Tracy K. Smith famous quotes

03-28-2025

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Distance #Thinking #Might
time never stops, but does it end? and how many livesbefore take-off, before we find ourselves beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Gold #Doe #Ends
Lizzie Harris's debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Healing #Joy #Crafts
Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Poetry #Events #Moments
Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Writing #Eye #Space
Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon Â– even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Real #Writing #Thinking
If I call it pain, and try to touch it With my hands, my own life, It lies still and the music thins, A pulse felt for through garments.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Pain #Lying #Hands
History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Dog #Ice #History
When I was young, my father was lord Of a small kingdom: a wife, a garden, Kids for whom his word was Word. It took years for my view to harden, To shrink him to human size.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Father #Kids #Garden
Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Beautiful #Ideas #Rich
I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines,
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Long #Six #Lines
We are here for what amounts to a few/hours,/a day at most./We feel around making sense of the terrain,/our own new limbs,/Bumping up against a herd of bodies/until one becomes home./Moments sweep past. The grass bends/then learns again to stand.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Home #Past #Body
Everything that disappears/Disappears as if returning somewhere
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Disappear
I grew up in northern California in a town called Fairfield, which is kind of exactly between San Francisco and Sacramento, a small suburb. And I'm the youngest of five children.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Children #California #San Francisco
For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Opportunity #Littles #Kind
Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Retreat #Brooklyn #Kind
Poems infatuated with their own smarts and detached from any emotional grounding can leave the reader feeling lonely, empty and ashamed for having expected more. Like icy adolescents, such poetry is more interested in commiserating than acknowledging that feelings â€” the sentiments that make us susceptible to sentimentality â€” actually exist.
-- Tracy K. Smith

#Lonely #Smart #Emotional

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