Tracy K. Smith Featured at Oprah Magazine

The magazine's reporter Serena Alagappan speaks with former US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith about her forthcoming (and first ever) volume of collected poetry, Eternity, and about poetry's mass appeal. "Smith," writes Alagappan, "underscores how poems encourage readers to feel." Picking up there: 

During her tenure as Poet Laureate, Smith compiled an anthology called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, which she took to various communities around the country, including senior centers, prisons, and colleges. With this collection, Smith sought to reach readers who might never have encountered poetry before. She explains, "you don't need a new vocabulary; you don't need prior knowledge. All you need to do is read attentively and be aware of or alert to what you feel, what you wonder, what the poem causes you to remember or realize."

As readers, we all have emotions and memories to offer text. But why might we shy away from such an offering? Perhaps we think our responses are illegitimate. Smith addresses this concern by saying that "once people have permission to see that what they're noticing is valid, then they see all kinds of things in poems." She debunks the notion that poems are "rarefied objects for the select few."

She says her approach to readers is really just to say, "read a poem and listen, and listen to your reaction as well...you can get quite far on that. That's not the end of the road, but it's a pretty good journey that you can take." Instead of finishing a poem and wondering if you "got it," ask yourself if you liked the way two words sounded next to each other, or if an image stirred a sensory recollection. Imagine what a stanza might sound like read aloud in the different voices of people you love. Observe if a line made you shake your head, raise your brows, or widen your eyes. Did one phrase make you grateful? Did another make you fearful?

Learn more at Oprah Magazine.