Tracy K. Smith will discuss her memoir at Labyrinth Books
By Hank Kalet
The best poetry defies expectations. Readers come to poems with a set of lived experiences and relationships to the world and to language itself. Then the poem hits and, as Tracy K. Smith explained in a “Wall Street Journal” piece several years ago, the reader’s world can change.
”When a poem can lead you into an unfamiliar place, where what you must do is watch and listen closely, think and associate quickly, and find your footing from scratch, it is imparting a set of skills that are yours to keep,” she wrote.
She says each reader comes away from a poem with something that is all his or her own.
It is emotionally democratic, with a small “d.” Ms. Smith will read from her new memoir, “Ordinary Light” (Knopf), Wednesday, April 1, at Labyrinth Books on Nassau Street.
”Whatever you do after reading (a poem) is done in the wake of a new feeling,” she says. “The scenario that brought the feeling into being might be imaginary, but the feeling, and whatever gets done with it, is real.”
Ms. Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who teaches at Princeton University, practices what she preaches. Her poetry — works such as “Life on Mars” and “Duende”—forces the reader to enter new worlds and to come away from them transformed, to look at this world anew.
The reader’s response is important, but does not figure in the writing. The creative process “is about being alone with language and listening for different possibilities, different questions, different paths that I can pursue.”
”You need permission to make mistakes and say things that may not be in the finished draft,” she says. “It is a very private and resourceful space. And it is different than the public space.”
The work of writing, she adds, “exists for me alone.”
”It serves as a way to raise questions and work through obsessions,” she says. “When you’re writing, you have an interaction with something, maybe the subconscious or something in the air, and the engagement with that is intense and locks everything else out.”
But once the work is completed, she says, “the distance between me and it becomes larger — I have to accept that it may begin to belong to other people.”
She uses her memoir as an example. “Kirkuk Reviews” describes it as a “daughter’s journey to claim her identity,” to understand her blackness after growing up sheltered in a “solidly middle-class suburb.” The book hinges on a visit to Alabama, where she learned that her grandmother “still cleaned for a white family” and lived in a house that “smelled of cooking gas, pork fat, tobacco juice, and cane syrup.” The visit altered her view of herself, her roots and her worth.
The memoir tells her own story, she says, but readers bring to it layers of their own experiences, which may shade their reading of it and alter their perspective of the world.
”I’ve had people come up and talk to me about the character of my grandmother in the book, and all of the things she allows them to recognize in themselves,” she says. “She allows readers to gain access to certain things in their own memory.”
”Suddenly,” she adds, “my grandmother becomes a mix of my grandmother and the reader’s grandmother.”
Ms. Smith, who is 42, says she grew up writing, but it wasn’t until she was 19 and a sophomore at Harvard that she realized she “wanted to get serious about writing poetry.”
”I had written poems before (Harvard), but I had no sense of a practice,” she says. “I wrote haphazardly. I didn’t revise. I didn’t have a systematic way of reading. When I got to college, a lot of things happened. I was finally going to readings where I heard poets read and talking about their work, and I realized living poets were doing real work.”
She joined the Dark Room Collective in Boston, a group of African American poets, and she took classes with critics like Helen Vendler and poets like Seamus Heaney, Henri Cole and Lucie Brock-Broido.
”It seems like a magical place in that regard,” she says of Harvard, “and also because everybody is so generous.” Her first book, “The Body’s Question,” won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002. She won the James Laughlin Award for “Duende” and , in 2012 at the age of 40, won the Pulitzer Prize for “Life on Mars.”
She appreciates the awards because they offer validation of her efforts, but she said they “fit in a different part of my mind” than the work of writing itself.
”I think of those as very fortunate events that I can draw from when I feel disheartened as an artist, or the well is dry,” she says. “But I don’t think it is productive to think of recognition when you are in the process of writing.”
Tracy K. Smith will appear at Labyrinth Books, 122 Nassau St., Princeton, on Wednesday, April 1, at 6 p.m., where she will read from her memoir, “Ordinary Light.” The event is free. For more information, go to labyrinthbooks.com or call 609-497-1600.