TRACY K. SMITH
It’s so nice to be at the Strand. Tina and I were just talking about how, when we were grad students in New York City, we would spend long days on the ladders downstairs here, looking through the books. So it’s really nice to be able to share some work here as well. And Tina and I are dear friends, so it’s also a delight to be able to have this conversation. I often preface reading poems from Life on Mars by saying that initially I was thinking about the genre of science fiction as a way of looking at America and American life. Of course, I’m a poet, so it put me in a slightly different position. I had a lot of fun watching a lot of science fiction movies from when I was growing up in the seventies and eighties, and thinking about what that genre brought to my own poetic voice. During my work on this manuscript, my father became ill and passed away. It was rather unexpected. I found myself in need of some kind of language to express my grief for that loss. Outer space and the loneliness of it seemed like a good construct for it, so those are some of the notes struck in this book.
TINA CHANG
I tried so hard to be Tracy’s opening act, but she wouldn’t let me. She’s so generous. Tracy and I were on a writing retreat once. In fact, our mentor and teacher Mark Doty was kind enough to offer up his summerhouse at Fire Island. I remember feeling quite terrified and joyful at the same time. Terrified because I was actually sitting in Mark Doty’s room writing my book and joyful because Tracy was in the next room writing her book, and I thought: the only thing separating our ideas is a thin wall. We were each pregnant with our first child—not together; separately. It felt like there was creation happening all around us. Tracy is the type of person who writes her poems and then comes out looking incredibly radiant, as if she’d just gone through a sauna. She’s incredibly open about sharing her poems. I remember how grateful I was for that almost childlike openness she had about sharing her work so soon after the making of it. It was an incredibly special time for me and I feel grateful for it. So these books were written in tandem. But there are so many things I don’t know about your process. What were some of the invisible elements of process that were influencing you?
TRACY K. SMITH
That’s a hard question. When I think about that time, I feel like it was a very spiritual time. I think loss and expectation push us to a place where we’re trying to imagine what we have no access to, or no literal access to, or no proof of. I remember trying to find the voices that felt like maybe they had gotten close to it, and one of the poets is Lucille Clifton. We were both students of hers when we were at Columbia, and I remember she would tell us stories about poems that she kind of received, that she imagined were, or understood to be, voices speaking to or through her. Those poems later appeared in Mercy, one of her last books. I always envied that. I always believed that maybe the work of a poet is to learn how to listen, not just to ourselves, not just to what we know or what our sense of language can guide us to, but to truly being receptive to everything around us. I wanted to do that, not only because I like that idea but because I was trying to say goodbye to my father. I’d lost my mother fourteen years before, and I felt like losing him opened up a more mature sense of closure, or an opportunity for that for me. So, as I was working on the book, I was thinking about the events in the world that were troubling me and wanting to find a way that they might teach me what question might be worth asking. I don’t know that any of the poems get anywhere near an answer, but wanting to isolate events and questions felt productive to me. Somehow, I aligned that impulse close to the poems. The poems are asking questions about where my father might have gone, what space I might try and listen toward or imagine in terms of him, in order to maintain a connection.
TINA CHANG
When you were thinking about these things, what was the first poem you wrote where these larger questions started to come into being?
TRACY K. SMITH
There’s a poem in the book called “It and Company.” The first version of it felt very blasphemous to me. It was called “Straight Talk.” It was a poem in my mind that was angrily addressed at God, the God I had grown up with. It’s a poem that ends “unconvinced by our zeal, it is unappeasable.” But the original pronoun was you, and I remember during that time I had a lot of time to wake up and sit down and write, and that honesty opened up a different space in my imagination. I think later the frustration with this idea of God became productive in pushing to try to actively enlarge or disrupt the sense of the creator or the source that just seemed too remote to me.
I wanted to ask you something. I’m so fascinated by the way that 9/11 figured into your description of some of the poems and your process. I believe, and I wonder if you feel this way, too, that so many American poets, particularly people of our generation, changed in terms of our sense of what a poem might do after that catastrophe. I know everything changed, the whole world changed, and our vocabulary as citizens changed. I feel like that event, and the way we’ve been reeling from it ever since, has opened up a space for the world to come into the work that I think in the eighties or nineties, when we were younger, seemed taboo—in fact, seemed impossible without sacrificing the lyrical. My question has a couple of strains. One thing I feel is really magical about your work is that those concerns are projected onto a future that is very deeply linked to history and to mythology. It also, as you describe, has a corollary in a private realm, so the speakers of the poems are often dealing with some kind of upheaval or struggle that seems parallel to something that might be broader or more public. Can you talk about how you got to the vocabulary for that? Was it something you were searching for?
TINA CHANG
When I started writing the book, and this was before 9/11, I felt as if a lot of my concerns felt domestic. My language centered around love, and my world felt quite small. Then, after 9/11, there was something that shifted for me, as it did for many people. I had a profound realization—it shouldn’t have been profound—that things could happen here on our soil. It was something that a poet who I admire greatly, Carolyn Forché, talked about so often in her work. How could I have admired this woman so much, and have followed her work throughout my lifetime, and only be making this realization now? I think it was around that time that my vocabulary shifted. I was editing an anthology for about ten years, Language for a New Century, and as I was sifting through and reading poems from around the world and poring over them, my sense of language changed and expanded. I was fascinated by what the lyric could do, and not understanding it right away, but feeling it through the texture and fabric of another language, and then seeing it translated into English was transformative. I felt like all of that was very deeply a part of learning about my own limitless language.
Were there particular poems that were more difficult for you to write than others in the book?
