Poured Over: Tracy K. Smith on To Free the Captives

Jenna Seery

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s To Free the Captives combines the beauty of a memoir with a grander look at America’s history and future. Smith joins us to talk about family and cultural identity, race and belonging, the importance of poetry and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.    

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.   

Featured Books (Episode):
To Free the Captives by Tracy K. Smith
Such Color by Tracy K. Smith
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and Tracy K Smith, former Poet Laureate of the United States, one of my personal favorite poets, has also written a couple of memoirs, the newest one is out now it’s called To Free the Captives. We’re going to start there. But there’s also a new poetry collection, A New and Selected Poems, Such Color, and certainly Life on Mars. We’re going to talk about Wade in the Water, there’s, there’s a lot. Tracy, I just want to say hi. And also, let’s start with To Free the Captives. Because there’s so much beautiful, beautiful work in this.

Tracy K. Smith
Thank you. I’m so excited for this conversation. So we can start wherever you want to go. Excellent.

Okay, To Free the Captives? When did you start working on this memoir? When did you decide the new book was going to be a memoir, and then we’re going to talk about your parents, again, who I kind of feel like I know, even though I’ve never met them, I just learned that through your work.

I started trying to write my way towards some sort of clarity in 2020, probably in August of 2020. And it was just a lot of traction, less thinking, if that makes sense. But that desire, created a different kind of writing practice for me, okay. And part of that was bringing in a more conscious kind of devotion, I always have said, poetry is a kind of a spiritual practice, you know, because the way of listening to a larger space, but that also often felt almost metal, metaphorical. Yep. And maybe I was listening to the deeper part of my own unconscious mind that gets sort of buried over in the day to day, but in 2020, I was looking for help. And so I was like asking God asking ancestors asking any life force to be able to guide and console me, that was true in my poems as well, a lot of such color, the new poems in such color were written at that same time, it was a summer of feeling almost summoned occasionally to capture a voice or a proposition that seemed to come from, you know, from an external source that I could perceive. And I didn’t want to call it a memoir. It’s so funny to me now, because it is so clearly a book in which the life I live in the lives I’ve descended from, are helping me to find what I believe, which is, I think what memoirs are. But I wanted this to be essays for the longest time. And I think it was because I wanted like, I wanted to be able to articulate something that would be useful and civic terms, that would be a kind of logic. That could be, I don’t know if that could cut through so much of the backward facing, or reactive discourse, that I just feel that we’re getting deeper and deeper into. But it’s really since finishing the book and feeling like I have learned something or been led a ways down a new path, that I can say, Oh, it’s a memoir. This is very clearly a book that’s thinking toward lives that I’m connected to, but one of those lives is the life of the nation.

I also feel though, that I know more of you now than I have previously. But I feel like you took us very specifically into say, Wade in the Water, for instance, like you’re bringing ring shouts into To Free the Captives in a way that took me deeper into the original poem, which was sort of my first experience of the idea of a ring shout, and we will come back to that for folks who don’t know exactly what it is. But during day two, like, I feel like there’s more of your dad, and certainly Life on Mars and your mom in The Body’s Question as well. And I just, I do feel like you were taking me deeper into work that I had already experienced, separate from and I don’t, for me, you know, our nation is represented by us, right? Like all of us who make it up and the more we can get these personal stories, and your family’s story is you have cowboys in your family. And I do want to talk about the Cowboys because I mean, if we’re talking about America, we have to talk about the American west at some point. Yes, your cowboys are in Alabama, New Orleans, but at the same time, I mean, talk about an image of America.

And so I think that is there are many things hiding in that image, right?

Yes, yes, there are. But did I laugh when suddenly you’re like, I’m here, my uncle’s friends and some of them are even wearing chaps and there you are on the back of a horse too. It’s a really potent image, and it’s one that brings us back to your dad. And you talk about how sort of you’re pretty sure that part of that cowboy ethos lived on in your scientist Dad, your dad who worked on the Hubble space project. So as you’re putting all of this together, though, and you’re putting yourself out in kind of a new way, right, I mean, ordinary light was much more about looking back. And To Free the Captives like you are really in the present.

Yeah, it felt a fair way to if I wanted to write about a collective undoing and collective kind of like, bridge, we have to figure out how to build. I wanted to think about some of my own sites of undoing and so sobriety, something I wanted to find a way to write about and situating it within a sense of what for me has become civic sobriety was really helpful. It helps me to be vulnerable and honest about that.

