying to say?" >> Ron Charles: Yes. Do you know what it would mean to America's high school students to see the Poet Laureate of the United States stand there and say, "I don't know exactly what that means"? It's such a rebuke of 1000 horrible high school experiences. Yeah, the position of the Poet Laureate is tantalizingly undefined, isn't it? >> Tracy K. Smith: It is. Yeah, which is a kind of freedom, you know. >> Ron Charles: And terror. I mean, it's a strange position. It's [inaudible] and funded by the federal government, but not officially answerable to the federal government. You don't have to write a poem for Donald Trump's birthday or any other occasional things like that. ^M00:36:11 [ Laughter ] ^M00:36:18 He's not here, is he? [Laughter] What inspired you to go on the road with this project? >> Tracy K. Smith: I had this wish to test out this idea that if we can stop trying to tell ourselves what other people think, and just talk, we can maybe find ourselves not yelling, not, you know, enraged, and maybe hearing something that's useful and that resonates somehow. I grew up going to church, and I remember feeling that. I remember feeling, "I love these people. I see them, but I don't agree with them on everything. And yet, somehow this is a community that works." And I think families are like that, too. And so why can't a nation be like that? So I had this fantasy that poetry could be one of these topics that urges us to be quiet and, you know, all of the adjectives that I talked about. And I said that, "I wonder if it would be possible to, you know, go out there and say something meaningful to each other through the vehicle of this artform? And then the opportunity presented itself. >> Ron Charles: Why did you focus on rural areas? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, as a writer, I spend most of my time in -- you know, going to cities or college towns. And then I feel like there's this tendency to divide our sense of what America is into two regions. I mean, it's silly because it's such a big place. But we have, you know, the urban, coastal region, and then the rural center. And so I thought, "Well, I spend a lot of time in these urban, coastal places -- or places where people who will soon graduate from a college will probably go to." >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: "So why not see what happens if I can cross that line somehow." >> Ron Charles: And when you went to these towns, who came? Were they, you know, beret-wearing hipsters? Or were they people that surprised you? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, some of the towns are so small that it was people who were aware that an event was happening, and that's something that doesn't usually happen. >> Ron Charles: Nice. >> Tracy K. Smith: So a pretty healthy cross-section. When we were in South Carolina, the locations that Representative Clyburn had kind of curated for us -- because he was excited to sort of take ownership of his district -- were connected historically. They had a strong sense of participation in the Civil Rights Movement. And I think that meant that many of the people who came were members of a black church that we visited, and they came. There were alumni and community members of the school -- Old Summerton High School, which was one of the schools that was desegregated during the group of suits around the Brown v. Board of Education. So there were members of that graduating class who came. Many people in those communities came out because they said, "Oh, there's a black woman doing something on this national scale. I want my kids who are black to see this." Similar thing happened, but in the opposite terms when I was in another community -- it will come to me sometime tonight. That's the problem with doing things so quickly -- where it was a white family who said, "We live in a town that's really racially divided, and I want my kids to be able to cross that line. So I want them to come here and hear what you have to say." >> Ron Charles: Just coming is a crossing of barriers. Did you get responses that surprised you, that you hadn't expected at all? ^M00:40:01 >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, I don't know what I was expecting. I was like a little bit just curious. So anything felt useful. There were people who wrote poetry, who in some places said, "I'll read a poem." You know, so we have some great recordings. Not here tonight, but of people saying, "Here's a chance. I'm going to read a poem." There was someone at Cannon Air Force Base who said, "I write poems in this secret journal that I don't want anybody to see, but I'll read you a couple now." >> Ron Charles: Wow. You read a variety of poems, not just your own -- other people's. What kinds of poems went over well? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, the two that I shared tonight are two that I've read before. And I felt like going over well means people, you know, listen and have theories about the poem, or even just want to talk about what the poems remind them of. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: So those -- and there are two others that like perhaps we'll hear tonight -- >> Ron Charles: Yes, we will. