"wow! American poet laureate Smith shouted:
During his three-day trip to Alaska, Smith was surprised by all kinds of animal specimens, from the fluffy moose sentry standing in the center of Anchorage Airport to the buffalo head staring at Palmer while reading poems in an assisted living facility. But the fact is this: a black bear, cheerful and unabashed, crossed the Mendenhall Valley along the glacier road in broad daylight, and Smith said:
"Oh, wow, wow," she thought her "spirit beast" was her rescue dog, a chocolate lab hound named Coco. "I don't know if I can live like this."
To rebuild the dream of Protos (the abbreviation of library), Smith chose the wilderness of Alaska to start her journey of "American dialogue", which was a barn storm she designed to bring "the humanistic power of poetry" to the corner of this country, which is usually not available in the literary field. Just like a poetic Johnny Appleside, she has been spreading poems to readers and donating some unaccustomed books for the visit of Pulitzer Prize winners of Ivy League. In the early version of the roadshow, Smith turned into a cultural center at the Methodist Church in South Carolina, the Air Force Base in New Mexico and a clothing factory in Kentucky, sharing her poems (and inviting her audience to share their interpretations). By the end of this year, she will add more outposts in South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana.
In this era of social media fanaticism, Smith enjoys education and educational opportunities. Smith, 46, the head of the creative writing program at Princeton University, said: "We have been trained to speak and explain. You know, it is better to argue and control others than others." . "We need to practice more in rooms that don't know what others are thinking. We must really listen and understand what may happen.
Whether reciting a poem about the unimaginable cost of suicide in a juvenile detention center or thinking about the unresolved legacy of slavery in an indigenous cultural center, Smith exudes an effortless warmth. She often speaks without introduction and never claims to be the guardian of secret knowledge, even if she wrote this poem herself.
"Hello, my name is Tracy. I am a poet. This is my first time to Alaska. Smith told more than 20 elderly people in the Alaska Veterans and Pioneers Home that they had been shoveled into a semicircle. Her signature fluffy curly hair distinguishes her from those old people who wear ball caps. They are all commemorating the war of the last century. Smith also said: "I believe that poetry can help us get in touch with our true selves, and feelings and memories are sometimes difficult to express." "So, she opened the 20 18 collection of poems and waded through the water, introducing to the audience a pair of unconventional angels who were dressed in leather motorcycle equipment, smelled of rum and gasoline, and had gray hair. They appeared in the dream and said, "Tell us not to be afraid. "
Like many of Smith's works, this poem transcends the boundaries between empiricism and supernatural, and confronts the mysteries of faith and death with accurate and easy-to-understand images. "I want to hear what you noticed when I read that poem," she said, her eyebrows dancing happily.
She later admitted that what upset her at first was that she hung her head and couldn't help it. But Smith waited, encouraged and patiently, giving her older students space to explore any images of talking with them.
Bob Schafer, a 76-year-old Vietnam veteran, finally said, "These thoughts come into your mind. If you don't write them down, they will disappear. " . "Sometimes it's just a sentence, a sentence that comes into your mind, a memory, and then you continue to write a poem with it."
"Oh, I like it! Smith said. I think this is also related to my writing consciousness. I want to hear what happened there and follow them.
The next day, after flying to the remote Yupik Center in Bethel, Smith boarded a flat-bottomed aluminum boat and sailed along the Kuscovim River to the survival village in Napa. Wearing a pair of caravan skates that quickly got bogged down, she walked into the K- 12 school and looked for the principal. Smith brought an American magazine: Fifty Poems of Our Time, which is a new collection of poems edited by her. She likes to think of it as "a prayer book for 2 1 century."
After the headmaster thanked her for venturing to such a remote area, Rob Caspar, director of the Poetry and Literature Center of the Library of Congress, wanted to make sure that we really arrived in Napa. "Oh, no," said the headmaster, Drew Inman. "This is Napakik." Smith managed to stay in Napa for a while, swam a short distance upstream and donated more books to the school library there. )
"Some popular views about poetry think that it is an intellectual luxury or decorative art, which is not only misleading, but also really deceptive and even cruel," she said. "I think I have the opportunity, maybe a little responsibility, to say,' You need this thing, you can have it'",
When Smith was first appointed to her post in 20 17, Carla Hayden, director of the Library of Congress, paid tribute to her and praised her poems as "so grand and with such a wide range of themes". At the same time, the laser focuses on its words. In her four poems, Smith became the david bowie in the universe, dragging her with a white-hot tail. In her most famous poem "The Declaration", she applied erasure technology to the Declaration of Independence and strategically deleted some paragraphs to reveal the audit of the country's founding commitment:
At every stage of these oppression, we demand correction with the most humble attitude; We repeatedly * * * only get a response because of repeated injuries.
Smith grew up in a suburb of northern California. His father was an air force and his mother was a devout believer. They were both descendants of Alabama, and he was eager to break free. As a female student, during her first summer camp trip, she stared at a forest landscape, which was full of "some magical potential", as she said in her memoir "Ordinary Light" on 20 15. On his last night in Alaska, Smith visited the edge of Mendenhall Glacier after work, where it crunched in the dark. Back in town, the headlights of the van hit a white hair and black eyes and crossed the road. Smith screamed. The raccoon's thumping killed all the adventurous spirit.
"Do you think he survived?" Naomi asked. Smith buried his face in his hands, looking exhausted, and finally absorbed many American external restrictions like her.
"Back in the city, some people will ask, perhaps naively,' What's it like? What is rural America like? Smith said that she plans to record her trip on the American Dialogue website of the Library of Congress. "This is not a thing. This is everyone, everywhere, and this is something we can all know better.
At 6:5438+0 pm on February 5th, at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Tracy K Smith's Smithsonian Creative Festival was held for free. Smith will discuss the influence of history and race in her acclaimed collection of poems, Wading, which is selected from Smithsonian magazine.
65438+ February Monthly