History and institution. History is a big sort of through line in the book. And it’s personal history, obviously. But it’s institutional history. It’s our shared history. It’s your parents’ history. It’s your family’s history. And a lot of your family has served in the military. And there’s a long tradition of Black and Brown people serving in the American armed forces. And, you know, sometimes I think about the 442, right, the Japanese American army contingent that, you know, Daniel Inouye, it was at the Battle of the Bulge and lost use of one of his arms there, and their families are going to camps. All of this contradiction. Your family’s history runs really long and deep.

Sometimes I realize it’s not just that we happen to find ourselves, either, with some sort of unexpected proximity to those contradictions. They are designed in such a way as to draw us in, we become complicit by design, I think. So an important facet of realizing that our private histories illuminate that larger history is to think about what’s been made inevitable for us.

Are we going to ever get to a point where we break that inevitability, we’re breaking everything else.

It feels like either the kind of thing where everyone is going to have to recognize, and this is my hope, that no matter how much power we believe ourselves to have, we’re actually vulnerable to being used by the systems, and institutions, those that you know, are really insistent upon that kind of complicity, or maybe even the hierarchies that that give us this different sense of who our allies are, and who we must use, as you know, kind of like pawns or leverage. Maybe we’ll get to that insight. But the more institutions I watch breaking, makes me feel like we might get there because we have no choice, you know, because even those systems that have manipulated us very effectively, are no longer able to operate based on their given or chosen terms.

I hope you’re right, I would like to see significant change. You ask a question, though, in To Free the Captives that I really love, and I’m still sort of playing with but you know, is memory and institution. And I do like that, it seems nostalgia, can be weaponized. And I feel like memory is kind of that’s going to be the thing that really tests us. And that’s the thing that’s really been pushing people’s buttons and really forcing bad decision making in a lot of ways because people just don’t, memory just has the force of a tsunami.

And we feel torn. Oftentimes, we feel like in order to have a fidelity or allegiance to generations before that we, you know, we’ve been taught to love and not question we have to take these hard, rigid stances. Not always, but when debate arises. There’s that moment at the very end of the book, though, where there’s a woman I meet in Kentucky, hears me read one of my poems that’s written in the voices of Civil War soldiers, and that’s actually arrived, you know, verbatim from a lot of their statements and letters. And I believe that encounter with those voices caused her to think differently about the voice of her grandmother that she’d grown up with a devotion to, and to say maybe some of the things she said, don’t need to be said any longer. That’s the little sliver of hope. And I have, you know, I think I have children. I know I have children. And I think that’s why I’m always looking for hope, you know, I can’t feel good. I’m not yet willing to hand it over to them and say it’s broken.

This is where language, right, like you have always, since minute one, since the first collection, Kevin Young, you know, out of the gate is just like, wait a minute, what Tracy K Smith does with language is extraordinary. And, you know, memory is built out of language, right? Poetry is built out of language, the story built out of language, like, language needs to be pliable, it needs to evolve, it can’t be the static thing. Because otherwise, and I am going to pick this joke because of where you now live. But we’d all be Puritans walking around saying thee and thou and you know, dost and blah, blah, blah. And that’s not when I think of how much we can do with language that we have now. Right? Like, even if we look back at our parents who, yeah, I don’t doubt that my parents loved me. But the language was sometimes an issue. They didn’t always have words, just talk about what was going on. We have this tableau, right, we have these resources, we have mountains of words.

We’re learning a new sort of like flexibility, even in thinking, I think about how he was the pronoun for so long. And we became willing and also grateful for the opportunity to say, or she. And now I think, you know, almost it feels like another era when there was so but I know it’s not past, there was so much resistance to claiming and, and living with a as a singular pronoun, but it’s happening, it’s changing. And even for those of us who, you know, still feel ourselves positioned inside this normative pronouns, I feel that there’s a larger sense of individual possibility that comes from thinking of a person as multiple, you know, it takes us back to some of the terms of great poetry, and philosophy, but it means that our ear, and therefore our body is becoming receptive to new signs to act in response to.

You can even flip it back and just say, well, it’s Walt Whitman. It’s Walt Whitman.

Or Emerson.