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- that are -- behave in different ways. You know, one that goes back to childhood and narrates a somewhat-familiar experience, and then aligns it, I think, with a larger sense. And another that's a family story about addiction within a family. Yeah, people are -- if they know I'm bot going to test them, if they know that I -- and this is something that I kind of go out of my way to say is I'm just curious. This is what I say to my students. What do you notice? Anything that you notice is useful and valuable to talk about, maybe it will activate somebody else's feeling of something else that they noticed. So just let's hear it. Maybe it's because it's a community where people know each other, but there hasn't been a sense of timidity. People -- so in some ways, most of the poems I've gone over because -- >> Ron Charles: That's great. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- people have kind of wanted to talk about them. >> Ron Charles: That's -- now you have a new collection coming out, "Wade in the Water," next Tuesday? >> Tracy K. Smith: It's out. It's been out for a couple of Tuesdays. >> Ron Charles: Tuesdays? Okay. It's a beautiful collection. I wonder if you'd read the title poem for us? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure. >> Ron Charles: On page 15. >> Tracy K. Smith: Thanks. ^M00:42:14 [ Laughter ] ^M00:42:19 So this poem narrates an encounter. I hope it's somewhat clear, but I'll tell you I attended a ring shout, and that's where this scene that occupies most of the poem took place. "Wade in the Water" for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters. One of the women greeted me. "I love you," she said. She didn't know me, but I believed her, and a terrible new ache rolled over in my chest like in a room where the drapes have been swept back. "I love you, I love you," as she continued down the hall past other strangers, each feeling pierced suddenly by pillars of heavy light. I love you, throughout the performance, in every hand clap, every stomp. I love you in the rusted iron chains someone was made to drag until love let them be unclasped and left empty in the center of the ring. I love you in the water where they pretended to wade, singing that old blood-deep song that dragged us to those banks and cast us in. I love you. The angles of it scraping at each throat, shouldering past the swirling dust motes in those beams of light, that whatever we now knew we could let ourselves feel knew to climb. Oh, woods. Oh, dog. Oh, tree. Oh, gun. Oh, girl, run. Oh, miraculous many gone. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord. Oh, Lord, is this love the trouble you promised? >> Ron Charles: What does it mean in this poem to say I love you to a stranger, which seems so much at the heart of what you're talking about? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, that's the question that set that poem into motion, because someone did greet me and say that, and it felt like such a gift, and it hurt at the same time. And it allowed so much to come out -- so many conflicting feelings. And -- >> Ron Charles: And not because you doubted here sincerity? >> Tracy K. Smith: No, I didn't, actually. She -- I could have, because she said it to every single person that she met. But there was no doubting it. >> Ron Charles: No. >> Tracy K. Smith: It was like a really genuine, beautiful thing. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: You know, vulnerable-making for both people gesture. And so I wanted to just go back to that and try and figure out what -- where that came from and what it had given me. I don't know what it means, but I have a feeling that we kind of need to learn what it means. >> Ron Charles: Yes. Yes, in these times. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: What does it mean to be Poet Laureate in these contentious times when everything from what's decent to what's science is a matter of such hot debate? ^M00:45:32 [ Laughter ] ^M00:45:38 >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, I feel like it's added urgency to my belief that we are better when we're more attentive, when we can sort of say, "I'm not going to accept this like word package without parsing it and testing its like validity in whatever terms that are valid, you know, like emotional or otherwise. And I've got to move -- I'll be better equipped to just be in this world if I'm willing to move away from what I'm certain of -- >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- and say there's got to be something I can stand to learn, got to be something I don't recognize about myself that could somehow, if I can face it, help. >> Ron Charles: Your example is quite different than the role that many writers are playing in this era, which is to be very political -- very political. You're being political in a very different way that I think is really provocative. Last year you said in an interview, "Poetry helps me contend with the smallness of spirit, the greed, the dishonest, the disregard for the lives of others at the root of American politics." Now fortunately, we've moved beyond all that. ^M00:46:52 [ Laughter ] ^M00:46:57 In your introduction to "American Journal," which is an anthology you'll be bringing out this fall, you say that you, "hope these poems might make us a little less alien to each other." That's such a great goal. How can a poem do that? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, you know, it does it in a lot of small ways that I hope add up to something. One, it says, well, I'm sitting here in this chair where I'm comfortable, and I'm reading about something that makes me have to sort of start from scratch and try and understand, because I want to. I want to do that work. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: Oh, this is something that's connected to a voice, a theoretical person. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: Somehow, I'm moving away from my own sense of being and into another person's. That -- I do believe that's good practice. >> Ron Charles: Right, modeling the way we should be as citizens more. