American - Poet | April 16, 1972 -
A poem gives me a chance to have an encounter with a feeling, with an experience, with a wish, with an idea.
Tracy K. Smith
ExperienceMeChanceWishFeeling
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.
LifePoetryThinkingI CanDistance
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.
FatherGodLosingParentsMeFeel
Literature allows us to be open, to listen, and to be curious.
CuriousLiteratureListenOpenUs
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.
StruggleBelievePossibilitiesDoubt
Rather than numbing or drowning out the difficult-to-describe but urgently sensed feelings that are part of being human, poetry invites us to tease them out, to draw them into language that is rooted in intricate thought and strange impulse.
PoetryThoughtLanguageFeelingsOut
My hope is to create spaces where people of all stripes can come together and speak at a lower decibel level. We make more sense that way. We sound more like our real selves that way.
HopeTogetherPeopleSpeakCreate
For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.
OpportunityMyselfMeKindLittle
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.
WorkSchoolPoetryParentsPeople
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.
FatherMeUniverseMysteryBackHim
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.
ImaginationMeInspireThinkBack
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.
MotherDeathChildGrowing UpThink
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