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Brian: Brian Lehrer in WNYC and as a special treat to close out our show today, tomorrow, and Friday during the membership drive, we're delighted to have Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Tracy K. Smith with us. She's a former Poet Laureate of the United States, as some of you know, from 2017 to 2019. For the rest of the week, she'll be reading and talking about poems from a new anthology that she's edited.
It's The Best American Poetry 2021. Those books that come out every year, well, Tracy K. Smith is the editor of this year's edition. In the introduction, she writes the best poems of the year reached her as offerings of desperately needed hope and endurance. With me now is Tracy K. Smith. Later in the week, we'll also hear poems from her own new collection called Such Color. Hey, Tracy, thanks so much for doing this. Welcome back to WNYC.
Tracy: Hi, Brian. Thanks for having me.
Brian: I know your term as Poet Laureate has ended. You recently joined the English department at Harvard as a professor of English and of African and African-American studies. How's it been to start a new role during the pandemic.
Tracy: [chuckles] It's been exciting. Last year was a heavy lift. It's nice to feel like a new chapter is beginning. This is a place that's been important to me, and it's nice to be back for a new part of my life. In a way, it feels like a new moment in the world is hopefully beginning.
Brian: Indeed. Let's hear something from The Best American Poetry 2021. I think you've agreed to start with the reading of a poem called Irony. You want to set this up for us?
Tracy: Oh, yes. This is a poem by a really wonderful poet whom sadly we just lost this past month, Kamilah Aisha Moon, a poet of, I think, huge conscience and compassion, and her work has been long committed to the sanctity of Black life in many different ways. This is one of the last poems of hers that will be published, I think. Irony.
It would be now when you feel
want is no longer your enemy,
that your body and soul would kneel.
O it would be now, when you feel
you’ve culled joy, seized a new zeal
that Death grabs you, fingers icy.
It would be now when you feel.
Want is no longer your enemy.
When I read this poem last year, it felt like such a poem about time, mortality, and also as the title suggests also irony between enlightenment or crossing emotional or psychic hurdles and maybe coming up against the end of one's life during the year of so much loss. The poem spoke really powerfully to me. Of course, now it speaks in new ways as I grieve a wonderful poet and a friend, but I think the poem manages the stakes of time, of loss, of knowledge, and anxiety really beautifully within the form, which is you hear is built on a lot of repetition and rhyme. In a way, it feels almost like the cage of existence, the way that these wheels of foam keep spinning around.
Brian: A cage of existence, and what a last line in that poem, "Want is no longer your enemy." Of course, it's not because you've got everything you want, which never actually happens in life, but that deeper thought about that that she expressed in that you read. Let's do one more. I suspect most of our listeners know the name Louise Erdrich for her fiction, but she's also an incredibly accomplished poet. You've chosen Stone Love as one of the best poems of 2021. You want to set this up for us?
Tracy: Sure. A lot of the poems in this book feel haunted, or their visitations, and sometimes that comes through encounters with other people, things that are startling. In a poem like this, I think it comes from a feeling of mysterious revelation. In the note at the back of the book, the poet writes about driving through a lightning storm and feeling like the sight of the heavens and turmoil began to speak to her and offer her a poem that I think is about time and about love. Stone Love.
I spent a star age in flames
Bolted to the black heavens
Waiting for you.
Light crept over the sill of the earth
A thousand upon ten thousand
Upon a hundred thousand years
But no light touched me
Deep in depthless time
Waiting for you.
Fate flung me out,
Hauled me here
To love as a stone loves
Waiting for you.
Touch me, butterfly.
Like you, I have no hands.
Kiss me, rain.
Like you, I have no mouth.
Snow, sit heavily upon me.
Like you, I can only wait.
Come to me, dear
Unenduring little
Human animal.
I have no voice
but your voice.
Sing to me. Speak.
Let the clouds fly over us.
I've spent a star age in flames
just to hold you.
I love the huge ethics sweep of this poem and the way that it brings my mind in my ear and my spirit and everything else that is reading the poem with me to a sense of the mythic scale that we think the poets of the oral tradition, poems that had a role that might be more than just literary or entertaining, poems that were sustaining and nourishing. This poem carries that kind of energy for me. Again, in the context of 2020 to be bolstered by something as ageless as this column seeks to be and to be reminded that there's a connection between our, what she calls unendurable little human life and the elements and something as ageless as stone. That was consoling.
Brian: Louise Erdrich as most of our listeners have probably never heard her before or heard her work before, and that's one. I'm going to have to go back and read that one again or relisten to you reading it because I didn't know that, and there was so much in there. It seemed to go so many directions at the same time. Well, we're out of time for today. You're going to come back tomorrow and Friday and do more at the same time, except you want to give us just in like 15 seconds if you can. How an anthology like this comes together. We see those books in the bookstores, the best poetry, the best essays, the best this of each year. How do you even pick it in short order here?
Tracy: You get the assignment or the opportunity to build this thing. You start reading voraciously in many different directions, and I didn't want to just read the magazines and journals that I tend to turn to automatically, but I wanted to scour and get a real range of the work that was published.
Brian: That's great.
Tracy: As I was putting the work together these poems started talking to each other.
Brian: Tomorrow some of your own work. Tracy K. Smith. Thank you so much.
Tracy: Thank you. Take care.
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