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Would you read a poem called "Refuge"? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure. >> Ron Charles: In your new book on page 73. ^M00:47:59 ^M00:48:07 Can they buy these books out there in the lobby? >> Yes. >> Ron Charles: Okay, good. >> Tracy K. Smith: Product placement. ^M00:48:14 [ Laughter ] ^M00:48:20 "Refuge," Until I can understand why you fled, why you are willing to bleed, why you deserve what I must be willing to cede, let me imagine you are my father in Montgomery, Alabama, walking to campus rather than riding the bus. I know what they call you. I know what they try to convince you you lack. I know your tired ankles, the sudden thunder of your laugh. Until I want to give you what I myself deserve, let me love you by loving her, your sister in a camp in Turkey, 16, deserving of everything. Let her be my daughter who has curled her neat hands into fists, insisting nothing is fair, and I have never loved her. Naomi, lips set in a scowl, young heart ransacking itself. Let me lend her passion to your sister and love her for her living rage, her need for more, and now, and all. Let me leap from sleep if her voice sounds out afraid from down the hall. I have seen men like your father walking up Harrison Street now that the days are getting longer. Let me love them as I loved my own father whom I phoned once from a valley in my life to say what I feared I'd never adequately said, voice choked, stalled, hearing the silence spread around us like weather. What would it cost me to say it now, to a stranger's father walking home to our separate lives together? ^M00:50:25 >> Ron Charles: It's just a gorgeous poem which reenacts the Golden Rule at the center of all the world's faiths, at the center of every ethical system is that we should feel what someone else is feeling. "Until I understand you," the poem begins, which is a pretty hopeful line, that we will if we make the effort. >> Tracy K. Smith: Or we'll be like those kids at the table like 12:00 after everyone's to bed still with like a couple Brussels sprouts. But either way, there is time. >> Ron Charles: Yeah, that -- it's just such a poem for this moment. We've got a recording of a poem called "Second Estrangement." Can you set that up for us? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure, this is a poem by Aracelis Girmay, a poet who -- it comes from her most recent collection, which is called "Black Mariah," and it's thinking about the African diaspora in different parts of the world. I think those are the large, thematic questions. But more urgent or salient is the sense of displacement that maybe any person can have field access to. So this is a poem that kind of builds that in these really familiar and very visceral terms. >> "Second Estrangement," Please raise your hand, whomever else of you has been a child, lost in a market or a mall, without knowing it at first, following a stranger, accidentally thinking he is yours -- your family or parent, even gabbing for his hands, even calling the word you said then for father, only to see the face look strangely down, utterly foreign, utterly not the one who loves you. You, who are a bird, suddenly stunned by the glass partitions of rooms. How far the world you knew, and tall, and filled, finally, with strangers. >> Ron Charles: What I love about that poem is that it reenacts that sense of alienation and fear in a way that makes us feel like everyone else. It overcomes the very problem it enacts, which is incredibly clever. >> Tracy K. Smith: I love the way it kind of guides you into that, too, because you don't know that's where you're going. I mean, the title might alert you to something, but it's also "Second Estrangement." But it begins, "Please raise your hand." I think that's the first line. And I -- you know, I'm a good student. I want to do it. And then, you know, "Whoever else among you." And then we descend step by step into this feeling of, you know, first you're just alone in a mall. Or then you're lost. And then you're without this person. And then we realize, you know, there's a private language, "The word you used then for father." Again, it almost could behave like that John Yau poem. Maybe there's a real language barrier, or maybe it's just I'm not at home anymore. And that image of the bird -- birds in the wrong places come up in poems, I guess. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: But it creates that feeling of abrupt shock. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: And so all of the, you know, willingness that we have demonstrated to follow this poem leads us to that same place of being lost, and scared, and stuck. And the poem can sort of speak to that. >> Ron Charles: And I -- just -- we've all felt that. There is a connection. As much anxiety as there's been recently about the political contention of our age, it's not the worst it's ever been. We've got the Civil War back there. And several of your poems are inspired by the Civil War and draw actual text from the Civil War in fascinating ways. Can you tell us about that and read a poem called "Declaration"? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure. The Civil War kind of got drawn into this body of work by the Smithsonian. I was invited by the National Portrait Gallery in the year that was leading up to the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War to contribute a poem for an exhibition. There were going to be portraits and poems. And I had to sort of say I want to do this because I want to write a poem, but I don't know how to make myself want to write about the Civil War -- >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- which I've never liked learning about. I was talking with another black writer recently about how every time we would get to that moment in history growing up where it was slavery and the Civil War, we as the black kids in the classroom were made to feel ashamed like how could this have happened to us? >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: And so I was conditioned to feel like, "Ugh, here we go again." But I wanted to do it, so I said, "What would black soldiers have experienced in this conflict?" And I found a couple of really great books that just contain all these primary documents that prevented me from doing what I wanted to do, which would be to write something in my own voice, and urged me simply to listen and bring these voices into conversation with each other. >> Ron Charles: What were these documents? >> Tracy K. Smith: Letters that soldiers and their families had written to each other and to Abraham Lincoln. >> Ron Charles: Okay. >> Tracy K. Smith: And depositions that veterans, and their widows, and descendants had given after the war, well into the 20th century in an attempt to get the pensions that they as veterans should have been entitled to, but that they were denied because, having been born into slavery, they didn't have birth certificates, marriage licenses. They didn't have anything attesting to the fact that they had changed their names after emancipation. And so they got stiffed, basically. >> Ron Charles: Oh, wow. >> Tracy K. Smith: So that's where that came from. And then suddenly, this history felt so alive, and active, and relevant. >> Ron Charles: Right, because you were hearing voices that are usually suppressed in history books. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, or that get -- yeah, they're suppressed, or they're just absent, you know, or they're -- they get reduced to well, this happened to these people. And so then I said, "I want to go deeper into this." So then the document of the Declaration of Independence seemed like another source to say, "Well, what would it say to now if I could have my way with it?" So this is the poem that came from that, and it's an erasure. So there are what I think of as the specific terms that clarify that this is a, you know, complaint against the King of England, and suddenly it felt like it was large enough to include other voices. "Declaration," He has sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people. He has plundered our, ravaged our, destroyed the lives of our, taking away our, abolishing our most valuable, and altering fundamentally the forms of our. In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our immigration and settlement here, taken captive on the high seas to bear. >> Ron Charles: You said very briefly as you began it's an erasure. Can you explain that a little more? >> Tracy K. Smith: Oh, sure. So if I looked at the whole document, and deleted most of it, and tried to hear a quieter voice under that official voice. And I didn't set out to do that really, I don't think. I was reading it to see okay, what can I -- I was actually trying to write a poem about Thomas Jefferson, so I was reading it to see what I could get from him. And then I heard this other thing saying, "Forget about him. Listen to this." >> Ron Charles: Would you read the poem called "I Will Tell You the Truth About This"? >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure. >> Ron Charles: And maybe explain the background of that poem. >> Tracy K. Smith: Sure, so this is the Civil War poem that I was talking about. And it's just a collection of letters, some almost in their entirety, written by these black soldiers and their families. And then there are a couple of sections -- it's a long poem, so I'll read you those two sections, do you think, or just the one? Oh, you want me to read the first letter? Okay. >> Ron Charles: Is this a single letter, or a composite of -- >> Tracy K. Smith: This is one letter. All of these are just actual letters. And even the spelling I left because it seemed urgent. ^M00:59:55 "I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It," Carlisle, Pennsylvania, November 21st, 1864. Mr. Abraham Lincoln, I want to know, sir, if you please, whether I can have my son released from the Army? He is all the support I have now. His father is dead, and his brother that was all the help I had, he has been wounded twice. He has not had anything to send me yet. Now I am old, and my head is blossoming for the grave. And if you do, I hope the Lord will bless you and me. They say that you will sympathize with the poor. He belong to the eight regiment colored troops. He is a sergeant. Mark Welcome is his name. >> Ron Charles: Did you know that these letters existed? >> Tracy K. Smith: Uh-uh, no. I'll tell you the book that they are collected in. I'm sure they're probably here in this great building. But this is how I found them, "Families and Freedom, a Documentary History of African American Kinship in the Civil War Era," which is edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. And that was published in 1997 by the New Press. And then the depositions are collected in "Voices of Emancipation, Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction Through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files," edited by Elizabeth Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer. >> Ron Charles: They're just incredibly poignant. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I mean, I feel like it should be -- this is what we should have been reading in those classes -- >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- where I felt so called out, you know -- >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- because they do what so little does, which is to restore the sense of humanity and actually like blood, and life, and voices, and stories to history. You know, I mean, I shouldn't say so little else does, but so often -- >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- it's not the first version of history that you get as a student. >> Ron Charles: No, right. Now you were in South Carolina and Kentucky, places where debates about how to memorialize the Civil War are still running pretty hot. Did that subject come up? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, this poem came up. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: And it was something that I think people heard in a way that's really similar to how I heard those voices. It was something that, you know, people would come up to me afterward -- so when I'm reading my own poems, I don't always say, "Okay, what do you notice?" Because that seems wrong [laughter]. So if somebody notices something, maybe they'll say it afterward. And this is the poem that people want to talk about because, you know, it does that for them, too, in some way. When we were in South Carolina, we were in a place where I think the 55th Massachusetts Volunteers had fought, and that was commemorated. And so there was, you know, a sense of this is our history. This is here in a way, too. >> Ron Charles: Right, yeah. You're going to read a poem called, "The Political Poem." >> Tracy K. Smith: Okay. >> Ron Charles: What is the function of a political poem in an age like ours? It seems different than it was during the Vietnam War, during the Civil Rights era. What is a political poem nowadays, and how does this poem you're about to read answer that question? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, I think a political poem in any age is valuable if it can challenge the easy sense of us versus them. So political poems that fail don't do that. They say, "I'm on the us, which is good." >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: "And I'm going to call out these thems." >> Ron Charles: Just propaganda, rallying cry. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, even if you're thinking in terms of justice, you're making bad art if that's the way that you're going to do it. So I think a good political poem says okay, perhaps this is what I as a person believe, but I've got a question, and I'm going to have to explore it in ways that are going to put that on the line, and call it into question, and move me toward an uncomfortable sense of perhaps complicity or implication in part of the problem as I see it. I want to do an organic kind of like walkthrough and think about what I'm made to acknowledge. I feel like there are lots of poems that do that. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: I liked adding the title "Political Poem" to this poem because that's -- makes you feel like, "Oh, God. What is going to come at me?" >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: And this is a poem that wasn't even written with politics in mind. >> Ron Charles: Really? >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Because it definitely plays with that theme and plays with its title in a very witty, conscious way. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. No, this was a poem that I wrote thinking about like -- I was in Vermont. I was -- I actually was having a dream that I was in a room where there was a poem on a -- like as a mural on a wall that I was reading aloud to somebody. And then I said, "This is not a poem by somebody else. If I wake up, this can be my poem." So I got up and sat -- I was in Vermont, so I think Robert Frost's, you know, mowers were probably in the air. And I recaptured to the extent that I could that poem. And I published it, and it was called, "The Mowers." >> Ron Charles: Oh! >> Tracy K. Smith: And then later I read it, and I said, "I think this is going to make more sense if I change the title. >> Ron Charles: Yes. Or it makes different sense. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, better sense. >> Ron Charles: Yes, 54. >> Tracy K. Smith: Okay. "Political Poem," If those mowers were each to stop at the whim say of a greedy thought, and then the one off to the left were to let his arm float up, stirring the air with that wide, slow, underwater gesture meaning hello and you there, aimed at the one more than a mile away to the right, and if he, in his work, were to pause, catching that call by sheer wish and send back his own slow, one-armed dance meaning yes and here as if threaded to a single, long nerve before remembering his tool and sheering another message into the earth, letting who can say how long grays passed until another thought or just the need to know might make him stop and look up again at the other, raising his arm as if to say something like still and oh. And then to catch the flicker of joy rise up along those other legs and flare into another bright yes that sways a moment in the darkening air, their work would carry them into the better part of evening, each mowing ahead and doubling back, then looking up to catch sight of his echo, sought and held in that instant of common understanding, the God and speed of it coming out only after both have turned back to face the sea of yet and slow. If they could, and if what glimmered like a fish were to dart back and forth across that wide, wordless distance, the day, though gone, would never know the ache of being done. If they thought to, or would, or even half wanted, their work, the humming human engines pushed across the grass, and the grass, blade after blade assenting, would take forever. But I love how long it would last. >> Ron Charles: How could such a poem help us rethink the political standoff we find ourselves in? >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, it's kind of begging, one, to change the scale upon which we're thinking and say okay, it's easy to get mad at like a big group of -- a demographic. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: But if you reduce it to one person out there doing his version of what you're over here doing, maybe it would feel different. >> Ron Charles: Yes, that's lovely. It's really, really lovely. There's a whole bunch of people nearby you need to talk to. In the introduction to "Wade in the Water," you write, "This is why I love poems. They invite me to sit down and listen to a voice speaking thoughtfully and passionately about what it feels like to be alive. Usually, the someone doing the talking, the poem's speaker, is a person I'd never got the chance to meet were it not for this poem." More and more, the way we get our news, the way we interact online through Facebook and other social media, we only interact with people who think just like we do. We don't see people that don't think like us. We silence them, we avoid them, we listen to the right news, etcetera. Could we listen to a poem called "My Brother at 3 A.M."? And can you tell us about that poem? >> Tracy K. Smith: Oh, yeah. This is by Natalie Diaz. It's from a collection called "When My Brother Was an Aztec." And so there's this family in the center of the book. It's on such a mythic scale that I don't know if it's a real-life family or if it's an imagined family that allows a certain dramatic situation to play out. But there's a brother in that family who is an addict and is, you know, causing all of this upheaval, changing the way that the speaker of the poems thinks about herself, about, you know, what she belongs to, what the threats are. But it's also a book that is kind of like testifying to what it feels like to grow up as a Native American kid in the United States and to feel, I guess, unseen, unvalued, or seen through a caricature lens. ^M01:10:43 So there are these -- and then it's a book that's also got some really beautiful love poems and poems that kind of play with literary history in beautiful, moving ways. But this is a poem that is kind of haunting. >> Ron Charles: Yes, yes. Can we hear that now? >> "My Brother at 3 A.M." He sat cross-legged, weeping on the steps when Mom unlocked and opened the front door. "Oh, God," he said. "Oh, God. He wants to kill me, Mom." When Mom unlocked and opened the front door at 3 a.m., she was in her nightgown. Dad was asleep. "He wants to kill me," he told her, looking over his shoulder. Three a.m. and in her nightgown, Dad asleep. "What's going on?" she asked. "Who wants to kill you?" He looked over his shoulder. "The devil does. Look at him, over there." She asked "What are you on? Who wants to kill you?" The sky wasn't black or blue, but the green of a dying night. "The devil. Look at him, over there." He pointed to the corner house. The sky wasn't black or blue, but the dying green of night. Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives. My brother pointed to the corner house. His lips flickered with sores. Stars had closed their eyes or sheathed their knives. "Oh, God. I can see the tail," he said. "Oh, God. Look." Mom winced at the sores on his lips. "It's sticking out from behind the house. Oh, God. See the tail," he said. "Look at the goddamned tail." He sat cross-legged, weeping on the front steps. Mom finally saw it, a hellish vision, my brother. "Oh, God. Oh, God," she said. >> Ron Charles: It doesn't seem like a political poem at all, except that it forces us to do what you hope poetry will make us do, which is to cross over barriers, to sympathize, to feel in ways we didn't -- do with people we didn't think we knew. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, it's a poem that kind of urges you to say -- to stop saying, "Well, that's not my problem," and to say, "Oh, I wonder what that woman" -- >> Ron Charles: The mother. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- "feels like." >> Ron Charles: Yeah. >> Tracy K. Smith: Or this kid who's kind of watching all of this. This is one of the poems that -- this was the last poem, I think, that we read in the men's rehab center. I don't want lead with it because obvious reasons, but I didn't want to not read it, because I wanted to know what they might make of it. And they saw a lot, you know, of this struggle, this -- you know, this awful monster that's kind of riding the brother. That made sense to them. His inability to really be able to translate his experience to the family members, which I think the poem manages, interestingly, by making that creature real to the brother and invisible to everybody else. But they also -- I think I'm not wrong in connecting this to that afternoon -- someone there said, "It's interesting -- where's the dad? This is the mom. She's bearing all the weight." And so suddenly, it was an even -- even an opportunity for someone who maybe had been in a version of this story to empathize with another figure, you know -- >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: -- which seemed really insightful to me. >> Ron Charles: Right, that opportunity that a great poem gives us to empathize with people that we don't run into is a great gift. >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think it's a great gift, and I just don't think it's one to be taken lightly. I don't think that it's enough to say, "Oh, yeah, empathy, kumbaya." I think that's one of the things that creates a sense of toxicity that we are all kind of, you know, reeling from. We're producing it by writing off these simple, but potentially meaningful acts. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: And so I think, you know, okay, read a poem and try and believe in what it causes you to feel. >> Ron Charles: Right. >> Tracy K. Smith: I think that's actual work. >> Ron Charles: I do, too. You told the New York Times -- that's another newspaper on the East Coast [laughter] -- "There's a deep and interesting kind of troubling that poems do." I love that. Tell us what that troubling is. >> Tracy K. Smith: Well, you know I like that word, right? That -- it's kind of like the anchor for that title poem. But it -- you know, which comes from the song and the biblical story of an angel troubling the water so that it would protect the Israelites as they were passing to safety, but so that it would also heal them of any kind of affliction. And so troubling is a stirring up. But, of course, stirring up is also trouble. >> Ron Charles: Yes. >> Tracy K. Smith: And I think art is something that asks us to do both. >> Ron Charles: Would you read a poem called "The United States Welcomes You"? >> Tracy K. Smith: Yeah. >> Ron Charles: Forty-one. >> Tracy K. Smith: Okay. I want to tell you that this poem is another one of those poems that got a different title after it was written. >> Ron Charles: Oh. >> Tracy K. Smith: I was thinking about -- it's placed pretty close on the wake of the Civil War poem. And I was thinking about what it feels like to be taken as a stranger in the country you belong to. And then this title was the title that I figured out that I wanted to give it to -- give to the poem. "The United States Welcomes You," Why and by whose power were you sent? What do you see that you may wish to steal? Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies drink up the light? What are you demanding that we feel? Have you stolen something? Then what is that leaping in your chest? What is the nature of your mission? Do you seek to offer a confession? Have you anything to do with others brought by us to harm? Then why are you afraid? And why do you invade our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute as ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess? Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal? >> Ron Charles: For an immigrant nation, this is a really troubling poem. You once said you, "Wish that more poets were brave or generous enough to risk failing at something that matters." What matters most to you as a poet? >> Tracy K. Smith: I asked a student that once when she was in my office. And we were talking about her poems, and I was giving her feedback. And she bristled at every suggestion I made. And I said, "What's going on here? What's at stake for you? What's in this room with us right now that's causing this?" And she said, "I just want to write truth." And she burst into tears. And I love her, you know. And I feel that way, too. I want something that's not just a testament to me and feeling, you know, proud of this momentary thing I might be, or something I feel like I might know. I want to write poems that are going to push me to kind of touch that big thing, you know. And you mostly won't, right. That's the failure that I'm kind of setting myself up for. But the wish is like, "I want something that's going to make this life kind of bearable," you know, or something. So I mean, the less kind of like lofty answer is I'm interested in what we do to each other in all the contexts that we operate in, you know, in families, in relationships, in society. And what -- why? What's the follow-up from that and what could we take from that? >> Ron Charles: It's such an honor to talk to you tonight and to hear you talk about poetry. Thank you so much. >> Tracy K. Smith: On, my honor. Thank you. ^M01:19:25 [ Applause ] ^M01:19:48 >> Rob Casper: Thank you, Tracy and Ron for a remarkable event. I'm Rob Casper, the head of the Poetry and Literature Center here at the Library, and I have just a few announcements before I let you go. First of all, a week from today, the center will kick off its first ever podcast series featuring our 21st poet laureate consultant in poetry. I know it's technology, but it's still worth listening to. This is the website, www.loc.gov/poetry. Give in to your inner techy self and go there, please. Second, if you haven't already, please fill out the survey forms you received when coming in. You can drop them off at the table up in the foyer. Your input helps us improve events such as these. And we'll have a book signing in the Whittall Pavilion, which is right next door. The book sales are outside that room, and we hope you'll get a signed copy and congratulate Tracy in person. Finally, this event concludes the Library's literary season, but I would be remiss if I didn't tell you that just down the street there's a big, big, big poetry festival taking place. Split This Rock is celebrating its 10th anniversary, and it's blockbuster evening readings, like this one, are free and open to the public. You can go to their website. You can just look around, keep your ears open, and you'll hear some poetry, and it will be great. Enjoy the rest of National Poetry Month, and hope to see you back here soon. Thank you. ^M01:21:19 [ Applause ] ^M01:21:21 ^M01:21:44 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.