I have very limited knowledge of poetry with all of the intricacies it encompasses. However, I do have an appreciation for it as an art form and means of self expression. I read this morning that the Library of Congress has named Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate. Her appointment is welcome and heartwarming news. I have seen the memoir No Ordinary Light before and just never picked it up. Now I am kicking myself and will be adding it to my fall reading list. If you are interested in checking out her poetry, I'm listing them below with links, as well as her memoir. If you are interested in reading the NYT's article you can view it here.
You are pure appetite. I am pure
Appetite. You are a phantom
In that far-off city where daylight
Climbs cathedral walls, stone by stolen stone.
--from "Self-Portrait as the Letter Y"
The Body's Question by Tracy K. Smith received the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African-American poet, selected by Kevin Young. Confronting loss, historical intersections with race and family, and the threshold between childhood and adulthood, Smith gathers courage and direction from the many disparate selves encountered in these poems, until, as she writes, "I was anyone I wanted to be."
Every poem is the story of itself.
Pure conflict. Its own undoing.
Breeze of dreams, then certain death.
―from "History"
Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.
(Smith won the Pulitzer Prize for Life on Mars)
You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself
To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What
Would your life say if it could talk?
―from "No Fly Zone"
With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation
Finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in nonfiction
In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells her remarkable story, giving us a quietly potent memoir that explores her coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Here is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America.
Love poetry even though I haven't read one in a good while, I'may have to check her out! Thanks Monica
ReplyDeleteYou are welcome, and thanks for stopping by!
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