Tracy K Smith Quotes

everything/ that ever was still is, somewhere

listen: the dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming, marbled with static like gristly meat. a chorus of engines churns. silence taunts: a dare. everything that disappears disappears as if returning somewhere.

We want so much, When perhaps we live best In the spaces between loves, That unconscious roving, The heart its own rough animal. Unfettered.

time never stops, but does it end? and how many lives before take-off, before we find ourselves beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

Look, I want to say, The worst thing you can imagine has already Zipped up its coat and is heading back Up the road to wherever it came from.

some like to imagine a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars, mouthing 'yes, yes' as we toddle towards the light, biting her lip of we teeter at some ledge. longing to sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best.

History is a ship forever setting sail.

[...] the body is what we lean toward, tensing as it darts, dancing away. but it's the voice that enters us. even saying nothing. even saying nothing over and over absently to itself

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.

Once upon a time, a woman told this to her daughter: Save yourself. The girl didn’t think to ask for what? She looked into her mother’s face and answered Yes. Years later, alone in the room where she lives The daughter listens to the life she’s been saved from: Evening patter. Summer laughter. Young bodies Racing into the unmitigated happiness of danger.

Is it strange to say love is a language Few practice, but all, or near all speak?

The Weather In Space Is God being pure force? The wind Or what commands it? When our lives slow And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing After all we're certain to lose, so alive --- Faces radiant with panic.

When some people talk about money They speak as if it were a mysterious lover Who went out to buy milk and never Came back, and it makes me nostalgic For the years I lived on coffee and bread, Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday Like a woman journeying for water From a village without a well, then living One or two nights like everyone else On roast chicken and red wine.

It used to be, you’d open your mouth And the weather changed. You’d Open your mouth and the sky’d spill That dry, missing-someone kind of rain No matter the season. And it hurt Like a guitar hurts under the right hands. Like a good strong spell. Now You’re all song. Body gone to memory. And guess what? It hurts Harder.

the hours plink past like water from a window a/c. we sweat it out, teach ourselves to wait. silently, lazily, collapse happens.

from time to time, i think of him watching me from over the top of his glasses, or eating candy from a jar. i remember thanking him each time the session was done. but mostly what i see is a human hand reaching down to lift a pebble from my tongue

sometimes, what i see is a library in a rural community. all the tall shelves in the big open room. and the pencils in a cup at circulation, gnawed on by the entire population. the books have lived here all along, belonging for weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face, a pair of eyes. the most remarkable lies.

I shut my ears, averted my eyes, turning instead to what I thought at the time was pain's antidote: silence. I was wrong... Silence feeds pain, allows it to fester and thrive. What starves pain, what forces it to release its grip, is speech, the voice upon which rides the story, this is what happened; this is what I have refused to let claim me.

We saw to the edge of all there is - So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

Like a god, / I believe in nothing.

Wasn’t it strange that a poem, written in my vocabulary and as a result of my own thoughts or observations, could, when it was finished, manage to show me something I hadn’t already known? Sometimes, when I tried very hard to listen to what the poem I was writing was trying to tell me, I felt the way I imagined godly people felt when they were trying to discern God’s will. “Write this,” the poem would sometimes consent to say, and I’d revel in a joy to rival the saints’ that Poetry—this mysterious presence I talked about and professed belief in—might truly be real.

Sometimes telling what happened, in whatever way you can, is a means of lightening your burden. It summons others to help you bear the weight of your own story, so that you might finally get out from under it.

while the father storms through adjacent rooms ranting with the force of kingdom come, not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw

Just like the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns.

I am you, one day out of five, Tired, empty, hating what I carry But afraid to lay it down, stingy, Angry, doing violence to others By the sheer freight of my gloom, Halfway home, wanting to stop, to quit But keeping going mostly out of spite.

And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust, Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only To be wanted back badly enough?

This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else's unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.

There are ways of entering the dream / The way a painter enters a studio: / To spill.

Old loves turn up in dreams, still livid at every slight.

Is this love the trouble you promised?