It’s Emily Dickinson. I mean, who turned— I love this story that you hit Emily Dickinson at what, 11 or 12, something like that. And you were just like, oh, this, please. And it’s true. She really is a touchstone for a lot of us where, you know, I’ve been sort of forced fed, very traditional romantic, Thanatopsis I’m still feeling a little slapped upside the head by Thanatopsis. And it’s been a very long time since I’ve. But then you come across someone like Dickinson, and you’re just like, oh, wait a minute. Wait, um, and then someone says, oh, well, she was doing this in the 1800s. And you’re like, I’m sorry. What? Like, that is so exciting to me. Yeah. And that tradition, and one of the things I picked up again, because of you, as I was playing around, prepping for the show, is Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems because I didn’t realize that Larkin was such an influence very early on just when you were saying, well, structurally, I was learning how to do this. There’s a formality to Larkin because I didn’t read Larkin for class. I just, of course, we all come to Larkin for that one poem that we all and it’s still he’s so fresh and so funny and so vibrant. And I’m thinking with these poems are like 60 years old. Yeah, like all of these, like, these poems are still older than…

Yeah, they I found Larkin really exciting when I was an undergrad. Because he invites you know, tone, he invited me to make something of dissatisfaction, anger, feeling left out, feeling snarky, and to do something productive with it, you know, to move through or in those tones and find that in his poems feel like a wall that can be blown out, you know, like a portal like that, that high window. I felt so grateful. I felt happy to be able to move through the world, oftentimes frustrated and alone and you know, I was young has speakers always feel so old but if feeling like an aged youth in some ways, and to think this is the bedrock of something that can be beautiful and meaningful if I’m willing to labor for that.

The poet’s Safiya Sinclair, who also has a memoir out, she draws from Sylvia Plath. And Cannibal is one of my new favorites, I was a little late coming to it, which I will totally own. But, you know, listening to her sort of talk about how she pulled from Plath and sort of created her own voice out of it. I just, I love this idea that poetry is a tradition that we can sit with, right? Like, when you were poet laureate, you came up with this very cool anthology, where you had 50 poets from 50 Different states, and you put it and it’s this tiny trim, and it’s, it is literally pocket sized, you can literally slip it in a jeans pocket, American Journal: 50 poems for our time, it’s so accessible and smart. And to me, there’s a direct line to sort of the Larkins of this world and the and sections and the Sylvia Plath and all the people that we sort of pick up at any point in our lives and go, Oh, hey, wait a minute. Yeah, now I get what you’re trying to do that it’s not just, you know, hearts and bunnies and flowers and all of this, like, you can take that image and you can take that musicality, and you can take that language. And suddenly, a line break looks really different. Yeah, you do that a lot. Actually, structurally, I was thinking about this, as I was making some notes earlier today, and your line breaks. As I was just sort of copying some stuff down just to remember the feel and everything. What’s the shift like for you that when you’re when you’re composing a poem, and you have to think about line breaks and blank space, you’ve also done a ratio of poetry, and found poetry, which are two different forms. It’s a really different way of experiencing language than when you’re writing prose. I mean, the flow is completely different prose. Obviously, there are some structural things that you do want to keep consistent with punctuation, some people, I’ve read novels where there’s no punctuation, and it works. And it’s great. And it’s amazing. But for a memoir, it’s kind of nice. A little bit of guidance where I should slow down.

Yeah, and I think it’s because we read prose more quickly, a poem, in so many ways, insists upon slower rate, and a receptivity to silence. Yeah, that’s my experience of poetry. And that’s definitely what I’m invested in as I write. And so for me, a line break, even though I know that in most cases, if my poems are pretty, you know, like, grammatical, for the most part, and so I know you’re reading toward a sentence, oftentimes. But a line break is this glimmer of suspense, where for a millisecond, you’re hovering, and not knowing if what you’ve been given as a complete thought, if you should dwell in the image that might be constructed out of what is ultimately proven to be a fragment, it often is a space to think about one possibility that the arrival of the next line is going to undercut completely. And I just love that. It’s not just about taking a reader through changes, I think that’s what life feels like, when we’re inside of it in the moment, you’re moving forward, and building as you go, or gaining a better sense of perspective. And you don’t always know if what you’re coming upon is going to undo you, or, you know, gives you a greater sense of authority, or, you know, insist that you stop and go back and, and try again, sometimes that apprehension, it makes us stronger, somehow, I think it makes us better at listening to the thoughts that we can easily dismiss and ourselves and certainly in others when we’re when we’re asked to be in the position of a listener, which I hope is always a position of like wrapped, or beholden listener.

