Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate, we've been having conversations about the art form all month long. This includes the organization behind it, the Academy of American Poets. Earlier this month, we spoke with President and Executive Director Ricardo Maldonado about themes coming up this month and former New York State Poet Laureate Willie Perdomo, who curated some poems you've heard on the air.

Today, we'll hear readings from former National Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith. In addition to a poet, she's a memoirist, an editor, a librettist. She also published several poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars in 2011 and Wade in the Water in 2018. She's also a professor of English and of African American Studies at Harvard University. Tracy, thank you for coming on the show.

Tracy K. Smith: Oh, thank you for having me. I'm delighted to celebrate National Poetry Month with you.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd love to hear from you. What's your favorite poem? Who's a poet you admire? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Call in with your favorite poet or poem. Tracy, can we start with a reading? You selected an old story from your 2018 collection, Wade in the Water. Could you give us a brief introduction to the poem before you read it?

Tracy K. Smith: Oh, sure. I wrote this poem several years ago now when I was thinking about the ways that mythology has authorized so much harm and destruction in our history. I was thinking, what if we all took the time to imagine or even write new myths that could help us manage our way forward into the future we would like to arrive at? This poem is my attempt to do that.

An Old Story.

We were made to understand it would be

Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge,

Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind.

Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful

Dream. The worst in us having taken over

And broken the rest utterly down.

A long age Passed. When at last we knew how little

Would survive us - how little we had mended

Or built that was not now lost—something

Large and old awoke. And then our singing

Brought on a different manner of weather.

Then animals long believed gone crept down

From trees. We took new stock of one another.

We wept to be reminded of such color.

Alison Stewart: That was Tracy K. Smith, reading from An Old Story. When was the first time that you really started to just love poetry, just love it, not as an art form, not as something you were going to do, you just decided, "I like this"?

Tracy K. Smith: [chuckles] I feel so lucky that I was encouraged to pull books of poetry off the shelf growing up, even before they would have made sense to me. I feel like in grade school, I loved the sound of words, the sounds of words, even that I didn't understand. Certainly, even reading children's poems, the rhythm of language, which could pick you up and carry you forward like a vehicle was really thrilling to me. I started to write rhymes, and I started to imagine that I could be a poet one day.

As I got older, I came into a different form of the love of poetry, where it was the ideas that poems helped me to bring language to and the questions that poems helped me articulate that became really life-saving. To be honest, it's still both of those loves that I carry with me. The fact that the energy and the rhythmic sensation, the vibration and the momentum of a poem can do something to your body and your mind, and that the sentences and their content can feed some need that you have. Both of those things feel like miracles to me every time I encounter them.

Alison Stewart: You often cite the late poet Lucille Clifton as an inspiration. What was it about her work that feels transformative for you?

Tracy K. Smith: Oh, gosh, it's so many things. She's a direct and concise and compressed poet in terms of language and form. At the same time, her work is cosmically large. She punches through this everyday world that we live in and through layers and layers of belief, feeling, longing, memory, and hope so that suddenly her poems put you in dialogue with what feels like the farthest reaches of the universe.

When I first met Lucille Clifton, I was a student in her classroom. Not only were her poems available to us and her wisdom about our poems, but she would talk to us her life. She told us about how her curiosity and her sense of need led her to really forge a sense of connection to other worlds, the world into which her deceased beloved family members had disappeared upon passing, the world of history, the world of mythology. I just am so grateful because I feel like our lives are so confounding that we need recourse to all of these other distances in order to find our way. I'm really grateful for that vocabulary and that practice that she instilled.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to a listener. This is Jason, who is calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Jason. Thank you so much for making time to talk to us on All Of It today. Tell us about yourself.

Jason: Hi. My name is Jason Applebaum. I've written over 400 poems. It's a big part of my life, besides my family. Here's one of the poems I wrote. Ready?

Alison Stewart: Okay, we're ready.

Jason: Can we fly?

Can we hold onto our elbows and fly,

Being careful of not searing our face

With speed and wind?

Soothing. Can we lightly hold our hands

As a warm embrace,

Then dance on the edge of air?

