Tracy K Smith’s “American Conversations” event in Lewiston, Maine – Transcript Tracy: Thank you. I’m gonna make myself at home. It’s been such a lovely day in Maine, this isn’t my first trip to Maine but it’s wonderful to meet a new group of Mainers – is that the noun? People who are so far, as I understand, interested in poetry, interested in other peoples’ voices, interested in finding language for what you feel. I spent the morning reading some poems and talking about them with another group at the library in Norway. I met people who are incredibly insightful and resourceful, finding insights in poems that were new and surprising to me, and finding ways of making those poems speak to things that are relevant in their lives, and I feel like that’s what poems are for. That’s what poems invite us to do. I was talking with the 21st Century leaders at dinner and someone said, “So why did you decide to write? Why do you want to take this thing that you do sometimes, like write poems, and make that into what you do in your life?” And I talked about how I have a friend who is a professor of religious history, and she’s really interested in the gnostic gospels and she’s doing research on one called The Gospel of Truth, and in it she found a passage that says, “If you call forth that which is within you, it will save you. And if you do not call forth that which is within you, it will destroy you.” And I feel like that’s such a profound way of thinking about whatever it is that each of us possesses – questions, capacities, potential. And I feel like poetry is a way of going inward and trying to feel for what’s there, and trying to listen to it and make sense of it and trying to remember it. There’s so much in our lives and in the world and in this moment in the 21st century that’s pulling our attention in other directions, and some of them aren’t as fruitful. So I feel like poetry is something that keeps us human, keeps us awake, and that makes us willing to be vulnerable and curious about ourselves and other people. I love that poetry does this amazing paradoxical thing – it gives you language for talking about your own story and your own life and why that matters, and it also pulls you past the ego. So you’re not doing it just to celebrate yourself so much as to find a connection in somebody else, and I feel like we need that. I’m gonna share some poems from – this isn’t working very well. How’s that? Okay, so imagine that what I just said was incredibly insightful. And now I get a do-over. I’m excited to share some poems from Wade in the Water, which is my most recent collection. It is a book that is thinking about America, thinking about the 21st Century, and where and how we find ourselves. And it’s doing that, much of the time, by looking at history. Listening to voices from the founding period in this country, documents like the Declaration of Independence, listening to testimonies that people give out of enslavement, during the Civil War, and trying to find a way that those voices might be useful and instructive. What I’m hoping to learn is a new language for our compassion. Let’s share some of those poems. And then there are also poems that come out of the everyday and that are bearing witness to the surprise and the confusion of being alive right now. I’ll start with a poem – I’ll start with a poem for my daughter, since there are some young people. My daughter is almost 9 and she’s so different from me, she’s full of life and energy. When you are about to have a kid, sometimes you think, ‘Oh I will just have another person like myself in the world’ and then you give birth and you realize this is just another person, she has nothing to do with me, she’s her own entity, which is much more exciting, I think. This is called “Dusk.” [Tracy reads “Dusk”] I’ll read a couple of family poems, find a way to get from that to some of the other larger questions in the book. Maybe some of you in the audience remember when you first heard the phrase “urban youth.” I remember hearing it a lot in the early ‘80s. I think it was devised at that time to describe black and brown kids, no matter where they live. I don’t think white kids in cities are called urban youth. I grew up in the suburbs of California. I remember one day I was walking home from school with my cousin who was visiting and we saw a drive-up bank where one of the old-fashioned devices, that you put in the chute and it zooms it to the bank, we saw it just on the ground. And so we picked it up and went up to the teller and she saw two black girls with something that she didn’t think they should have, and she started yelling at us. And it was like oh, we are—we’re urban youth. We’re trouble, we’re trouble. And I remembered that and it helped me to create a title for this poem, which is about a happy family – a happy black family. [Tracy reads “Urban Youth”] This is a poem called “Refuge.” Sometimes I get invited to contribute poems to things and I get excited because it’s an opportunity to get a bonus poem, something I wouldn’t necessarily have thought to write. So this is one of them. I was invited to attend a conference on forced migration that took place at Princeton University, where I teach. They said come, sit in on as many sessions as you can, and then at the end of the conference you get to present a new poem that you just wrote that kind of sums things up. Luckily it was over two days, so after the first day I got to go home and say just in case I don’t feel so confident to write something on the spot, let me get started. So this is the poem that I wrote. And I was so moved by hearing all of these accounts of different people who had experience with—people seeking refuge, either families who had migrated to the U.S. out of necessity, people who had spent time in detention centers on their way to migrating to the U.S., people who were volunteers who’d go in every day or every week and just sit and talk to people to keep them sane and give them hope, people from faith-based organizations that fostered families. What I learned, across the board, was that what I had expected, which was that the people who had sought refuge would have these powerful stories of gratitude or salvation or something like that, what I heard and was struck by was that it was the people who had helped them who felt like they had gotten the most out of the situation. They had learned the most, they had absorbed a kind of belief or strength that changed them. And so this is a poem that’s allowed me to process that a little bit and practice a little bit, like okay what would it take for this to be something that was second nature? So this is a poem called “Refuge.” [Tracy reads “Refuge”] So let’s go backward. Another one of these bonus poems, if you will, that arose out of an invitation is a sequence called “I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It,” which is a poem that is built of letters and testimonies that African American veterans of the Civil War and soldiers while they were enlisted, letters that they wrote and then depositions they gave after the war in an attempt to claim their pensions. Many people didn’t have birth certificates, marriage licenses, affidavits to attest to the fact that they’d changed their name from one thing to another, and this is because people who were enslaved didn’t get these documents. And so after the war it was really difficult for many people to prove who they were and get the pensions that they had been promised and that they, like all veterans, were entitled to. I found that so upsetting and I found the voices and the courage and dignity that they used in making their cases so inspiring. And together, their voices seemed to tell a very clear story, and I just wanted to gather them up and invite other people to listen to them with me. I’m gonna read you two brief sections that are made up of many different voices from what is a long sequence. [Tracy reads sections from “I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It”] Living with that history and thinking about it got me thinking about the feeling of living in a country that doesn’t claim you, living in a place where you are at once at home and a stranger. And I think that many people feel that in different ways. This is a poem that is kind of imagining that by getting inside the head of somebody who might be observing someone that they mistrust, that they don’t get, and asking them questions. And I wrote the poem and I lived with it for a little while without a title, and then I said I’m gonna call it “The United States Welcomes You.” [Tracy reads “The United States Welcomes You”] Maybe I’ll read you two more poems of my own, and then shift – I hope many of you received little anthologies, American Journal, so what I’d love to do is turn toward the work of other poets and read them together and see what we can come up with in terms of observations, questions, responses, so let me – maybe I’ll read you two brief ones. I think poems are really exciting because they allow me to wrestle with big questions and they allow me to try and be more rigorous than myself, more empathetic than I might naturally me. And then I also think poems are great because they sometimes allow me to just let the real out and share the pitiful person that I actually am. So this is one of those poems, it’s called “Charity.” [Tracy reads “Charity”] I’ll close – this is a short poem that is my attempt to write a new myth. It’s called “An Old Story.” [Tracy reads “An Old Story”] Thank you. So those are some of the poems that have helped me find a way of exploring my own questions and anxieties, and then these are some of the poems that have helped me feel connected to other people, other lives, other places, other perspectives. I like being able to say, “Let’s all turn to page 94.” I think most of you have copies but if you don’t, maybe that’s a good excuse to slide over and share with someone. I teach creative writing and the question I ask my students is really simple, every time we read a poem, “What do you notice?” I think it’s by paying close attention to the things that elicit our interest, our curiosity, our responses in poems is one really great way of experiencing and enjoying poetry. I don’t think you need a specialized vocabulary, I don’t think you need a great deal of biographical information about the poet or knowledge about things that might sit just outside the poem. I think poems do a lot to engage us, to speak to us in active and kind of subtle ways, so just taking stock of what we notice can get us pretty far. So I’m gonna read this poem and then my friend Millie in the front row is gonna read it again so that you can hear it in two different voices. You’ll hear the different things we hear in this poem and then let’s just start talking. And there are some microphones, there’s another one in the back, so everyone can be heard. “Dear P.” This is by a poet named Victoria Chang. [Tracy reads “Dear P.” by Victoria Chang] Millie: [Millie reads “Dear P.” by Victoria Chang] Tracy: Okay, so there’s a microphone back there. What’s something you notice in this poem? Poems are made up of such small, deliberate gestures, that there’s nothing too small to notice. Person 1: I noticed some of the rhymes and the spaces. Tracy: Yeah, there’s a lot of music in the poem. Even those “o” sounds – no and know. And even words like haunt and hunt that assert a kind of relationship but it’s almost scary to think about the connection between them. So there’s a lot that suggests the poet might be moving through this poem by listening to what she said and