Poetry is also really the only thing that makes me slow down. Really, it really it, I can’t tell you how many books I read, I have no idea. I don’t keep track. I have never kept a book journal. I just I have no idea. But I do know that there are times where I’ll come off of like a lot of tapings in a row. If I don’t have a poet to break it up. And I need to just read a lot of poetry for like a week. And because I can’t like I just it’s really rebooting my brain. It’s absolutely rebooting my brain. And sometimes it’s stuff that I’ve read 1000 times before and other times, I’ll just poke someone and just say, Okay, I need to record who’s doing interesting work now. Who do I need to be reading? Who have I missed? It’s funny how the poetry books always seem to live together on my shelves, and they don’t get scattered around. That’s a little weird. Because everything else I’m kind of like, Does it fit there? That’s fine.

What you’re saying is true for so many of us, not just writers, but people who read and care about literature and about other people’s voices. So I really question that question that comes up all the time for poets, which is does poetry matter? You know, I feel like it’s a campaign that’s intended to dissuade us from believing that slowing down like you’re talking about, or breaking out of the patterns of logic and association that live in all the other forms that demand our attention. Something that’s trying to persuade us at breaking out of that is not in our best interest, right? When what I believe teaches us to do is to recognize how much language feels like it’s eroding something alive in us. Now, I’m not talking about literature, but the language of the everyday, the language of our institutions and the language of the media.

Absolutely, because part of what I’m thinking about too, is when I read the part of To Free the Captives, that’s about ring shouts, where you’re sort of really digging in and really explaining a little more about what a ring shout is. And I’m going to ask you to explain here just in case, there are listeners who don’t know what a ring shout is, and then I’m going to bring up the poem that references it, but would you just explain what ring shots are.

They are a form of ritual and spiritual practice that emerges, you know, this is one beginning of it is in the antebellum south when you know, and enslaved people would make time to come together and bolster themselves with song with prayer with praise to God or even like calling upon God to become present. And one major vehicle for that gathering was the spiritual, these songs. And this practice has ties to West African spiritual practice and rhythmic patterns. So we know it really doesn’t begin on plantations, but it’s something that makes survival on plantations possible. And the spirituals as a canon are also operating in different registers. One is about hope and faith in God. But the stories of the Old Testament which contain so much of that hope, or the framework for it, also are stories of liberation. And so these songs become encoded with instructions on how to go about escaping where to meet, how quietly to tread, to walk in the water. So it’s not to be trackable by hounds and the trackers that are with them looking to bring people back into bondage. And so it’s this at once historical kind of practice are an artifact but it’s never died. It’s always been invested, even if it’s only subtly with a sense of like reviving a sense of community of hope of investment in not just the self, but a large collective. I think those songs, we know not obviously not everybody escaped or even thought they could, but to sing a song that gave us a sense that this is an operation that someone you care about, or someone that someone you know, cares about my undertake, I think that has to have given an enslaved person a sense of hope and purpose.

The first time I read Wade in the Water, the poem that incorporates ring shouts, obviously, I didn’t have the understanding that I now have having read To Free the Captives, right, and also listening to you right now. I’m like, the first time beautiful, loved it got lost in the language. The second time though, knowing what I now know, there was a cadence there that was not previously available to me. And the juxtaposition of the prose experience of crankshafts and the poet, the poetic experience, of ring shouts, I’m hoping that people who when they read To Free the Captives will go find Wade in the Water, because that’s exactly what writing is supposed to do what regardless of form, write prose or poetry. But to bring that moment to light, and that’s something you do across your work, even in ordinary light when you’re looking back, sort of more at childhood and everything else. We are so firmly in the present. It’s kind of like a magic act. You manage to say, hey, wait a minute. I know we’re looking at the history, but I don’t trust the history and we shouldn’t trust the history. The history has gotten us here. Like we need to make something new. But then we’re also kind of giving little bit of sight out of the future. Because while we’re us, and we haven’t quite figured out what we’re doing, but to be able to sit this firmly in the present, which you’ve kind of always done in your work, I know you’ve been meditating more, because you told me and to free the captives. So clearly that’s influencing some of the recent work, but nobody’s sit in the present the way that you because really, you’ve been doing it your entire career. So I can’t say it’s meditation.