TRACY K. SMITH
Oh, yeah. There’s one poem that I don’t think I’ve ever read. I’ll back up a little bit. I gave a reading a few nights ago and my father’s girlfriend of twelve years was visiting New York. She was in the audience as I was reading some of the elegies for him. Suddenly, knowing that he wasn’t just a character to everyone else in the room but me, but that there was someone who had shared her life with him, I felt very vulnerable and I also felt very grateful that maybe I was invoking him somehow that might be realer than when I read those poems to strangers. But there are some poems in the book about family that are a little bit hard. There’s a poem called “No Fly Zone” that is addressed to someone in my family who I have tremendous love for and also a desire to push in some way. I feel like that is a poem that I’m still not sure that the impulse behind it is right. It made me say some things that I always tried to swallow.
TINA CHANG
I remember one of the poems you read to me when we were away on our retreat, and I remember that you felt differently about the poem than I did. I felt like it was really reaching that place of pure vulnerability. I was so surprised when you read that poem, and I thought it was really something profound in the making.
QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE
Why poetry?
TRACY K. SMITH
I remember the moment that I got poetry. I had always loved it as a child. I loved making puzzles with words, and I liked the feeling of wisdom that I attributed to poems and I wanted that for myself. But when I was older and in college, reading a poem and really coming under its spell, I realized that it was visceral and that it afforded the reader the opportunity to stop and look at very small details with such scrutiny that they become completely other. The poem that really did that for me was Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” in which the poet, the speaker, is looking at a pen, and at the beginning of the poem he compares the pen to a gun. He then considers the pen and his environment, and goes backward in time and remembers his father and grandfather working the land, and by the end of the poem he’s stepped back into that history and that sense of place and he looks at the pen and compares it to a tool one can dig with. And so suddenly, the pen becomes a completely different kind of implement, but it also suggests a different kind of urgency, and a different kind of location, and that just blew my mind. I wanted to be able to look at the things that were at hand and let them teach me something, not just about myself but about the world I was in. What about you?
TINA CHANG
I feel like I get asked that question a lot since serving as Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, maybe in slightly different ways each time. I think it’s an important question. I find that when I watch children, and I have had the opportunity to go to quite a few public and private schools, I’ve noticed that their tendency is to go toward what Robert Hass talks about as the “rhythmic imagination.” Even my son, who is three, now likes to write poems. There’s something to be said that the creative imagination works toward a kind of song.
When Tracy and I were going to Columbia together, we had a wonderful teacher named Alfred Corn. He was a very, very smart man and his lessons were very intimidating to me. He would make us read poems with a Shakespearean rhythm that I didn’t think I could master, and I was laughing at myself all the time. But now, when I look back on this education, I remember his main lesson began with rhythm. We begin with heartbeat. I think that we grow up knowing that, and then at one point something changes somewhere in our education of poetry and we have a tendency to become a little bit intimidated by it, but if you reach back and think about when we were children and how our imagination was alive and it grew with poetry, you realize that it’s not really that far away. If you think about the more profound occasions in our lives like funerals or weddings, it’s always the poem that seems to be the document or the statement or song that is just the right expression that encapsulates the urgency of the moment. One of the first poems that I ever understood was T. S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It was the famous first few lines that got me; I wondered what is this patient upon a table and why is it compared to the sky? That kind of questioning made me love poetry, because I wanted to understand that natural curiosity that I had. So I think it’s that inquiry that keeps me excited and encourages me to wonder.
TRACY K. SMITH
I feel like the language that we live in is so disruptive to the kinds of insights that we are not necessarily able to paraphrase. We live in the language of text and commerce and a poem is designed to bring us closer to the language of ecstatic experience. I’m not saying this in a religious way, but it’s language that is willing to perform those impossible feats. I know many people are required to read poetry in school, and it becomes an adversarial undertaking in understanding what the poet is trying to say. But I wish that there were equal space in our lives for the language of poetry.
You have to depersonalize your poetry to get to your eventual art form. How do you recognize that emotion? Is it more to do with form or more with how you feel?
TINA CHANG
There are so many ways to approach that. You ask any poet and it’s slightly different. I remember reading an interview with Sharon Olds and the interviewer is asking her how she begins her poem, where does a poem live? Where does it begin? Where is the seed? For her it was sound, and she said whenever she begins writing in her notebooks, she begins with sound. I begin with an image. The image has always been the grounding force for me, and I think it’s because it feels the least intimidating. Because if you’re thinking to yourself, I’m sitting down and I’m going to write a whole poem, or not only that, but, I’m going to write a masterful poem, the entire idea can just overwhelm you completely. I’m often reminded of this wonderful book that I don’t think was given enough credit, Carolyn Forché’s The Blue Hour, in which she writes a long poem beginning with each of the letters from A to Z. I think of her practice as meditative. She listed the simplest and yet most profound images. I often find that’s the way I naturally begin. I lay down one image and then another. Layer upon layer, so that it begins to build itself naturally. If I begin this way I don’t become overwhelmed by the moment I’m trying to reach, or the epiphany I’m trying to get to, or even the overarching questions that I’m asking, because all of that can seem too much for me. But if I just remind myself to create those images one after another, then I think I’ll get to the place I need to be. I have faith. Faith that I’ll reach that moment of revelation. Maybe it’s a little bit different for you?
TRACY K. SMITH
Well, I feel like that belief in the image really speaks directly to Eliot, too, and the idea of the objective correlative. The emotional and subjective experience can best be conveyed by way of some external marker or an image, so instead of saying, I am sad, look at the world through the lens of that feeling, and what you see is going to bear the traces of that. I feel like that’s part of the DNA of a poem, and the way that those particular feelings are laid up against the world so that they color what is seen and how it is seen. I think it is part of every successful poem. That’s one of the ways in which Eliot was pretty brilliant.