After an exciting semester with English teacher Mela Frye, Symposium students were thrilled that they were able to finally meet Symposium author Tracy K. Smith after her visit was postponed a month due to COVID-19 precautions. Smith visited KO on Feb. 7 and 8, 2022, the culmination of a six-month long deep dive into Smith’s poetry, memoir, translations, and essays. Students read her work in a chronological order, beginning with “The Body’s Question” and finishing with her new release “Such Color.”
In addition to reading her works, the Symposium class also gave speeches every other week in praise of specific elements of her poetry or memoir. It was a time to reflect on what the class had been reading and tie it to concepts with larger implications, similar to how Smith did in her poetry. On the off weeks, the students submitted either a poem imitating Smith’s style or a written reflection on a certain element of her work, allowing the class to strengthen their writing skills throughout the semester. Finally, the students learned of Smith’s background through watching various speeches and interviews, as well as reading her memoir “Ordinary Light.”
Smith was born in Massachusetts and grew up in California, the youngest of five children. Her mother was a teacher and her father was an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, which heavily influenced her writing. She graduated from Harvard and later went on to be a Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford. Currently, she teaches at Harvard, her alma mater, as a professor of English and African American Studies. She has vast experience teaching and collaborating with college students, but this was her first time visiting a high school where students had done such a deep dive into her work. She didn’t have a lot of preconceived expectations coming in, leading her to be pleasantly surprised by the program the English Department prepared.
Smith won a Pulitzer Prize for her collection “Life on Mars,” which was heavily influenced by her father’s occupation and written as an elegy for her late father. It discussed themes of death, grief, and existentialism, interweaving them with scientific language and imagery. She also was the Poet Laureate from 2017-2019, where she went to different communities and read poetry.
The pandemic had a large impact on Smith’s life and her poetry. With all the chaos happening in the world, she felt it brought clarity to her voice. With the summer of 2020 being the height of reckoning with racial injustice, the movement impacted her personal life greatly. Writing these poems helped her feel sane during a time of both public and private pain and feeling like her life was one way one day and completely different the next day.
The Symposium students observed a few common themes about Smith’s work; most notably, the many different forms of love. Whether for family, a romantic partner, friends, or even the general public, it was a constant presence through all Smith’s writing. Her book “Wade in the Water” specifically focused on that all-encompassing love (agape, as termed by the Greeks), featuring poems that required patience and understanding from the subjects, even if they didn’t necessarily know each other. “Some of the poems in that book I think about as a thought experiment to practice more love and compassion towards strangers,” she said. Seeking to promote understanding and empathy in place of judgment, she created somewhat uncomfortable situations that forced us to consider our own response. “It’s hard to look with love towards someone who is intersecting with your life, perhaps inconveniently. And so a poem is a way to practice something that’s hard in life. If the poem teaches me something, makes me recognize that this hard thing is a choice I’m capable, occasionally, of making, then a poem can have that use for somebody else.” Smith uses that sentiment both figuratively and literally in her poems from “Wade in the Water,” where she discusses the mundane that surrounds our everyday life. A moment as simple as walking across the street becomes an unforgettable moment in time.
Smith’s ideals surrounding this topic were certainly reflected in her visit with us, as she treated every question, presentation, and lecture with the same respect and graciousness. She spoke more to the power of poetry throughout her visit, citing that it could be responsible for both minor and major shifts in perspective, but then revealed that her next work branches out into an entirely different art form. She wants to explore the collective imagination that we share as a country, defining who we are as Americans and what tools we have to shape this space through a variety of mediums.
After finding her unique creative voice, no art form is off limits to Smith. She spoke to this process, outlining her own experience to guide others. Her first inspiration was Seamus Heaney; she was able to study with him in college and improved her technical skills through imitating his work. From there, the question was how she would find her own writely voice- a question she worried about immensely originally.
“What I think now, with decades of experience, is that your voice is characterized by what you’re interested in, by the questions you’re committed to asking and exploring,” Smith said. “Everything else- the way you use language, the way you use sound, all of that is something that you learn by imitating other people,” she continued, laughing. “Those tools, in service of your innate questions and commitments, equals your voice.” Smith’s introspective nature helps the reader to adapt those same qualities and creates a space for reflection and compassion.
After establishing a unique voice, Smith struggled finding the time to use it, finally realizing that she had to specifically carve out chunks of her schedule to write. “It’s easy to be distracted,” she said. “It’s easy to go out, fill up your calendar with commitments that take you away from the slow, quiet, solitary work that you have to do in order to write poems. You have to make deliberate choices in order to have time.” She also learned to be truly vulnerable in her writing during the time she set aside, overcoming the doubts that could dissuade her from discussing certain topics. She shared that it can be easy to hide within a poem, using attitude, tone, or events to mask the hard topics she wanted to discuss. It’s obvious that Smith conquered this fear, as there were many a symposium speech dedicated to the raw emotions present in Smith’s work, which then prompted the class to consider certain elements of their life through a new perspective.