Yeah, it hasn’t been conscious meditation. But I think that to descend from Black southerners, I think is to be aware that time, has like more than one track. Yeah, to know that, like, I can be sitting in a room, as a child listening to my parents reminisce about growing up in the South in Alabama, and hear them conjure the voices of their parents and grandparents and to feel a laughter, or a silence take shape that contains those other lives. That’s something that I’ve always been familiar with and haven’t always known what to call. But I think it’s it at heart is a kind of conjuring, it’s a way of saying, I mean, like people say, Oh, the generations I descend from, you know, every goodbye and gone, you know, or you’re someone has gone but not forgotten. Maybe that’s another more standardized way of thinking about that. But I think it’s to take it even farther and say, you know, you think we’re separated from the past by something as permanent feeling as death. But we’re not, right. If you believe in the Spirit, then you’re actually sitting with and potentially working with everybody else who’s been invested in these same questions, a family of nations of liberation. And it took me getting to a place of, you know, maybe it’s like one of the first real experiences of downhearted, blues feeling that seemed to emerge from my own individual life, it opened up a a new way of understanding that perspective. And it wasn’t metaphorical anymore.

I’ve been leading up to sort of the heart of the book, which is really this idea of free versus freed. With a d at the end, one of my favorite things about your work, as you always just sort of push me to think a little more about ideas that sort of on the surface seem obvious when you put them in front of me on the page. And I’m like, but wait a minute, I’ve never actually really thought about this in the way that I’m now thinking about it. And when did you start thinking about that particular piece of the book free versus free. And I’m going to ask you to sort of really riff on it. I mean, it’s, it’s a big part of your family. It’s a big part of your experience as a Black woman, but it’s not limited to your family, or you.

One origin, although it didn’t contain that terminology really came from me. And some of the conversations that many of us had, within the institutions we’re affiliated with. So I’m on lots of boards that wanted to reinvent themselves in 2020, and read, you know, like, audit themselves and think about what they’ve been doing right or wrong. Universities are constantly doing this. And 2020 was an invitation to do so. And I found myself having conversations with people, and saying, if you have never genuinely been challenged, as to your belonging, as to your civil rights, yep. These questions of belonging, and civil rights are theoretical, they’re abstractions. But if someone has looked at you and said, you probably don’t belong here, or if someone has come up to prevent you from feeling that you’re welcome, will not be revoked, then you understand very clearly that you’re in a category where these things are things you’re always susceptible to. And suddenly I realized, Oh, I know we always talk about double standards. And you know, like two-tiered society, those are cliches now and American English. But suddenly they became concrete and their purpose or purposefulness announced itself to me a new and so those moments of coming up against what for some as a wall, and what for others doesn’t even seem to exist. Those were some of the moments that made me want to try and write some prose thinking in essay form, about freedom and about America and about on how we perceive one another across lines of difference, it was writing it, that led me to the realization that these categories feel very real, that these categories suddenly, if I look back, I’ve seen them everywhere. I’ve seen them my whole life, I understand that when my parents said, you’re going to have to try harder, and work harder, and be seen to do that in order to be taken as seriously as your friends who are white. And they were talking about the fact that I’m freed. I’m a newcomer, I’m somebody who’s belonging, who is deserving this, of the kinds of, you know, opportunities and, and welcome that we think live in democracy, somebody for whom those things are provisional, and they’re very new. And so it just felt suddenly like a room in my imagination that had always been present, but I’ve never actually walked in or turned a light on.

There’s a really powerful line in the new book, where you say free is another word for worthy. And wow, did my eyes get big, that sentence that is, I mean, you’ve edited anthologies about class and opportunity. There’s a Revolution Outside, My Love, which is pretty terrific. That came out during lockdown, right, if I remember correctly, yeah. You’ve written introductions to a new edition of Audre Lord’s Cancer Diaries, you’ve done introductions to other people’s poetry collections. You’ve translated or worked in collaboration on a translation of a Chinese poet. You’ve written a libretto, you started a podcast, poet laureate twice in the United States. All of these things, I mean, even Riot, which is, there are two poems, called Riot in Such Color, and both of which were written for the centennial of the New Jersey State orchestra and set to music. Yeah, is that technically a libretto, music is… I play the radio.

Yeah, I would, I would say Songs by Color,

You’re pulling from all of these different places.

