No. 7

Fall 2004

Where Listening Takes Us:
A Conversation with Tracy K. Smith
Marshall Warfield

Tracy Smith was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her first book, The Body's Question, published by Graywolf Press. She received degrees from Harvard and Columbia universities and a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Described by Kevin Young as a "wordsmith of the first order" and by Yusef Komunyakaa as possessing "a voice that can weave beauty and terror into one breath," Smith's work continues to garner attention--as evidenced by recent interviews in Gulf Coast and Callaloo and a 2004 Rona Jaffee Foundation writer's award. She currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Marshall Warfield is a student in the University of Pittsburgh's MFA program.

This might sound very opinionated, but I've become accustomed to seeing sensual and sexual imagery in poetry handled like a symptom to be described clinically or like a spectacle to be gawked at - what's surprising and wonderful about the sensuality and sexuality in your poems is that they seem to be asking me for commitment, involvement, to deal with complicated emotions like longing or hurt or sympathy or sadness, even happiness. I am curious to know where that came from - what makes you do that with your imagery.

Well I don't think that it was necessarily a choice. Those poems served an important purpose for me - they were sites where I was able to explore certain questions, reactions, responses or feelings. I also remember that there was a point where I was trying to ask my students what topics they were afraid to write about. I asked myself the same question and sexuality or sensuality was something that I just felt very self-conscious discussing in my work. It was something I pushed myself to engage in, but I didn't have any sort of goals in terms of what I wanted a reader to experience or reflect upon. I think that's generally true in terms of my process as a writer - I don't think about the reader until very late in the game.

I want to talk to you about the middle of your book - there's a movement between the poems "Appetite," "A Hunger So Honed" and "Credulity" - that is beautiful. I think of it as a moment of manuscript craftsmanship in which I see a theme becoming richer and emotional stakes getting higher, from poem to poem to poem, even though the subject matter and the forms are different. How did you do that - what was going on there?

Thank you. "A Hunger So Honed" is probably the oldest of those that you mentioned - I didn't realize that that idea of longing and hunger, or desire, was that important to me, but once I gave myself permission to broach it - it just wouldn't go away. Once I had the work finished and was brave enough to take a look at it all there were certain poems that seemed to announce a relationship to one another. Sometimes my choices in terms of ordering the manuscript were determined by trying not to disguise the fact that certain themes came up again and again; that recognition caused me to place poems like the ones you mention together. Sometimes it was about trying to pull a little more out of a poem by placing it next to a poem that might be able to draw sharper focus to certain themes within it. I feel like with those poems I was "outing" myself in terms of placement - trying to see if the obvious theme of appetite in its different forms could be sustained. I was hoping that maybe the placement would be one way of giving it a different kind of weight or a more deliberate weight.

I hoped that you would be able to talk to the craft behind that arrangement.

Well, I remember writing "Credulity," - then coming back to it after I had a sense of where things were going in the manuscript - and wanting a quiet moment at that point in the manuscript. Because there were so many extended poems in that part of the book, I wanted something that was more of a brief lyric to go there. There were a few places in the book where I had a sense that if this was a continual arc, and the reader was going to be reading it from beginning to end, there were places where I wanted some quieter poem to come in and pull back from longer sequences or more dramatic moments. I think "Credulity" and "What Fear Is," or even "Something like Dying, Maybe," are placed where they are because they seem to be deliberately quiet.

Those "quiet poems" are often deeply lyric but there is still a narrative force that compels me to learn more, to turn the page - and in your narrative poems there is still a great sense of lyricism that makes me want to read the poem again. Where do you think that comes from?

I think it comes from having been initially uncomfortable with the idea that I had to choose - that if I was going to write a lyric poem I needed to find a way of sustaining a meditation and a set of images and have them work on their own, or that if I was going to tell a story, I had to begin at the beginning and keep going to the end. For a long time the process of writing a poem or at least finishing a poem was kind of painful work, akin to anxiety like "Will I be able to get to the end of this poem?" What I feel now is "How can I get further into this poem? How can I get this poem to respond to my wishes or questions? How can I hear it?" So I started to experiment. If I began to feel stuck in a lyric poem I would ask, "What would happen if I started to narrate something or ask a question?" I found that one of the pleasures of writing more narrative poems is using that other voice or that other story as a kind of pretext to wander into different sets of images than I might have access to in a lyric poem. It's ironic or paradoxical - but it seems like each form has given me a little more access to the other in ways that make writing more fun.