listening to what those sounds and words invite her to say next. Person 2: I noticed the change from the weeping into gathering into the boats. That hope that was in there that is in us. And that, really, I found very moving. Tracy: Let’s look at that line again. It’s kind of the middle. I have this idea—I’m sorry, I just got, it’s like a year, my first year of reading glasses and I feel seasick all the time. But I have this idea that the middle line of a poem is hugely important. And you don’t even know it’s the middle line until after you finish, so it’s not like people are planting things there, but I think a poem naturally has like a center, like a heart. And here, the middle is kind of where this turn that you’re referring to begins. We’re talking about love and loss and then there’s something that takes shape, right? [Tracy reads a line from “Dear P.”] And so there’s this amazing way that the poem goes from telling you ‘this will happen, this will happen, this will happen’, to ‘do this, there’s this thing, do this’, which I think is really beautiful. It feels in some ways like sound is one of the things that allows that discovery to take shape. Certainly one of the first images that’s not literal, that’s exciting. Person 3: I noticed that it has a rather simple vocabulary, but there’s some lovely wordplays in there. The haunt and hunt that you mentioned, and brother and bother, and some other things like that, but all with a fairly simple vocabulary. Tracy: Can we talk a little bit about that? I noticed that too, I have this love for poems that can take me to really powerful and strange places using really ordinary words. What’s the effect of that here? What’s the effect of this familiar vocabulary? Who—what does it make you suspect there relationship between the speaker of the poem and whoever the “you” in the poem might be? Person 4: I think for me it lends an intimacy to it. It feels like you could be sitting across the table talking to someone, or even just talking to yourself. Even in the turn that you mentioned, just the slow determination to like one step at a time and keep moving forward, that you would have with a close friend that you might not have with somebody much more distant. Tracy: Yeah, I like that. It creates a sense of intimacy and this is a simple truth that someone is telling to another person. There’s not a big ceremony that makes this possible, it’s just being real. Person 5: What I find interesting in this is the formatting, the spacing, the hesitancy that almost implies. And yet with the enjambment that’s just from line to line, sometimes that’s almost in the middle of a phrase. And it was interesting listening to you read it and listening to Millie read it because you both – sometimes you hesitated and sometimes you didn’t. Tracy: It’s interesting. It’s kind of this interesting pushing and pulling because the sentences and the logic pulls you forward, but then the spacing kind of makes you slow down and think, am I running things together or am I following a trail? And does that have an effect? Is it doing something in the poem that relates to the material of the poem? Person 5: I think so. It’s the spaces in between, it’s the quiet or the nothingness that happens in between the words. So I think it’s part of the significance of the poem. Tracy: It feels in some ways like something that you want and need to tell someone, that you also don’t know if you should. Like I imagine this is—I could imagine this being a mother speaking to a daughter, you know I have a daughter and so this is why the poem feels useful to me. And you think, should I tell her? Or does she just have to discover this by living? I’ll tell her. There’s that interesting push and pull. Person 6: Kind of that push and pull, I feel like there’s a cycle here, like a row where you’re – if you’re being addressed – you’re pulling your hands through your body, but perhaps they’re doing that through you as well in that kind of rowing fashion so you’re always in that cycle. Tracy: Since you mention it, pulling your hands through another body, that is a different kind of act than what we think of normally. Down toward the bottom. [Tracy reads a line from “Dear P.”] It’s so violent, so surprising, and it changes my sense of the “you.” So in the beginning I think, yes this is someone who needs to be told love is gonna do all these different things to you, you can handle it. And then at the end it’s also saying, and you’re gonna do some kind of messed up stuff too. This is real. Which I think is really interesting, a layer of reality that comes into the poem. Person 7: I also have a daughter and as I was reading this I imagined myself speaking to her. And I would start off by saying, “Someone will love you.” And then I may end up and say to her, “But when you do find the real thing, there is no argument.” And between the beginning and the end, this is all the stuff that you’re going to have to deal with before you recognize the real thing. Tracy: I mean, it’s a really interesting last statement in the poem, too. [Tracy reads line from “Dear P.”] So that’s one way of taking it, like you’re not gonna have to fight when it’s real. What else do you hear in that last line? ‘Cause sometimes we think of an argument as a good thing. What’s your argument? What’s your point? What’s your idea? Person 8: Well, I kind of thought of it as—I took that to mean that the emotion itself won’t involve anger, but you might go through some rough patches with your partner. I didn’t take it to mean that there won’t be anything difficult about it, just that the thing itself in its simplest form won’t have those rough spots. Tracy: I’m a mother but I’m also a daughter and that last line reminds me of all the loves I’ve had where I felt like my job was to win, was to convince