I think we need to, you know, we need we need to move toward other directions, and others, you know, think about the wonderful world expanding experience of, of dwelling in Yi Lei’s, work of a poet, who became famous in China in the late 1980s. And who only just recently passed away in 2018. We need each other to understand different vocabularies for what we’ve long lived with and in. And I just feel every chance I get to learn a new language or form, I think of different art forms as languages, I think it’s going to help me understand the world that I belong to, and what I can do within it, how it can be abused to it, how I can live with it better, and I just, I’m invested in that kind of that kind of work.

I love the idea that you believe so deeply that poetry is for everyone. Does poetry matter? Yes, absolutely. Poetry matters. And I will stand on the rooftops and scream. And however you come to poetry, you know, if it’s song lyrics, if it’s, you know, internet post, I don’t care, because eventually, you will find that and maybe that’s exactly what you say, whatever. But there is something to the flow. Of the ideas of the words of everything else. Like if we can catch you there, you might just stay.

Yeah. And you might, you might make it, you might survive in a full sense.

That it belongs, you know, in and around and wherever that it’s not some rarefied. I mean, yes, please do you study it? It’s, I have never studied poetry formally. And that’s okay. I know what I like. I know, I like to read more. I would like to be better educated in poetry. Am I going to sit down and take a class? I probably will not. I just don’t have the time. But I can sit with a writer and in some cases, you know, it’s ancestor notes. Lucille Clifton, or it’s Langston Hughes. You know, I mean, there’s some really, really beautiful work out there. Yeah. And then there’s some stuff where I’m like, okay, I’m good. Thanks.

Sometimes you have to come back to that stuff. I found that teaching the work that sometimes I was like, I know a lot of people like this, but I’m good. That taught me. You know, it taught me what other principles and values can impart what other revelations can be possible within a behavior of language that I’m not at home in. And that’s kind of like I felt like oh, I’m I can hold myself to my belief that poetry pulls you out of the instinctual and into something that can be truly transformative. Now I replaced the word transformative with liberating. If you believe that, then you’re gonna have to dig down in some of the work that doesn’t make sense to you. It doesn’t hit you on a gut level. And so I love being able to test myself by teaching work I find difficult.

One of the things to appreciate is the fact that you study with Seamus Heaney in college, which I didn’t know until very recently. And then but you also pull from Rita Dove, and Yusef Komunyakaa, and it’s so very American, right? Like, I know, Heaney is an Irish poet, but I’m talking about your experience, right? And all of the places that you’re pulling from it just feels so American, like it’s a new art form. Right? That you’re just saying, okay, and yes, you studied formally and you were a Stegner fellow. And now you’re learning to write your first book as you’re a Stegner fellow, that’s what you do when you’re a fellow there. But you said that, when you were studying with Heaney, you were trying, not directly trying to sound like him, but you were kind of like, well, he was trying to teach us to sound like ourselves.

Oh, I was definitely trying to sound like him. I felt like I read Death of a Naturalist and Seeing Things, which is, I think, one of his newest books at that time. Right? Okay, obsessively. And every time I, I wanted to write a poem, I wanted it to live inside of the world of sounds and the tenor of memory, and possibility that his poems often I was shameless, you know, I think a lot of a lot of my classmates. I was I was like, 18, and 20, or something like that. And I think that he could tell, right, maybe if I wasn’t alone, many of us, and I think gently, he guided us toward a voice that was not his might even become ours. And that was a that’s a gentle and generous teacher who can do that.

Do you remember when you figured out your voice?

I mean, I write about the obsession with, it’s another one of these obsessions, or preoccupations that I think is tossed at a young writer. And it becomes an awful distraction, right? Because you’re, it’s like, oh, do I have a voice? Is this my voice? Or are you my voice? Are you my mother, like, it’s just, you know, it’s, the only way to find a voice is to find your material, what do you care about, and then you will learn that you have always sounded like yourself. And that what you sound like has to do with what you’re committed to, and what ceilings you’re willing to own up to, and invite to become productive for you. And the places that have marked you. I didn’t know what my voice was, until I could look back. I don’t even know if that’s true. Did my first book teach me I had a voice maybe. But to be honest, I remember sitting on my couch with a half finished manuscript, and probably 2001, thinking, I need to finish this. And I don’t know how to finish it. So I’m going to finish it the way a braver writer would finish it the way a writer I wish I was, would finish it. And so I just stepped into a kind of authority. And maybe that taught me to sound like the poet I am now, I looked through a lot of my college poems, about eight years ago. And when I was like, my papers are at Emory University. And so at that time, I had went through all this stuff. And I was surprised that I had a number of those poems. And I was like, I sound like myself. I wouldn’t make those choices. But it’s me in there.

