Tracy K. Smith on the Spiritual and the Poetic

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Tracy K. Smith about her new book, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: You open this book by saying poems help you move forward, evolve question certainties,  and change each time you read them. That’s just a summary of page one. Almost every other page on my copy has a dog ear on it. I am curious about how poems do this for us.  It feels like such a spiritual exercise.

Tracy K. Smith: We are spiritual beings, and I don’t think that needs to be tied to any kind of religious framework or dogma. We have energy. We have consciousness that moves beyond the bounds of our physical beings, and I think we don’t acknowledge or claim that as much as we could. Poetry helps us to say, oh, there are things I know that I haven’t learned. There are instincts or intuitions that arise for me that prove to be quite practical and useful. And so part of what I’m excited to do is to say we can, and maybe should claim the full scope of our capacity as beings in time and space, and not only because it brings different terms to our description of what we’re aware of, how we feel, but because the world is so perilous, and there’s so much – I want to say psychic, but maybe another way of saying it is psychological friction – that we deal with every day, we must use our whole selves. It’s not enough to just use our brain. It’s not enough to just use the forms of logic that we tend to default to. And it’s not enough to seek to do the work that we need to do alone. And so, the full scope of our selves, as beings, I think it becomes immaterial in really powerful ways.

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Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017-2019. Smith is the author of five poetry collections: Such Color: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2022 New England Book Award; Wade in the Water, which was awarded the 2018 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; Life on Mars, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the 2006 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets; and The Body’s Question, which received the 2003 Cave Canem Prize. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction. She is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute.