Tracy K. Smith Quotes & Sayings

I don't know how anyone can see the Hubble 'Deep Field' image and not feel like something else is going about its business out there. — Tracy K. Smith

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

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

It used to be, you'd open your mouth
And the weather changed. You'd
Open your mouth and the sky'd spill
That dry, missing-someone kind of rain
No matter the season. And it hurt
Like a guitar hurts under the right hands.
Like a good strong spell. Now
You're all song. Body gone to memory.
And guess what? It hurts
Harder. — Tracy K. Smith

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 - the sentiments that make us susceptible to sentimentality - actually exist. — Tracy K. Smith

I feel most alive, most electric with faith, breath, and courage, when I think of God as a current that runs through all that is. Not by will or by choice. Not as a benediction but because there are laws even God must obey. — Tracy K. Smith

One of my main wishes in wanting to write about my mother was to explore the impact of her death on my life, explore our relationship, think about the different versions of myself that I was with and without her. I also had the really strong wish to bring her to life for my children, who were born after she was gone. — Tracy K. Smith

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

Time never stops, but does it end? and how many lives
before take-off, before we find ourselves
beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold? — Tracy K. Smith

From time to time, i think of him watching me
from over the top of his glasses, or eating candy
from a jar. i remember thanking him each time
the session was done. but mostly what i see
is a human hand reaching down to lift
a pebble from my tongue — Tracy K. Smith

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit. — Tracy K. Smith

Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it. — Tracy K. Smith

I think humans have always felt watched back by whatever is out there flickering in the distance. What excites me is what the imagination creates, not simply in explanation of what is there but also to explain or justify the feeling of awe and attachment that the heavens inspire. — Tracy K. Smith

We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,

That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered. — Tracy K. Smith

A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point. — Tracy K. Smith

Some like to imagine
a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,
mouthing 'yes, yes' as we toddle towards the light,
biting her lip of we teeter at some ledge. longing
to sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best. — Tracy K. Smith

I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking. — Tracy K. Smith

Look, I want to say,
The worst thing you can imagine has already
Zipped up its coat and is heading back
Up the road to wherever it came from. — Tracy K. Smith

I am keenly aware that in writing about my mother, I am writing about my aunts' sister, and that in writing about my grandmother, I'm writing about their mother. I know that my honesty about how my view of these people has changed over the years may be painful. — Tracy K. Smith

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem. — Tracy K. Smith

I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to. — Tracy K. Smith

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

I feel like it's a gift for any writer to be recognized like this. — Tracy K. Smith

I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life. — Tracy K. Smith

Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated. — Tracy K. Smith

I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books. — Tracy K. Smith

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

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

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

I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines, — Tracy K. Smith

Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat. — Tracy K. Smith

I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them. — Tracy K. Smith

Listen: the dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,
marbled with static like gristly meat. a chorus of engines churns.
silence taunts: a dare. everything that disappears
disappears as if returning somewhere. — Tracy K. Smith

Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect. — Tracy K. Smith

When my father died, those years when he was working on the Hubble came back to me, and it seemed fitting to imagine him as having somehow merged with the large mystery that the universe represents. — Tracy K. Smith

We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer. — Tracy K. Smith

Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas. — Tracy K. Smith

Sometimes, what i see is a library in a rural community.
all the tall shelves in the big open room. and the pencils
in a cup at circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.
the books have lived here all along, belonging
for weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence
of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,
a pair of eyes. the most remarkable lies. — Tracy K. Smith

[ ... ] the body is what we lean toward,
tensing as it darts, dancing away.
but it's the voice that enters us. even
saying nothing. even saying nothing
over and over absently to itself — Tracy K. Smith

When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine. — Tracy K. Smith

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

For years following the death of my mother, I wanted to write about her. I started writing what I thought of as personal essays about growing up as her child, but I never could finish any of them. I think I was too close to that loss, and too eager to try and resolve things, to make her death make sense. — Tracy K. Smith

everything/ that ever was still is, somewhere — Tracy K. Smith