Tracy K. Smith on Race, Love, Hate, and Lucille Clifton

In the second part of her conversation with Paul Holdengraber, Tracy K. Smith talks race in the Obama years, trying to find a vocabulary for love and tolerance, and the brilliance of Lucille Clifton. Listen to part one, here.

Tracy K. Smith on race in America…
It’s sort of heartbreaking to think that my generation is the new generation, when the problems that we’re confronting are the same. Relatively unchanged. It doesn’t even feel so long ago that the history that we were talking about when we talked about race and discrimination and progress and protest was my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. And I realized that that generation never went away. So much that I knew was not resolved that I imagined that we somehow found a way of being polite or being reasonable about race in America. I thought that at least Americans knew how to behave. And somehow all of that decorum and composure went away when Obama became President. So much anxiety and hatred seemed to kind of rise to the surface of public discourse—beginning in 2008—reminding us that things perhaps have been quiet but never gone.

Tracy K. Smith on a vocabulary of love…
The past has a lot to do with pain, and shame, right? This is what we have done to each other. And it hurts to have to acknowledge that… I think the huge question for the next eight years is: Is there a way that the vocabulary of love, as opposed to the vocabulary merely of tolerance, can come into how we talk about life as citizens? How we think about policy and what the constitution might help us to accomplish this that has less to do with just protecting ourselves from each other…

Tracy K. Smith on otherworldly poetry…
I have this beautiful collected poems of Lucille Clifton on my desk which came out just a few years ago. Her work has always been thinking so powerfully about the reality of hate and the power of love. Not just love within the black community, a love of the planet, a willingness to believe that there is some universe beyond ours which is watching with love or compassion. In the 1970s she spent a lot of time playing with Ouija boards, and she took it rather seriously. In her last collection, called Mercy, she has a series of Ouija poems called “Messages from the Ones.” I think it comes down, if not to real messages that she received, then to this feeling that there is something beside us with a different kind of agency and knowledge and that wants to see us succeed. It filtered through the those poems so beautifully… I read these poems as a series of encounters. She was actually my teacher many years ago, and she talked about hearing these voices come to her and really believing them, and that was the first time I’d been in a workshop where we weren’t thinking about the nuts and bolts on the page. She was talking about the idea that poems might be receptive to something that’s not just the poet’s imagination. I think I was really frightened but also excited by that possibility.