Let's sing like birds do.

Let's sing like flowers do

When they open up the first time.

Let's sing at the first edge of life given sun

Shines at the edge of the world

Where horses fly high and land with almost no sound at all.

And flowers burst heavenly scents into the world

Where the fish do fly from sea to sea.

Hold me, hug me just for joy. Always joy.

Alison Stewart: Jason, thank you so much. That was great.

Tracy K. Smith: Yes. I love your poem. I love all of the borders and boundaries that your poem pushes past and teaches me to imagine that I can reach. I love the ways that you bend senses even like that early in the poem, the image of searing our faces on speed. I love the new dimension of feeling and sensing that your poem brings in. I love so much more as well.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Tracy K. Smith. She's a former National Poet Laureate. We are celebrating National Poetry Month. We'd love to hear another poem from you, Tracy. This is from Wade in the Water. What are you going to read?

Tracy K. Smith: I'm going to read a poem called Beatific. It's another brief poem. Oftentimes my poems help me to enact what I think of as thought experiments where I can pull myself out of the impulses toward impatience or frustration that often arises in day-to-day interaction and say, what would happen if I responded differently? This poem let me go back to a brief encounter and receive it differently.

Beatific.

I watch him bob across the intersection,

Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants.

I watch him smile at nobody, at our traffic

Stopped to accommodate his slow going.

His arms churn the air. His comic jog

Carries him nowhere. But it is as if he hears

A voice in our idling engines, calling him

Lithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Every least leaf

Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,

Late, captive to this thing commanding

Wait for this man. Wait for him.

Alison Stewart: We are celebrating National Poetry Month with readings from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, editor, and former National Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. We're also having listeners call in to share their favorite poems. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

[MUSIC - Luscious Jackson: Citysong]

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. She's helping us celebrate National Poetry Month. We want to hear your favorite poet or poems. Our number is 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Tracy, when you write about deeply personal experiences, how do you approach emotional vulnerability on the page?

Tracy K. Smith: Well, it's emotional vulnerability that brings me to the need to write a poem. I'm really trying to make space to claim and inhabit that feeling. I'm writing, and I feel like maybe a lot of us are writing initially as a way of having a conversation with ourselves, or maybe what I think of as my higher self, which is more courageous and more honest than I might be in my day-to-day life. The worries that I have, the mistakes that I know that I make, those things are really welcome in the poem.

I try and see what they can teach me, what they can challenge me to name or claim. If I can put off thinking that, oh, someone's going to read this and someone's going to attach all of this to me and maybe I'll feel indicted, if I can push all of that away, what I'm really doing is saying I'm going to learn to face my life with courage and I'm going to listen to my life in a way that I don't necessarily have the time or the patience or the resolve to do, and it's going to offer me something that I'm going to be grateful for.

Alison Stewart: What does a poet or a poem need to have to have resonance with you, one that you didn't write?

Tracy K. Smith: I think that one of the things that poems do is they draw us into this really receptive state where we're listening to another person's voice and we're experiencing something alongside them because they're describing it in really irresistible, vivid and sensory ways, or because they're surprising us by bringing new language or new vocabulary to feelings that we ourselves also recognize.

When a poem can do that, it's leading me both away from my own experience, but also deeper into my own experience, and that's one of the things I love. When I'm writing or reading poems, I'm also really excited about the moment of what I think of as revelation or discovery, the moment the poem, in its own process of unfolding, begins to yield some kind of insight or realization that would not have been possible at the outset. It's a part or a result of the journey that the poem has led me on.

To me, that feels like an act of magic or a kind of miracle that language behaving poetically can enact. That's what I'm hoping for every time I sit down to read and also to write a poem.

Alison Stewart: Let's check in with our listeners again. This is Spencer calling in from Greenpoint. Hi, Spencer. Thanks for making the time to call All Of It.

Spencer: Hi, thank you for having me.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear the poem that you were interested in talking to us about.

Spencer: Wonderful. It's Apartment Living by Meghan O'Rourke, and it begins.

So those despotic loves have become known to you,

rubbing cold hands up your thighs, leaving oily trails,

whispering, Just how you like it, right?