Heaven forbid we should have fun writing. It seems that often your poems allow themselves to go where they may - that the poem takes over, so-to-speak. I've heard this phrased as the difference between willful and intuitive writing - I see your work as closer to the subconscious, the intuitive. Would you speak to that?

There is an essay by Gregory Orr that I read as a graduate student and I've become conscious of it again now that I have students. The idea is that there are four temperaments: music, imagination, story, and structure. Music and imagination are pushing against limits and story and structure are pushing toward limits. A poem "should" on a certain level, try and embody all four to differing degrees even though the poet may, by nature, feel more adept at one or another individual temperament. I've changed a lot from when I first started writing poetry. When I was in college, even when I was getting my MFA, those limitations of story and structure were very important to me. I felt I needed a certain type of symmetry. I wanted the poems to cover certain ground. I felt like those limitations ultimately were needed - maybe that's part of the anxiety I was talking about earlier. So making a conscious move toward the more expansive elements invested the writing process with more of a sense of freedom and possibility. I'm also conscious of ways that music and sound and association can drive a poem, so maybe that's another thing that you are noticing or pointing to when you say the poem takes over. I like the idea that in a poem, you don't have to be true to the idea that starts a poem - it can get you to something that might be more important or more intrinsic to the poem itself - and that can lead somewhere else. I'm also interested in ways that those other speakers or other impulses in a poem can pull me away from a kind of poetry of "me" - the self - poems that are driven by my literal lived experiences - because I feel that in a way I've already done that for now.

Your poems in The Body's Question never claim "to tell it like it is" yet they also don't cast out realities as "whatever's," or "non-concern's" that I can contemplate and then forget. Your poems ask questions of me - they shake the ground where I am standing and open up this imaginary space that I must step into in order to feel steady again. What or who taught you how to pose these powerful questions?

I can remember being really enchanted by one definition of a poem that Lucie Brock-Broido posited - she's wonderful - she starts out her workshop with 50 definitions of poems by students, poets and several "anonymous" people. One of them that I really loved and that I think is hers describes a poem as stopping you and saying, 'Hey, come here, let me tell you what it was like,' and then the poem lies to you, or does its best to tell you what it was like or wasn't like or whatever the poem chooses to do. I like the permission that that kind of a definition gives me because it's about deciding who's going to do that assault - and deciding what the world that they are trying to make sense of is. The idea that everything is so subjective means that there is a certain amount of shifting that you can explore.

I feel like the questions that your poems raise also manage to admit subjectivity but deny us a moral relativity.

Well, we really don't live in that position of moral relativity or with much objectivity until afterwards, until we are questioning events. But I feel like the only way that you can enter into the endeavor of a poem is from a very specific place. I love reading a poet like Seamus Heaney because I think he's so good at looking at something and looking at it longer and longer - until the world of that thing opens up and suddenly you are made to realize that you have different faculties than you thought you had. For me, poetry is really just about trying to inhabit the world a little more fully. And I don't know if there's any other way to do that than to assume that there are large and unavoidable and unknowable elements of the world all around us, and that we're inside of them and the only thing that we can really do is describe those small pieces and know the gaps in those descriptions point to bigger, sometimes truer, observations.

Throughout the book I felt like I was hearing, "Why and how joy? Why and how pain? Why and how love? Why and how movement? Why and how lack, abundance?" I don't know if those were the questions you had in mind as you were writing or revising the book, but I wonder what questions you're asking these days.

Those were the questions that were really governing my life around the time of writing those poems. There were big transitions, big losses, big wonderful events. I feel like I'm asking different questions in my poems right now, questions to pull me outside of my own perspective a little bit, my own "stake" in things. That's impossible, but I think that there's a way of choosing whether the self is going to be the vehicle of the poem or not. I'm trying to choose away from that now. I'm trying to see if there is a way of getting outside of the self to such an extent that the self is more easily and generously able to connect to the world that it's a part of. I'm writing about different geographical places and different communities. I'm trying to engage in some ideas about history and politics that are interesting to me. I'm sure the other questions won't go away soon - recognizing that there are lots of things that we will never know, or have, or obtain - but I'm trying to use them to evoke other kinds of discoveries.

Would you talk more about your current work?

