Tracy Smith: A voice for the world's nobodies

In her passionate and political poetry, Tracy K. Smith gives voice to the wretched of the Earth (Ugandan child slaves and Indian foster children, among others) and to those who cannot speak: the dead. She also writes of personal experience -- marriage, divorce and falling in love -- with a stunning directness and control. Her two collections, "The Body's Question" (2003) and "Duende" (2007), are published by Graywolf Press in St. Paul. The former won the 2002 Cave Canum Poetry Prize for the best unpublished manuscript by an African-American poet, and the latter the prestigious James Laughlin Award. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Princeton University in New Jersey. We spoke with her about her influences and the dark forces that push her into the light.

Q Poet Yusef Komunyakaa said of your work that "the unguarded revelations are never verbal striptease." It may be easier to simply bare one's soul and sexuality, as so many writers do. Why do you decide to bring more control to this process?

A The process of writing for me is almost always about the wish to understand something more fully, and almost never about wanting to merely find a showcase for what I have already figured out or what I came to the page aware of wanting to say. I'm interested in the process of discovery that the act of writing a poem provides, which means that, for me, the route toward the finished poem is where the bulk of the reward lies.

Q Several poems are issues-oriented or drawn from the news. How is this kind of "real life" material useful to you as a poet?

A I tell my students that everything that is part of their lives should be allowed into their poems, not merely the topics and situations we tend to view as "poetic." Given the fact that such "real life" material is what makes up most of our lives, it only makes sense that it, too, should find its way into the work. But I think my willingness to bring social concerns into my poems also speaks to the degree to which a poem can be as valuable a tool for insight and argument as anything else at a writer's disposal.

Q Some of your poems give voice to the dead. How does it make you feel to be able to do this?

A Whenever I attempt persona poems, I do so with a tremendous amount of humility. Any attempt to adopt another's perspective and imagine the impact of his or her experiences is about empathy -- about wanting to understand something which sits at a distance from my own direct experience. It also provides an opportunity to look back at myself and the conditions characterizing and extending from my own life through different eyes. Ideally, such an endeavor requires something to change or take root as a result. If I've succeeded at writing an effective persona poem, I am not quite the same person I was at the outset.

Q The title of your second book is the wonderful Spanish word, duende. Dictionaries define this in many ways -- as a spirit who inhabits a house or a room, as personal magnetism, as inspiration. What does this word mean to you?

A I've been fascinated by [Federico García] Lorca's idea of the duende as the dark and potentially dangerous energy an artist is seeking to channel from within. To my mind, that concept is about survival -- about taking risks to get to a truer kind of experience. I also believe this idea has a political corollary. After a while, the idea of duende came to represent the struggle to emerge intact from the ... urgent and perilous places ... to which the forces acting upon and within our lives have the tendency of pushing us.

Rosemary Herbert is a former books editor for the Boston Herald and co-editor of "A New Omnibus of Crime" (Oxford, 2005).

EXCERPT "THE NOBODIES"

The child who tends the goat

Sits on his knees in the shade of a low tree.

He considers what he knows. He lies down

On his side, takes the teat into his mouth

And drinks. What he does not know

Flickers in the breeze, brushes past his cheek,

The tip of his ear, and is quickly behind him.

- Tracy K. Smith, "Duende," Graywolf, 80 pages, $14.