someone I’m the one. And so, the act of being in a relationship like that is kind of an argument, you’re building a case for yourself. And I feel so consoled by this voice at the end of this poem saying love is the only thing you’ll do in your life that’s not that, and I love that ‘cause it’s so counterintuitive in a way. Are there other last things to say about this poem? Person 9: Well, I see it as the elder speaking to the young people and the elder uses very few words, so that’s why it’s fragmented the way it is. Person 10: The spacing also, I think, ends up being the older person perhaps not knowing how much they want to reveal about themselves, their own experiences. Sort of as I’m saying this to you, I’m telling you about how I’ve been, how I’ve seen things, and some of that I may not want to admit to you or myself. The ending of course ends where it wants to be, but how you get there may not be what you want to tell your child. Person 11: Yes, I noticed it’s “little boats” plural. Tracy: What do you think about that? You get more than one? Person 11: Well, it’s kind of like things come from different parts of your body, or different sources in your life, or more than that I guess I was thinking it was usually singular. It’s usually a boat, a lifeboat. This person has the ability to see that it comes from a variety of places. Tracy: Many chances, maybe. Do you feel like looking at one more poem? Okay that’s a thumbs up. This one is on 59. It’s by Tina Chang. No relation to Victoria. [Tracy reads “Story of Girls” by Tina Chang] Can we have a volunteer to read this one again for us, a second time? [Person 12 reads “Story of Girls”] Tracy: I feel like I have to tell you. This poem is a beautiful poem on the page when the page is big enough to fit it, but in this little tiny book the lines get broken. So don’t take those as disruptions that are intentional, this is just formatting that happened so that the poem could fit on the page. I love symmetry so I feel like I wanna tell you this poem is beautifully symmetrical. But what are some of the things you notice here? Person 7: I’m wondering if I’m the only person after reading the first few lines felt particularly disturbed, because immediately my mind went to the hearings that we just witnessed. And it took me a moment to continue because it was so vivid. Tracy: I think there were some mhm’s in the room. Even after you read the first line of the poem, with the title so close behind you, there’s this terrible reality that the poem acknowledges, right? The poem does a lot to tell us, nothing happens, it’s okay, nothing is touched, she’s okay. But that initial sense of terror never goes away. And in some ways, to me, all of those moments where it’s just her brothers, nothing happened, it almost—it doesn’t count. This is an awful scene of violence, right? Even, whatever, with all of those disclaimers. So what do we do with that? What does this poem cause you to notice and think and wonder? Person 13: Actually, I think I preferred just to not. The disclaimers made me so angry. The disclaimers, as if because nothing had been touched nothing bad had been done, made me extremely angry. Tracy: I feel like that might not be accidental. You know? The poem is telling you it’s okay, it’s okay, but this is the story of girls. It’s really interesting, and maybe this is what we tell ourselves sometimes too. Person 14: I feel like there’s a really powerful story that’s told in not that many lines in this way that while you were reading it I almost felt, and then while he was reading it I almost felt like it was a really well constructed horror movie. In the middle of their being that marriage of sound was an error and the error kept repeating itself, I thought of the theme song from Halloween or something very jarring. And it just keeps going and it keeps repeating and you get kind of lulled into this certain type of atmosphere. And then also kind of building off of that, I felt like there’s actually only one girl who’s mentioned in the poem but the title says “The Story of Girls” so you wonder by the end kind of who the narrator is and what sort of story is being told and who’s telling it and who it’s for. Tracy: Did you want to speak to that a little bit? Person 15: I think I really noticed that she doesn’t speak, right? She’s just crying and screaming and sobbing. The poem took me to a space of, yeah nothing happened, nothing happened, but also knowing the history of families and the history of silence and the history of shutting up our stories, and how it’s very much focused on the boys and it’s very much focused on the men and how women are silenced. I thought it was very powerful, the line about how she took a breath and then she tried to take another, and I just picture her just sitting there traumatized, and I think about how this event that nothing happened in, and how that’s gonna follow her. Tracy: It’s interesting the verbs that we get to describe the boys, all the things that they’re doing—holding, laughing, jostling yeah then they’re dismissed and jostled down the long staircase, and we see the girl. Just almost breathing. There’s this really powerful and disturbing imbalance too in even the agency. Person 16: I was thinking about how, even though there’s only one girl being mentioned, how to read the mother. Is this something that’s intergenerational? Is this a repetition of something that’s happened in the mother’s—I don’t know, something about that. Person 17: Yes, what struck me and brought me to an emotional point was the final line. [reads line]. He stood by, he never even raised his voice so he could be heard, and he in a way allowed this to happen without any protest, and I find that kind of painful. I’ve sort of been in that position at one time where I let something happen