There are some literal triggers. I had this idea that I wanted to look for Afro-Mexican poets - because I met one, and didn't know that much about the history of people of African descent in Mexico. I knew that there must be more poets like this person. I was in Spain for a little while at a residency and really struck by what seemed to be very direct connections between folk traditions-like flamenco, and "outsiders" such as people of Roma descent in urban communities in Spain-and things like the blues and people who are marginalized in a context which is more familiar to me here in the States. Those ideas were in my mind when I took my search to Mexico. What I found were older groups of people of Afro-Mestizo descent who were keeping folk traditions alive. There are versos, which are these rhymed couplets that people recite, and quentos, folk tales, and a particular dance called the Artesa, which has very visible connections to African forms and traditions. These small communities that seem to kind of exist in another time also made me think of parts of this country-of my memories of the south when I was a child visiting grandparents; of neighborhoods in cities like New York or Los Angeles where people's day to day lives happen in what we've learned to call the "margin." I'm trying to weave this together in a way that reflects my own interest in the world as a political space. For me there is a big element of resistance that these people seem to embody. They are not activists and they're not calling attention to themselves and they're not fighting in the way that we associate with activists or freedom fighters, but there is an ongoing struggle that they inhabit that is compelling and interesting. I'm trying to learn something other than the most obvious thing from it - somehow thinking about the political climate that we live in and our culpability as Americans even when we aren't in agreement with what the country is doing. Somehow there is a sloppy trail that all of that stuff is connected to and I'm interested in making more sense out of it and maybe drawing from some of the elements of those folk cultures in making that sense.

Right now you're teaching at Pitt. What's it like being on the other side of the classroom?

I love teaching. I didn't know that I would like it this much until I got thrown into it maybe like four or five years ago. For me it's the best of a workshop - because I'm able to really give 100 percent to each of the writers in the workshop and to think about the ideas that I'm already thinking about and talk about the ideas that the students are thinking about - so it's also feeding me in ways that I am very grateful for.

Are there any things that you would love to repeat with your students now that happened for you in a classroom back at say Harvard or Columbia?

Definitely - I think that my teaching has been really informed by the way that teachers I've loved-like Lucie-have taught me. One of my conscious goals is to convey her devotion to poetry and her sense of wonder - to convey the fact that poetry is this entity that is kind of mischievous and magical and unable to be pinned-down. There is a kind of play that I think is important to the serious work of writing and commenting on one another's work and I hope that is all part of the workshops I currently run.

Are there things that you are never going to repeat or will just not allow your classes to get engaged in?

I will lay myself down on the train tracks of a workshop where people are more concerned with making sure that their knowledge and background as readers comes across than they are concerned about helping other people make the most of their projects. That posturing is a waste of everybody's time. I've been in workshops with people who thrive on that - it's always kind of detrimental to everyone. You can really learn from the work that you don't understand or agree with. It teaches you something. I think if we could all just figure out ways of learning from one another than the workshop is guaranteed to be a worthwhile endeavor.

Can you describe your ideal teaching environment, whether it's the classroom, the home, is there one in which there's a kind of authority balanced with exploration?

Yes. (Laughter) I find myself teaching predominantly in classrooms, so I find that that's just normal. I like it when people acknowledge my ability to guide, but I also really love when there is a lot of energy and exchange regardless of which students have been in writing poetry or workshopping or in the program longer.

Thank you - this is what I was trying to ask. Can you describe that ideal classroom - it sounds like for you it's one that has a lot of energy.

Yes, it begins to happen about three or four weeks into the term when we begin to recognize one another's voices and then we can speak a little but more individually to the work, to the poems, based on what they come from, what other poems they have been preceded by, what the wishes of the writer are.

What would be your ideal space in which to write? Where do you find yourself writing?

I do a lot of writing at home, so it's nice that I live with somebody who - when I'm at my real home - is also engaged in making art. The first poem that I finished here in Pittsburgh was written on one of the computers in the library, so I'm also pretty flexible. I get a lot of writing done in my office. Generally, I like to be in a private space where I know that there's other stuff happening, so an office in a hallway of other offices is great because there's traffic, people. I'm the youngest in a family of five kids and I remember lying in bed at night - my bedtime would be first - but I would hear the voices of the rest of the family laughing and people talking, and I always longed to be in that other room, and if I couldn't be there I would really just enjoy listening to the sound of life going on.

Copyright 2004, Marshall Warfield

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.