As your work came out, I was reading it. And sometimes, you know, rereading, I gave myself the time to sit down with all of the poetry. And I just went through it sequentially, which I had never done before. The voice is there. The voice is there from that first collection. And yeah, the word choices are slightly different, but I knew who I was reading. And, okay, did I know sort of roughly the publication order? And, you know, maybe that influenced some of how I was reading. But it’s really clear from The Body Question straight through to Such Color, that it’s all there. I think it’s true for many poets. Yeah. I mean, when you’re doing the found poems, or you’re doing the posts based on the letters, there are a couple of letters I’m thinking of specifically from, I think, Wade in the Water, actually, where it’s members of slaveholding families writing to each other, but it’s all based on fact, the letters claiming benefits. So he’s claiming their benefits. You know, I grew up in the land of glory, right and the Massachusetts 54th. And, you know, was I glad the movie was made? Sure. Would I like to see more of that history sure, is callow the only source of message It’s 54th. Well, let me know. Let’s talk about that for the Union dead, right? Like all of these pieces come together, they all feed each other. But your voice is really consistent from the, how old were you when Body Question was published?

2003. I was 31 when that book came out.

Still, that’s a really consistent body of work over time, and it’s just, it’s wild to see and sit with.

Jenny Xie was a student was one of my first thesis students at Princeton. And I always say, you know, I had her in a workshop when she was a freshman first year. And that voice and mind and conscience were there and intact, and that young person, of course, the work is larger and capable of doing and taking on more, but the mind and the soul has always been there. I believe that’s true for a lot of poets, we become innovative in different ways. But the large part of the self that poetry becomes a vessel or vehicle for I think it presides, you know, it has presided probably since infancy and in its own way.

I do think too, that riff is part of what keeps you in the present. I think that’s exactly because the way you talk about poetry and the way you talk about how you use language, the language of poetry to flip a feeling, you sort of finally put something that we can’t necessarily explain. And suddenly we understand it, kind of thing because of the language because of poetry because we slow down, because we stop. Yeah, it’s kind of magic. Kind of magic. It is. And I do appreciate the prose, in To Free the Captives. And I love the way you talk about your uncles and your family and their sort of experience of each other and how your experience of them right, in part, you’re writing for your kids who are all very tiny, and didn’t get to meet your parents, or did they meet your dad? Okay, so they didn’t get to meet your parents. And this idea, right, like, reading is kind of the ultimate act of connection. And that’s, you’re gonna be able to hand this over to them and be like, well, here you go. I think that’s pretty great. Because I mean, you have a lot of cousins, it sounds like that last generation like we are, you know, we’re evolving, hopefully, as a culture and a society. But we’re losing folks who had a very different experience of the world, and to be able to capture that right. In words like, there are photographs in the new book, right? They’re great. Everyone looks so old, though. All of these children look so old. Because I mean, I had a colleague who showed me a photo of her grandmother actually the other day in her grandmother’s like, 18, you know, it’s 1952 and her grandmother did not look…

Yeah. It’s like you become an adult very quickly in visual terms of the past. Yeah, my dad seemed like a man. And those pictures were, I believe he’s a child now.

Exactly. I am watching that evolution, though, of your family of your parents, your siblings are all considerably older than you correct?

Yeah. The next oldest is about nine years older than me.

So sorry, the difference between 12 and 21 is pretty extreme.

Yeah, can be big. Now it doesn’t feel like anything that back when I was little.

But you were kind of an only child, in a way.

In a lot of ways. Yeah. I mean, they, my siblings would come back home a lot and bring friends. And so there was always, you know, this exciting reunion just on the horizon. But there were also long afternoons of just being home with my mom, really. And I think that was probably what made me a poet, having time to get bored and to read and to make music with words as a form of entertainment.

Do you feel closer to your parents now that you’ve written both of these memoirs? I mean, you’ve obviously written about them in the poems for a very long time, but it feels like something shifted.

I feel like I learned something about my parents with each memoir. When I wrote Ordinary Light. I was a new, I was expecting when I first I mean, my daughter. When I first started wanting to write that book, I was, you know, just delivered my sons as I was finishing the revisions. And so thinking about my childhood with this very recent experience of the world being blown, opened by the fact that I was mother gave me different insight into my mom. Right. And I understood very differently, what she must always have known and seen and respected. I think I learned a lot about her in that process. And this was a book that taught me a lot about my dad, you know, in part because there were these records that he had saved, that I, I inherited, essentially. And so reading them literally narrated chapters of his life that he had protected his children from.