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. "Staying Human: Poetry in the Age of Technology

There is not a day in my life during which I have not looked at my Black children and worried. There is not a day in my life when I have not made actual prayers on their behalf. Simple prayers for their safety. Simple prayers for their survival.

I didn't want to wait on my knees In a room made quiet by waiting. A room where we'd listen for the rise Of breath, the burble in his throat. I didn't want the orchids or the trays Of food meant to fortify that silence, Or to pray for him to stay or to go then Finally toward that ecstatic light. I didn't want to believe What we believe in those rooms: That we are blessed, letting go, Letting someone, anyone, Drag open the drapes and heave us Back into our blinding, bright lives.

She's like an island Made of rock, with one lone tree at the top Of the only mountain. She's like the sole Incongruous goat tethered to the tree, Smiling almost as you approach, scraping The ground with its horns, and then-- Lickety split--lurching hard, daring The rope to snap.

we like to think of it as parallel to what we know only bigger. one man against the authorities. or one man against a city of zombies. one man who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand the caravan of men now chasing him like red ants let loose down the pants of america. man on the run.

Look, I want to say, The worst thing you can imagine has already Zipped up its coat and is heading back Up the road to wherever it came from.

the blue hours between three and five

America, there is not a place I can wander inside you and not feel a little afraid.

time never stops, but does it end? and how many live/before take-off, before we find ourselves/beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

In the '70s, everything shone as bright as brass.

The best was having nothing. No hope. No name in the throat. And finding the breath in you, the body, to ask.

These and other tools help poems call our attention to moments when the ordinary nature of experience changes--when the things we think we know flare into brighter colors, starker contrasts, strange and intoxicating possibilities.

THE EVERLASTING SELF Comes in from a downpour Shaking water in every direction — A collaborative condition: Gathered, shed, spread, then Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love From a lifetime ago, and mud A dog has tracked across the floor.

When Your Small Form Tumbled into Me" I lay sprawled like a big-game rug across the bed: Belly down, legs wishbone-wide. It was winter. Workaday. Your father swung his feet to the floor. The kids upstairs dragged something back and forth On shrieking wheels. I was empty, blown-through By whatever swells, swirling, and then breaks Night after night upon that room. You must have watched For what felt like forever, wanting to be What we passed back and forth between us like fire. Wanting weight, desiring desire, dying To descend into flesh, fault, the brief ecstasy of being. From what dream of world did you wriggle free? What soared — and what grieved — when you aimed your will At the yes of my body alive like that on the sheets?

So why do we insist He has vanished, that death ran off with our Everything worth having? Why not that he was Swimming only through this life--his slow, Graceful crawl, shoulders rippling, Legs slicing away at the waves, gliding Further into what life itself denies? He is only gone so far as we can tell. Though When I try, I see the white cloud of his hair In the distance like an eternity.

In America’s earliest mythologizing of itself, America is the underdog guided to the promised land by a merciful God. Other countries do something similar. In some other national mythology, America might be the Egyptian Pharaoh holding a worthy population captive. We can’t all be that righteous. And sometimes that’s hard to stomach. It’s hard accepting that your comfort, or privilege, or disinterest might feed into a real and palpable problem for another group of people. And it’s hard, once you’ve recognized this to be the case, to heed the call to change.

Motherland. Madre Patria. We are born of a nation, and we are shaped by its features. Whatever that nation offers — whether it’s hardship or opportunity — is our inheritance. When we see ourselves belonging wholly to our nation, it can be difficult to decipher its flaws and shortcomings. We make excuses for its failures and contradictions, just as family members sometimes cover for one another. It’s a form of denial. Conversely, when your own nation lets you down, when it leaves you vulnerable, when it fails to make good on the promises of citizenship, the sense of betrayal you’re left with is nothing short of traumatic.

