Tracy K. Smith

This book quietly and insistently demands that the reader slow down, absorb, contemplate - not rush through in one big gulp like a mystery novel. Smith examines others' poems and her own to help those who enjoy poetry but aren't always sure what a poem "means" discover the true meaning: that poets are seeking more than they are declaring or explaining, asking questions more than answering them. That poems require us to pay attention, encourage us to notice. That they might be different from show more one reading to another, or one reader to another, depending what the reader brings each time.

The final section, Be Ye Not Afraid ("A brief guide to what poems are and how they do what they do") points to the title of the poem, the speaker, imagery, form, and closure. Smith explains poetry-specific vocabulary (e.g. trochee, rising and falling meter, prosody) as she uses it, without condescension and as a tool for understanding how a poem is crafted, and why the author might have made that choice.

Quotes

Ask a poem what it means, and it will reply, Tell me what you noticed. (Falling Awake, 19)

A poem - any poem that slows you down, draws you in and invites you to recognize, wonder, and remember - is a gateway to the inner life: the unique, uncompromised, unincorporated, unmappable territory we each possess and by which...we are connected to all that is. (33-34)

Beyond literature, beyond works of art, poems are acts of attention. (49)

To be drawn back into the world after a period of intense bereavement was, for me, a matter of becoming acquainted with the ways my own suffering connected me to others. The time it takes for loss to sink in. The first morning you wake up not to the shock of remembering that someone you love has died, but knowing this as familiar and incontrovertible fact. (Any Small Thing Can Save You, 59)

Group allegiance, while promising a sense of safety and acceptance in community, also functions as a harbor against individual accountability. (66)

Language is the engine for our sense of the possible, and poetry fosters a productive impatience with the notion that things as they are cannot or must not be made to change. (80)

After all, a large part of the consolation of poetry as an art form stems from the fact that poems emerge not from what poets have already mastered, but from the lessons and realizations they are compelled to reckon and struggle with - sometimes over and over again throughout the span of a life. (Who Are You?, 85)

I believe that an equation must exist in which Language + Time = Clarity. (96)

...the utmost hope of a poem, which is to foster for its reader the freedom to envision another way of being in the world - or another world in which to be. (110)

In every life, aren't there questions, upsets, and delights it is neither sufficient to feel once and let go, nor to live through and process on your own? We don't just want to tell our stories, after all, we want reassurance that they matter and make sense. We want help living as and with ourselves. (Be ye not afraid, 121)

Does childhood end? Yes. And no. [John] Yau's poem reminds us that it surfaces again and again in a life, familiar and strange, through the fragments and figments of memory. (135)

Poets live in a perpetual and ongoing conversation: invoking and responding to their predecessors, inspiring and activating literary offspring, and even circling back to revise and reinvent themselves via alternate forms, new subject matter, and ever-evolving values. (143)

Awe is...the aim toward which a poet's voice, via their poems, is pitched. (145)

Poetry is a place writers go not to deposit meaning, but to seek it out. (final sentence, 151) show less

The title of this collection, Life on Mars seems almost tongue-in-cheek as the collection is VERY much about life here on earth, in a very visceral, beautiful, and sometimes intensely difficult, way. Poems like "Everything That Ever Was" manage to dance with the universe without overly lofty ambition, keeping our feet on the ground. "The Universe as Primal Scream" marries biblical storytelling with the everyday tedium of our existence. Occasionally Smith packs a huge punch with just a few show more words (your mileage will vary, based on personal experiences). When I read, "Tonight, I'm at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. I don't know where I end" ("They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected"), I was transported to that exact state of being. Prior to reading the collection I had been at an event where Tracy K. Smith spoke about her father, and many of the poems in this collection revealed much about that relationship--in particular the one dedicated to his memory, "The Speed of Belief".

At that same event, Smith said, "When you read a poem you become humble." In humility there is great wisdom and beauty and it is woven throughout this wonderful collection. show less

"History is a ship forever setting sail. On either shore: mountains of men, Oceans of bone, an engine whose teeth shred all that is not our name."

Tracy K Smith was the poet laureate for the United States when this was published, and it's easy to see why. Her control over the form and emotion of her writing is fantastic, and she manages to seem playful in her poetry without losing the power and steadiness of message. The most compelling thematic content is definitely the examination of race show more in America, historically and beyond simple concepts of slavery. The extended poem that focused in on marginalized black soldiers in the Union army of the civil war... damn!

Sometimes she started to lose me a bit-- part of me wishes that she had followed a bit more restriction on some of these poems. Not for lack of meaning, but just for the sake of coherence and accessibility. I feel like non-poetry fans (of which I am friends with many) would only appreciate about 30% of this book. Which is fine, but a bit of a disappointment.

All in all, pretty damn good. One of the better contemporary poetry collections I've seen. A solid read for poetry fans. show less

So, let me be clear: I do not read a lot of poetry. In fact, since graduating college, probably only the poems that friends have posted on their threads here on LT. But I heard Smith speak and loved her as a person and I bought this book, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

I am more of a traditionalist: I do not care for lines that extend into the next one, stopped by punctuation halfway in. Or stanzas that are sometimes three lines and then often two. Let's not even talk about rhyming. Clearly I show more am dated. Nor do I enjoy politics in my poetry. But there you are. This is what she does. In the end, my limits were tossed aside as Smith explored life, death, piracy, space, love, Bowie and her father (who worked on the Hubble Telescope).

I didn't understand all of the poems, but many of them I found stunning, or really interesting, or both!

This one is about the presence of her own child before conception:

“When Your Small Form Tumbled Into Me”

...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? show less