It’s kind of trippy to when we realize our parents were people before they were our parents. I was one of those kids who was like, oh, yeah, my parents had no life before. And you know, of course they did. But when you’re small, you’re just kind of like, oh, well, they’re my parents. That’s it. There is no other story and then the pieces get filled in there. Oh, yeah.

Well, isn’t it funny to be on the receiving end of that now as a parent?

Auntie, yes. But explaining some of that to the smalls, you’re just like, Well, about that.

Yeah. How old do you think I am? Oh, you must be about 100,000.

Yeah, the fact that we didn’t all walk around with cell phones, or that, you know, my brother and I would fight over the phone, because we had one phone in the kitchen.

And we actually use that. Wouldn’t that be nice now?

I kind of do actually, I really kind of do, like, I? Sure. Is it nice to have whatever information I want at my fingertips? You know, but do I really need it? I mean, I kind of don’t. Is it nice to be able to pull up, you know, a poem on my phone? Sure. Do I do it as often as I would like? I do not. Is it nice to be able to, you know, scan yourself into the airport? Sure. That’s great. But when you think about the power of poetry, right? And the imagery and the stuff that you can do with word choice, or language or tone that somehow pop differently from pros. That’s like, do I really need the screen in my pocket?

Making me buy boots all the time when I could be doing something else.

Sneakers, were a problem for a while that has stopped. Sometimes I just need to go stare at a cloud. Yeah, sometimes I just need to stare out a window on the train instead of work. And you know, I need to watch the landscape pass and just let my brain rest. And poetry lets me do that. And you know, as you were saying, at the top of the show, like we’re in a really weird moment, for us as human beings, we’re in a really, really weird moment. It feels really fragile. And it feels fragile in ways. We’ve lived through some really big moments, sort of in our lifetimes. You and I are not that old. But we’ve still had some very big moments. And this feels different. Yeah, this feels like we’re either going to have a collective coming together kind of thing, or we’re just it’s gonna get worse before it gets better. And I don’t know where we are. I know I have faith in books. I know, I have faith in words, I know. You know, we’re going to change it. I just, I can’t predict the future.

I guess we can’t. But I feel like there are a lot of not so old experiences that I’ve had. That give me more hope than I normally would simply from reading the news and watching, you know, the media, just in our faces all the time, right? That the two years, which are you know, they come they came pretty close, before lock down, when I was traveling in the laureateship led me into these communities, many of which were rural communities, many of which were not very diverse communities, in which people were willing to become beautiful with one another, and vulnerable and curious, and teach and learn from, you know, teach each other about things and learn from each other, about experiences. And that makes me feel like the work that is necessary to succeed as a species is work we actually know how to do we just have to break ourselves of this bad habit of plugging into these voices that are defeatist, and that sort of whip up our worst, laziest and most fearful impulses and and weaponize them. I think that we’re watching how the systems we were taught would save us, or not saving even those that they’re benefiting the most. Right. And I just really do believe that there’s a large part of every human that wants to have community of others, and actually wants to care about people who are strangers to them. I mean, that’s what most stories are about, right? Strangers meet, a lot of stuff happens. But there’s also this investment in the possibility that something beautiful can happen when strangers meet. I don’t know, I feel like more and more my work as a writer and as somebody who gets to travel and talk with people is to say, we have to plug back into other sources. There are sources we are familiar with in fluent and that assure us that we’re courageous and generous, and that we don’t have to be greedy, and binary, and fearful of one another. But we surrender so often to an algorithm that makes money from activating all of those small making impulses.

Taking that step back. Just taking that one tiny step back. There’s so many places that you can start such color is a good place to start to free the captives is a good place to start. American journal is another place there’s so much opportunity, Tracy, that seems like the perfect place to wrap the show because who doesn’t want to note of hope everyone wants a little help. Sometimes my Boston comes flying out and I do mean to keep it in a box. But I’d rather take your point of view if you don’t mind. So thank you so much for joining us on pored over to free the captives is out now. And there is so much beautiful poetry to work with. there’s life on Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize. There’s such color, which is the new and selected doing day. For those of you who read westerns, there’s so much great work. Anyway, Tracy, thank you so much for joining.

Thank you, Miwa, what a joy.

Poured Over