So much we once coveted. So much That would have saved us, but lived, Instead, its own quick span, returning To uselessness with the mute acquiescence Of shed skin. It watches us watch it: Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts Ticking through our shirts. We’re here To titter at gimcracks, the naïve tools, The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks. There’s green money, and oil in drums. Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars. In the south wing, there’s a small room Where a living man sits on display. Ask, And he’ll describe the old beliefs. If you Laugh, he’ll lower his head to his hands And sigh. When he dies, they’ll replace him With a video looping on ad infinitum. Special installations come and go. “Love” Was up for a season, followed by “Illness,” Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see (After a mirror—someone’s idea of a joke?) Is an image of an old planet taken from space. Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.

RANSOM When the freighters inch past in the distance The men load their small boats. They motor out, Buzzing like mosquitoes, aimed at the iron Side of the blind ship as it creeps closer. They have guns. They know the sea like it Is their mother, and she is not well. Her fish Are gone. She heaves barrels leaking disease Onto the shores. When she goes into a fit, She throws a curse upon the land, dragging Houses, people to their deaths. She glows In a way she should not. She tastes of industry. No one is fighting for her, and so they fight. By night, they load their boats and motor out, And by day, they aim their guns at the ships, Climbing aboard. It is clear what they want. The white men scramble. Some fight back. When one is taken, the whole world sits up To watch. When the pirates fall, the world Smiles to itself, thanking goodness. They Show the black faces and the dead black bodies On TV. When the pirates win, after the great White ships return to their own shores, There is a party that lasts for days.

(A poem can lie.)

I am not What you intend me to be.

The point is, you won't necessarily know Whether you're living a science fiction reality.

What does living do to any of us?

Why Do we insist our lives are ours?

Who can say the word love When everything--everything--pushes back with the promise To grind itself to dust?

Marbled with static like gristly meat.

Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last, Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on At twilight.

I am writing this so it will stay true.

Tracy K. Smith, in her essay “Survival in Two Worlds at Once: Federico Garcia Lorca and Duende” argues that we poets can’t assume that the goblin will roost in our art. If there’s duende in our poems, it’s a happy accident, a result of living in such a way that makes the goblin curious enough to visit. She loves the concept of duende, she says, because it supposes that we don’t write poems to win the reader’s approval: we write poems in order to engage in the perilous yet necessary struggle to inhabit ourselves—our real selves, the ones we barely recognize—more completely. It is then that the duende beckons, promising to impart “something newly created, like a miracle,” then it winks inscrutably and begins its game of feint and dodge, lunge and parry, goad and shirk. . . . You’ll get your miracle, but only if you can decipher the music of the battle, only if you’re willing to take risk after risk. If we write poems that face our unique struggles, attempting to find “our real selves,” duende might grant us a “miracle”: that is, the poem. Duende, it seems, doesn’t care who the artist is or what they believe, but only that the work reeks of human struggle. Of feelings exposed. Of the “bare, forked animal” smeared in blood and mud.

I walked through, and my eyes Swallowed everything, no matter How it cut. To bleed was my prize: I was free, nobody’s daughter, Perfecting an easy weightless laughter.

Not the flame, but what it promised, Surrender. To be quenched of danger.

We move in and out of rooms, leaving Our dust, our voices pooled on sills. We hurry from door to door in a downpour Of days. Old trees inch up, their trunks thick With new rings. All that we see grows Into the ground. And all we live blind to Leans its deathless heft to our ears and sings.

There is a We in this poem To which everyone belongs. As in We the People-- In order to form a more perfect Union-- And: We were objects of much curiosity To the Indians-- And: The next we present before you Are things very appalling-- And: We find we are living, suffering, loving, Dying a story. We had not known otherwise-- We's a huckster, trickster, has pluck. We will draw you in.

Sometimes this poem tells itself nothing matters, All's a joke. Relax, it says, everything's Taken care of. (A poem can lie.)

If I lean unbuttoned into the blow Of loss after loss, love tossed Into the ecstatic void-- It carries me with it farther, To chords that stretch and bend Like light through colored glass. But it races on, toward shadows Where the world I know And the world I fear Threaten to meet.

Somewhere in every life there is a line. One side to the other and you are gone. Not disappeared, but undone.

What's heavy Grounds us to the world.

And it's not the future their eyes see, But history. It stretches Like a dry road uphill before them. They climb it.

the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns.