and I regretted it, because I didn’t say something or do something or even try to stop it. So I relate to the boy and I also relate to the uncomfortable feeling of his just letting this go on. I think that’s a very powerful line. Tracy: Can we talk a little bit about that shift? You emphasized it when you read it. Because the whole poem has been in third person and then we get to that last line, [reads line]. What happened when you got to that place and suddenly our distance between what’s happening closes up? Person 18: For me, it makes me think about who the narrator is, but also I felt a sense of self-splitting. Sort of like, if the narrator in the beginning is using my brothers, but at some point it’s the brothers, and at the end it’s I again. There’s a sort of disassociation in the narration itself, it feels like a self-splitting to me. Well, even the mother—it said that it went on for hours or an hour and it was really loud, but then only after that long period of time did she come in to rescue the girl. She let the boys just get off with it, and didn’t even talk to them about what they had done, just let them go on with what they were doing for so long. I thought that was just sort of another disclaimer like oh it’s okay, whatever, she’s fine. But she’s clearly not, and so many people just stood by and let it happen. Tracy: I wanna ask a question that—if these are two poems that are very different, what do they suggest that poems are? If these two things are both poems, what are poems? Do you ever wonder like how do dogs know that a Dachshund and a Great Dane are both dogs? How are these both poems? Melissa: Hi, my name is Melissa Dunn, I’m a community organizer here in Lewiston, thanks for coming. I just wanna name that even a conversation, the Kavanaugh thing has been a really triggering time for people and survivors and bringing it up in spaces in subtleties is really hard. And hearing this poem is really triggering for some people and I hope that if there are people that are in the audience, that they seek self-care afterwards and maybe seek out somebody here that they can talk to. But I’m just naming that I’m really triggered, I’m in a really vulnerable time in my life and I’m a really vocal proud survivor of childhood trauma. I mean, this is really real stuff. It’s not just incidents like this, but similar incidents where things have happened. So I’m really having a hard time sitting here right now, so I just wanted to name that. Tracy: Thank you for sharing that and reminding us of that. I hope it’s at the very least an opportunity to have the kind of conversation that you’re talking about. And I’m sorry if it’s a painful poem to spring. Can we maybe close with another poem that can get us to another place and then have our conversations afterward? Maybe we can look at a poem, I think it’s on 47. It’s by Ross Gay. I love this poem because I think it is a beautiful poem about getting outside of yourself, learning from someone or something else, and I feel like it’s something that we need to remind ourselves to do more. And I feel like it’s also one of the great things that poetry teaches us to do. [Tracy reads “Becoming a Horse” by Ross Gay] Tracy: Can I ask that same question, now? Draw this poem in too – what are these things that we’re looking at? What are poems? What do they do? What are they for? Person 19: Poems, for me, feel like testimonies. They go beyond telling a story to sharing deep experience with another human being about what happened. This is what happened to me. And this is what it meant. Person 20: For me, when I read a poem, I think the more important thing is a poem doesn’t necessarily answer a question and there’s not one question, I don’t think, that one could answer definitively when using a poem. I think the more important thing is the questions the poem is provoking, and what the poem is trying to make you think, what the poem is trying to start like what kind of conversations it’s trying to start, what kind of things the poem wants the reader to think. That’s personally what I think a poem’s importance is. Person 21: I think a poem is like a personal kind of sharing that tells a story but, at the same time, it’s also kind of a thing left up to you for how you want to take it and you’re emotion. And sometimes I write poems, too, to just kind of let go but at the same time think deeper about what I’m writing the poem about. And I think poetry is a good way to express emotion. And yeah, that’s what I think poetry and poems are. Person 22: Hello guys! A poem to me is like being vulnerable and letting people see your talent and letting them know that your voice really matters, so yeah. Person 23: I think that oftentimes in poems there’s tensions and conflicts and, like the last poem we read, that love is the only thing without argument, I think there are arguments in poems and things constantly fighting against each other. Person 24: So basically what, in my perspective of a poem, it basically tells us—a person to shout out who they are and yeah and it basically tells us a story. So yeah, thank you. Tracy: Okay, there’s one last comment. I’ll just say thank you now ‘cause I’m so grateful that everybody’s really been so generous and thoughtful in responding to these poems. I really—I learn from listening. Person 25: I’m not suggesting that it’s the only use for poetry, but one of the values is when we read a novel or a short story, the character comes into a problem and then there’s a solution at the end. And not every story that we have to tell, have we come to the solution yet. And so, a poem is a way to tell a story that you haven’t solved yet. Tracy: Well, thank you very much. And I hope you might find poems in this anthology that are useful, helpful, worth pondering and talking about. Thanks.