Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith in 2012. Photo by Slowking. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Tracy K. Smith (born April 16, 1972) is an African-American poet and academic.

Life

Overview

Smith has published 4 collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume, Life on Mars.

She served as the 22nd Poet laureate of the United States, an office she assumed in 2017.

Youth and education

Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and grew up in Fairfield, California.

Smith became interested in writing and poetry early, reading Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in elementary school; Dickinson's poems in particular struck Smith as working like "magic," she wrote in her memoir, Ordinary Light, with the rhyme and meter making Dickinson's verses feel almost impossible not to commit to memory. Reading Dickinson, Smith remembered, she felt “like I was in collusion with someone that knew more about me than I knew about myself."

Smith composed a short poem entitled "Humor" and showed it to her 5th-grade teacher, who encouraged her to keep writing. The work of Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Rita Dove also became significant influences.

She earned a B.A. from Harvard University and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she was a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University.

Career

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, and National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, September 13, 2017. Photo by Library of Congress.

Smith has taught at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. In 2005, she joined the faculty of Princeton University, as an assistant professor of creative writing. She is the Roger S. Berlind '52 professor in the humanities at Princeton.

Smith was a judge for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize. Smith lives in Brooklyn, New York City, with her husband, Raphael Allison, and their daughter.

Writing

The Body's Question

About Smith's debut collection, The Body's Question (2003), Lucie Brock-Broido wrote: "How delightful it is to fall under the lucid and quite more than lovely spell of Tracy K. Smith's debut collection. Smith's work is deceptively plainspoken, but these are poems that are powerfully wrought, inspiring in all the clarity of their many gospel truths. The Body's Question announces a remarkable new voice, brilliantly bundled, ingeniously belted down."

Yusef Komunyakaa wrote: "The Body's Question is an answer to pure passion, but the beauty is that the brain isn't divorced from the body. The strength of character in these marvelous poems delights and questions. Here's a voice that can weave beauty and terror into one breath, and the unguarded revelations are never verbal striptease."

"Tracy Smith speaks many different languages. Besides the Spanish that graces the 'Gospels' of her book's opening section, Smith also seems perfectly at home speaking of grief and loss, of lust and hunger, of joy and desire, which here often means the desire for desire, and a desire for language itself....She seems to speak in tongues, to speak about that thing even beyond language, answering 'The Body's Question' of her title," said Kevin Young.

Duende

Of Smith's 2nd book, Duende (2007), Elizabeth Alexander wrote: "Tracy K. Smith synthesizes the riches of many discursive and poetic traditions without regard to doctrine and with great technical rigor. Her poems are mysterious but utterly lucid and write a history that is sub-rosa yet fully within her vision. They are deeply satisfying and necessarily inconclusive. And they are pristinely beautiful without ever being precious. Writers and musicians have explored the concept of duende, which might in English translate to a kind of existential blues. Smith is not interested in sadness, per se. Rather, in the strange music of these poems I think Smith is trying to walk us close to the edge of death-in-life, the force of hovering death in both the personal and social realms, admitting its inevitability and sometimes-proximity, and understand its manifestations in quotidian acts. This dark force is nonetheless a life force, which, in the poem 'Flores Woman,' concludes 'Like a dark star. I want to last' If Duende were wine, it would certainly be red; if edible, it would be meat cooked rare, coffee taken black, stinky cheese, bittersweet chocolate. Tracy K. Smith's music is wholly her own, and Duende is a dolorous, beautiful book."

Life on Mars

About her collection Life on Mars (2011), Joel Brouwer wrote: "Smith shows herself to be a poet of extraordinary range and ambition.... As all the best poetry does, “Life on Mars” first sends us out into the magnificent chill of the imagination and then returns us to ourselves, both changed and consoled."

In his review of Life on Mars, Troy Jollimore selects Smith's poem "My god, it's full of stars" as particularly strong, "making use of images from science and science fiction to articulate human desire and grief, as the speaker allows herself to imagine the universe:"

... sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

So that I might be sitting now beside my father

As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

For the first time in the winter of 1959.

In his review of the collection, Joel Brouwer also quoted at length from this poem, writing that "for Smith the abyss seems as much a space of possibility as of oblivion:"

Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,

That the others have come and gone — a momentary blip —

When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

...

Dan Chiasson writes of another aspect of the collection: "The issues of power and paternalism suggest the deep ways in which this is a book about race. Smith’s deadpan title is itself racially freighted: we can’t think about one set of fifties images, of Martians and sci-fi comics, without conjuring another, of black kids in the segregated South. Those two image files are situated uncannily close to each other in the cultural cortex, but it took this book to connect them."

Recognition

Smith's collection Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Her book Ordinary Light: A memoir, about race, faith and the dawning of her poetic vocation, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction in 2015.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress on June 14, 2017, and reappointed her to a second term on March 22, 2018.

Awards

• Grant from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.
• Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
• Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award.
• Cave Canem Prize (2002) for the The Body's Question. This award honors the best 1st book by an African-American poet; Smith's book was chosen by Kevin Young.
• Whiting Writers' Award in 2005 for poetry. This award is for emerging writers.
• James Laughlin Award in 2006 for Duende. This award from the Academy of American Poets honors the best second volume of a poet published in the US.
• Essence Magazine's Literary Award in 2008 for Duende. The award honors the best African-American literature.
• Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative in 2010. Hans Magnus Enzensberger became Smith's mentor for one year as part of this program; their experience working together was described in a short article by Philip Dodd.
• Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2012 for Life on Mars.

Publications

Poetry

• The Body’s Question. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2003.
• Duende. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2007.
• Life on Mars: Poems. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2011.

Non-fiction

• Ordinary Light: A memoir. New York: Knopf, 2015.

Except where noted. bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Tracy K. Smith reads trom 'Life on Mars'

Audio / video

• Ordinary Light: A memoir (CD). Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, 2015.

See also

• African-American poets
• List of U.S. poets

External links

Poems

• "Self-portrait as the Letter Y" from Post Road Magazine
• "My God, It's Full of Stars" from The Awl Poetry Section
• Tracy K. Smith profile and 2 poems from the Academy of American Poets.
• Tracy K. Smith b. 1972 at the Poetry Foundation.

Prose

• Savage Beauty: The Top 3 Poems of 2011, NPR.

Audio / video

• Listen to Tracy K. Smith read and discuss her poetry at From the Fishouse
• Tracy K. Smith at YouTube

Books

• Tracy K. Smith at Amazon.com

About

• Tracy K. Smith Princeton University Faculty Page
• "Tracy K. Smith, America’s Poet Laureate, Travels the Country to Ignite Our Imaginations, Smithsonian, December 2018
• Tracy K. Smith guest-edits the poetry section of Guernica Magazine.

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