Upstairs the sorority girls are playing charades

again, smoking cigarettes, wearing shifts, burning

pain into their synapses.

Life is a needle. And now it pricks you:

the silver light in which you realize

your attempts at decadence

tire the earth and tire you. The etymology

of “flag” as in “to signal to stop”

is unknown. It is time to sit and watch. Don’t

call that one again, he’s pitiless in his self-certainty.

You used to be so.

You laid your black dress on the bed.

You stepped in your heels over sidewalk cracks.

You licked mint and sugar from the cocktail mixer,

singing nonsense songs,

and the strangers, they sang along.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Carol from Lynbrook. Hi, Carol. Thank you so much for calling All Of It. Happy National Poetry Month.

Carol: Hello. Thank you. It's a good month.

Alison Stewart: [laughs]

Carol: A poem I'd like to share is The Mockingbird, and it's by Charles Bukowski from Mockingbird Wish Me Luck.

The Mockingbird.

The mockingbird had been following the cat

all summer

mocking mocking mocking

teasing and cocksure;

the cat crawled under rockers on porches

tail flashing

and said something angry to the mockingbird

which I didn’t understand.

Yesterday the cat walked calmly up the driveway

with the mockingbird alive in its mouth,

wings fanned, beautiful wings fanned and flopping,

feathers parted like a woman’s legs,

and the bird was no longer mocking,

it was asking, it was praying

but the cat

striding down through centuries

would not listen.

I saw it crawl under a yellow car

with the bird

to bargain it to another place.

Summer was over.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Tracy, you have another poem that you're going to read for us. It's not one of yours. It's called The Day-Breakers. Tell us a little bit about the poet and the poem.

Tracy K. Smith: Oh, sure. This is a poem by Arna Bontemps, a poet, fiction writer, and editor, who is associated with the Harlem Renaissance. This is a poem from almost 100 years ago, 1927. I really love it because it reminds me that the work of writing and the work of the imagination are liberatory acts and that they are also acts that intend to change lives and change the world, even when that's a dangerous thing to seek to do.

The Day-Breakers

We are not come to wage a strife

With swords upon this hill.

It is not wise to waste the life

Against a stubborn will.

Yet would we die as some have done:

Beating a way for the rising sun.

I feel like Bontemps does so many things in just a short six-line poem. The first is to say all of these things that are not what the speaker of the poem and the group that they feel connected are come to do. It's not about wasting people's time with frivolous acts. It's not about violence or strife. It's about something purposeful and practical and calm. Then the last couple lines of the poem, which bring this dangerous act, something that a person could die for, into the vocabulary of making a new day possible, beating away for the rising sun.

This poem gives me so much belief in the power of words and so much also patience when I think about what we, who are in the business of trying to grow and bring about change, are doing. It's a long project. It might take generations, but it's something that feels more and more worthwhile to participate in.

Alison Stewart: We have another Carol who's called. This one is from the Upper West Side. Hi, Carol. Thanks so much for calling All Of It.

Carol: Hi, thanks for taking my call. I want to do a shoutout to the MTA for posting poems all the time, maybe changing every month on the subways. I'm a dedicated subway user They may not be very complicated poems, but they're poems, and I think can introduce many people to the concept of poetry. I usually take a picture of them just to have it. Thanks again, MTA.

Alison Stewart: Appreciate you, Carol. A quick piece of advice, Tracy. If someone wanted to get into poetry, what would you suggest?

Tracy K. Smith: I would say find a poem that you like that has made you feel surprised or reminded you of something that you hadn't thought of or felt in a long time, and then spend time looking at the specific choices that writer makes. Are there questions in the poem? Are there moments where senses flare into vivid language? Are there moments when a pattern that the poem has established is ruptured? See if you can make similar choices in exploration of your own material.

Alison Stewart: Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. She helped us celebrate National Poetry Month. Tracy, thank you so much.

Tracy K. Smith: Oh, thank you. Happy National Poetry Month.

Alison Stewart: That's All Of It for this week. I'm Alison Stewart. I appreciate you listening and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.