Rob Casper: I’m also very interested in the notion of talking about poetry and craft to a general audience: and maybe even an audience that maybe hasn’t experienced a poem written by a living poet ever, and maybe you could talk about how you do that with other poems that you brought to these readings. Tracy K. Smith: I like to honor the reality that people get more than they are willing to acknowledge just on an initial hearing: not even an initial reading, just hearing it once, the things that your ears kind of pick up on: that sounded really lovely, or that sounded really percussive, or that sounded dark. Thinking about image sources: a lot of those images made me think of this context. And the other thing that is really easy to hear in a poem is when a shift occurs, and that’s what people recognize in the same way that they recognize it in a song. We’re really good in talking about what we notice in music, and a lot of that vocabulary applies to what we notice in poems. So those are places where I start. And sometimes it’s easy to say “the poem is talking about this topic when it does this particular thing, my mind wanders to this other place,” I think that’s productive and I think it’s a part of the experience of the poem. So saying these things are not accidental and you’re not just imagining them, these are effects of the poem and this is also something that we can bring into our conversation about it. I guess this isn’t a classroom, this is not a seminar and this is not a lecture, its light, but I think there are ways that I seek to almost console and assure people that what you hear is really there and what it seems to speak to it probably is doing deliberately. Rob: Yeah, and that seems like such a different approach saying “oh you can’t hear something, there’s some sort of thing there that’s coded, that if you only have so much knowledge, then you’ll be able to unlock the box and sort of understand. “ To say, you are having an experience by hearing to this poem, and whatever that experience is, it means there’s probably something there that we can talk about that is meaningful. It’s a very friendly approach to audiences who may just not know what’s going on. Tracy: I think it is too. And I hope it means the next time that members from that audience see a poem, they feel like they’re in charge in some way, they’re in charge of their reaction. Rob: I’m also just curious: have you ever given a reading or done a talk following a member of Congress or following a political official? What might that be like? We don’t know yet, how that’s going to work, so we’re curious to see how that plays out. Tracy: Yeah, that’s not something I’ve ever done, or seen done. Yeah, I’m very curious about what the opening remarks will be, and perhaps they’ll be very similar to what happens at a reading on a campus. They will likely, well, I’m imagining that they might speak to what the representative knows and understands about this community, what might be current in people’s minds, but I’m just going to see what happens and see how I can use whatever energy he puts in the space. Rob: How do you think the language of poetry relates to, can engage with, and even channel the language of politics, political speech? Tracy: I believe that the language of poetry gets through to the actual, the concrete in the way that political language avoids, because poetry isn’t trying to group large sectors together and harness or fabricate consensus. Poetry, really, I think, is in celebration of the singular perspective: the speaker, of the poet, of the reader, and there are moments where those things intersect, there are moments where the reader submits to this strange perspective, and goes somewhere for the duration of the poem. I think poems are really good at contemplating the matter of politics, like events, questions, and what I love about the thing that art requires is you can’t come away from examination of something political in a poem in the same place where you started. And it’s really so much more satisfying when that poem disturbs what you believe, even if ultimately the poem agrees with you, it’s got to also point you to those areas where you’re complicit with something you don’t believe in. And that’s something I get excited when my own poems do that for me so, those political poems that I share will hopefully foster a sense of conversation and perhaps even discomfort. Rob: My final question is really one about this whole project and the idea of what rural means and what kind of venue we’re really looking for, and maybe you can talk a little bit about just the genesis of your idea, why reach out to rural communities? I know you had that idea from the very beginning, from when we first talked about the notion of you being poet laureate. And what you found in New Mexico and you’re hoping to find here in terms of the community you really want to connect to. Tracy: well from the beginning I thought that this is a strange period where, nationally, we are being reminded or convinced of the great divisions that separate coast and urban communities from the central and rural communities, that’s a rough, sloppy distinction, but I just have always distrusted that, and I think that there are lots of places where we have something clear, compelling, and welcome to say to one another. Poetry is such a great vehicle for cutting through the surface anxiety and social performing because a poem takes you to a source of feeling that is undeniable and that runs deep. Poems take you to the moments of great loss, and questioning and struggle and celebration in your life, and to begin a conversation with a stranger there, I think is amazing because you’re not anticipating “okay, I should perform this persona for this other person because this is what I do or don’t know about me or this is what they’re expecting.” None of that really comes into play because you’re saying “oh wow, this reminds me of losing a parent.” This is so much of what I experienced at that time. You leap to a kind of trust or intimacy that isn’t always possible. Now, that’s the wish, and I feel lucky going into communities where people may not know the social dance of “oh okay, this is a poetry reading, these are the kinds of questions that people ask in these sorts of arts communities.” I hope this is an organic interaction with somebody who reads the poem has something to say, as well as someone who’s never been to this kind of event or met a writer. But I really don’t know what distinguishes the place I come from, from the places I’m going and hoping to go. It’s so soon to tell, and when I really think about it every single reading is different. The chemistry in every audience is different and it depends on so many things, so I don’t know that, in fact I kind of hope that I don’t come away from this project with a sense of “oh, this is what the rural experience is about.” Rob: And I think the challenge we have to avoid which is that the news tells us that people in rural communities, and in guess from what I know in my experience, going back home to a rural communities, folks coming from the east coast or from big cities or fancy colleges telling people in rural communities what to think and who they are, and sort of patronizing people in smaller communities, have you had to deal with the possible tension of any of that with the New Mexico trip or thinking about this? Tracy: I didn’t feel any of that. I visited the Air Force community, and that’s made up of a diverse group of people, they come from places and move through different places. And then I visited the Santa Fe Indian School in Santa Fe, and those kids were amazing. They had really strong ideas about language because they are aware of the language that they might live in at home, and they are also aware of the threats to that language’s survival, they talk really beautifully about how living in more than one languages means there are some things that can easily be carried over from one to the other, and some things that can’t. And I think that’s an amazingly sophisticated starting point for thinking about poetry. Rob: Although, that was a bit of an outlier, because that was in Santa Fe, which is not rural in the way that we are talking about, and I think that one of the challenges we faced in trying to figure these out is: Where are these places? How do we get to these places? Tracy: Well, you know a lot of these students are boarding students, so they come from other parts of the state, so I kind of wager that the tribal communities to which a lot of students belong and which they sort of identify gives them another consciousness. So they are of an urban environment and they aren’t as well, which I think is fascinating. What was the other part of your question? Rob (laughing): That’s it on the nose. Does anybody in the back have any questions? Somebody has to have a question back there. No? Brett Zongker: I’ll ask one. Was there a reason you wanted to visit South Carolina in particular or this part of the country? Tracy: I haven’t spent much time here. I have been to St. Helena, which is in South Carolina, one of the sea islands (I hope I’m not geographically mixed up) I’ve come to this part of coastal South Carolina and Georgia for another project that I’m researching, but I don’t feel like I know very much, even at this point, about what life out here feels like. My other project tis looking at really specific communities and thinking in really historical terms as well. It’s a life in the present, on the mainland, is interesting to me. We’re also looking, over the course of this project, to find some geographic equity or balance, so this is southeast trip that follows a southwest trip, eventually we’ll go to other parts of the country.