Does God love gold? Does He shine back At Himself from walls Like these, leafed In the earth’s softest wealth? Women light candles, Pray into their fistful of beads. Cameras spit human light Into the vast holy dark, And what glistens back Is high up and cold. I feel Man here. The same wish That named the planets. Man with his shoes and tools, His insistence to prove we exist Just like God, in the large And the small, the great And the frayed. In the chords That rise from the tall brass pipes, And the chorus of crushed cans Someone drags over cobbles In the secular street.

1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust, Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then, Even for a few nights, into that other life where you And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy? Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove? Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old, Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns. 2. He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out, Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens. But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin. Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives Before take-off, before we find ourselves Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold? The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky Like migratory souls. 3. Bowie is among us. Right here In New York City. In a baseball cap And expensive jeans. Ducking into A deli. Flashing all those teeth At the doorman on his way back up. Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette As the sky clouds over at dusk. He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel The way you’d think he feels. Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes. I’ve lived here all these years And never seen him. Like not knowing A comet from a shooting star. But I’ll bet he burns bright, Dragging a tail of white-hot matter The way some of us track tissue Back from the toilet stall. He’s got The whole world under his foot, And we are small alongside, Though there are occasions When a man his size can meet Your eyes for just a blip of time And send a thought like SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE Straight to your mind. Bowie, I want to believe you. Want to feel Your will like the wind before rain. The kind everything simply obeys, Swept up in that hypnotic dance As if something with the power to do so Had looked its way and said: Go ahead.

I am alive in 21st Century America. I have a voice. Let it serve as a corrective to the violent and reckless power that stands against the force of love.

And then I think, maybe that’s what we are. An accidental spectacle.

How wonderful would it be if trust, or even love, might be possible between any of us — or even all of us. I mean, if we let ourselves believe such a thing is possible.

Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?

I am you, one day out of five, Tired, empty, hating what I carry But afraid to lay it down, stingy, Angry, doing violence to others By the sheer freight of my gloom, Halfway home, wanting to stop, to quit But keeping going mostly out of spite.

Is God being or pure force? The wind Or what commands it? When our lives slow And we can hold all that we love, it sprawls In our laps like a gangly doll. When the storm Kicks up and nothing is ours, we go chasing After all we’re certain to lose, so alive— Faces radiant with panic.

Sometimes, small minds seem to take the day. Election fraud. A migratory plague. Less and less surprises us as odd.

We wept to be reminded of such color.

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way to mounds and mounds of ice.

They’re gassing geese outside of JFK. Tehran will likely fill up soon with blood. The Times is getting smaller day by day. We’ve learned to back away from all we say And, more or less, agree with what we should. Whole flocks are being gassed near JFK. So much of what we’re asked is to obey— A reflex we’d abandon if we could. The Times reported 19 dead today. They’re going to make the opposition pay. (If you’re sympathetic, knock on wood.) The geese were terrorizing JFK. Remember how they taught you once to pray? Eyes closed, on your knees, to any god? Sometimes, small minds seem to take the day. Election fraud. A migratory plague. Less and less surprises us as odd. We dislike what they did at JFK. Our time is brief. We dwindle by the day.

Give a man a stick, and he’ll hurl it at the sun For his dog to race toward as it falls. He’ll relish The snap in those jagged teeth, the rough breath Sawing in and out through the craggy mouth, the clink Of tags approaching as the dog canters back. He’ll stoop To do it again and again, so your walk through grass Lasts all morning, the dog tired now in the heat, The stick now just a wet and gnarled nub that doesn’t sail So much as drop. And when the dog plops to the grass Like a misbegotten turd, and even you want nothing More than a plate of eggs at some sidewalk café, the man— Who, too, by now has dropped even the idea of fetch— Will push you against a tree and ease his leg between Your legs as his industrious tongue whispers Convincingly into your mouth.

This is why I love poems: they require me to sit still, listen deeply, and imagine putting myself in someone else’s unfamiliar shoes. The world I return to when the poem is over seems fuller and more comprehensible as a result.