Tracy K. Smith and Jackie Kay in Conversation

The Guardian hosts a conversation between Scotland's Makar, Jackie Kay, and the outgoing U.S. Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith, spanning the subjects of Insta-poetry, what it's like to be poet laureate (or makar, in Kay's case), and the interesting places that their duties have taken them. Killian Fox facilitates the conversation and explains at the beginning that the two needed "very little prompting to get started and the conversation flows so freely that it’s difficult to get a word in edgeways." From their conversation: 

Let’s start by talking about being a poet laureate – or makar in Jackie’s case. What’s the experience been like for each of you?

JK It’s a huge honour and a huge surprise to be picked as the national poet, particularly if you had an ambivalent relationship with your country for some of your life. Lots of different things come along with it. I wrote a poem for the opening of the Scottish parliament three years ago and the Queen was there, and the whole of the parliament, and my mum and dad – my dad, who’d fought as the Communist party candidate for years, said: “I’ve made it at last, I’ve finally got in!” I’ve just written a poem to celebrate 20 years of Scottish devolution that’s multi-voiced, because I see my role – and I think we have a lot in common in this way – as not just representing my own voice but the voices you don’t get to hear from. What about you? What was it like when you were asked?

TKS I was honoured and grateful, but also scared because I’d seen so many poets laureate do amazing outreach work and I asked myself, what could I do that they haven’t already done? But then I started thinking about how our national discourse in the US has become so splintered, with such division and intolerance across different perspectives, and I thought, poetry is good medicine for that, it’s something that makes everyone a little bit more attentive.

What’s been so exciting to me is going into spaces where there are people who say, “Oh I’ve always been bad at poetry”, and I say, “No, this is our original language. We lived in images and metaphor and associations and dreams until it was taught that we should be thinking otherwise, and what we are doing together now is restoring something that we ought to claim.”

Read on at The Guardian.