Tracy K. Smith via Zoom, sponsored by the Smith College Boutelle-Day Poetry Center on 10/21/20
How wonderful to have Tracy K. Smith read her poems in your living room. While in-person poetry readings are special — the poet projecting from podium or stage, the feeling of community with fellow audience members, the excitement of shared experience — there was a real intimacy to this online reading which was captivating.
Smith kept her gaze outward toward the listener as she read, something not always possible when reading pages from a podium at an in-person event. And despite the digital distance between the poet and audience, she easily established a shared space.
Smith’s selection focused on recent pieces, several of which are found poems (see links below). “I make use of what’s around me,” Smith explained, “what startles, illuminates, and consoles me.” Working with historical texts, the poet had an epiphany “that history, which I felt was behind us and represented closure, suddenly felt undone, in progress, and very, very near.” A deeper examination of our past, with fresh eyes and insight, can shed light on our present predicament. Hers is a process of uncovering the text beneath the text, by paying close attention and hearing other, hidden voices.
For example, while she worked with the Declaration of Independence to create the erasure poem “Declaration,” Smith said the historical text “presented facets of itself I hadn’t recognized before.” The resulting poem, stitched together from phrases several hundred years old, speaks to today’s continuing struggle for Black lives and equal justice under the law. Smith then read “The Greatest Personal Privation,” a found poem mined from the family papers of Charles Colcock Jones, a mid-19th century slaveowner and minister. Out of letters composed a century and a half ago that exhibit an acceptance and promotion of enslavement comes something new, spoken in the voice of a slave.
Smith read several other found poems, the starting points of which were an essay by Woodrow Wilson that celebrated Robert E. Lee and the correspondence of Helen Plain, president of The United Daughters of the Confederacy and Klan sympathizer. The cumulative effect of the found poems was indeed a startling sense of history’s nearness and all its unfinished business.
Smith then read “Rapture.” An after-image of the last lines, which depict a woman lifted up and carried away, stays with me. In “The Wave After Wave is One Wave Never Tiring,” the poet wonders whether movements for justice ever end, or are instead crucial parts of one long, arduous movement.
She read a new poem inspired by a recent news article about the mysterious elephant die-off in Botswana, titled “The Elephant in the Poem.” There are silences written into the poem, missed beats that stand in not only for the noun “elephant,” but the elephants’ very vanishing.
Lastly, Smith read a few selections from her forthcoming volume of translations of Chinese poet Yi Lei, My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree. A line from the translated poem “Black Hair” stood out: The story of black hair is my story. Smith explained that the image of black hair in Yi Lei’s poem has to do with youth, sensuality, and aging. But the translator’s voice is unmistakably there, too, coming from beneath the text, or perhaps even nearer, in chorus with it. Pay attention to the multitude of voices around you, Tracy K. Smith encourages. Train your ear to pick up hidden frequencies. Turn up the volume.
Links to poems and books from this reading:
“The Greatest Personal Privation”
“Rapture” & “The Wave After Wave is One Wave Never Tiring”
About the poet Yi Lei, with 3 poems translated by Tracy K. Smith
Karina Borowicz 