Born in Falmouth,Massachusetts,[1] she was raised in Fairfield,California,in a family with "deep roots" in Alabama. Her mother was a teacher and her father an engineer[7] who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope.[8] Her book Life on Mars pays homage to her father's life and work.[9] Smith became interested in writing and poetry early,reading Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain in elementary school;Dickinson's poems,in particular,struck Smith as working like "magic," she wrote in her memoir Ordinary Light,with the rhyme and meter making Dickinson's verses feel almost impossible not to commit to memory.[7] Smith then composed a short poem entitled "Humor" and showed it to her fifth-grade teacher,who encouraged her to keep writing.[7] The work of Elizabeth Bishop,Seamus Heaney,Philip Larkin,Yusef Komunyakaa,and Rita Dove also became significant influences.[7][10]
In 2006,she joined the faculty of Princeton University,where she was made a member of Phi Beta Kappa[13][14] and the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities.[15][16] On July 1,2019,she became Chair of Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts.[17]
In his review of Life on Mars,Troy Jollimore selects Smith's poem "My god,it's full of stars" as particularly strong,"making use of images from science and science fiction to articulate human desire and grief,as the speaker allows herself to imagine the universe:"[3]
... sealed tight,so nothing escapes. Not even time, Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke. So that I might be sitting now beside my father As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe For the first time in the winter of 1959.
In his review of the collection,Joel Brouwer also quoted at length from this poem,writing that "for Smith the abyss seems as much a space of possibility as of oblivion:"[23]
Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone, That the others have come and gone —a momentary blip — When all along,space might be choc-full of traffic, Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel Nor see,flush against us,living,dying,deciding, ...
Dan Chiasson writes of another aspect of the collection:"The issues of power and paternalism suggest the deep ways in which this is a book about race. Smith’s deadpan title is itself racially freighted:we can’t think about one set of fifties images of Martians and sci-fi comics,without conjuring another,of black kids in the segregated South. Those two image files are situated uncannily close to each other in the cultural cortex,but it took this book to connect them."[8]
About The Body's Question,Lucie Brock-Broido writes:"How delightful it is to fall under the lucid and quite more than lovely spell of Tracy K. Smith's debut collection. Smith's work is deceptively plainspoken,but these are poems that are powerfully wrought,inspiring in all the clarity of their many gospel truths. The Body's Question announces a remarkable new voice,brilliantly bundled,ingeniously belted down."
Yusef Komunyakaa writes:"The Body's Question is an answer to pure passion,but the beauty is that the brain isn't divorced from the body. The strength of character in these marvelous poems delights and questions. Here's a voice that can weave beauty and terror into one breath,and the unguarded revelations are never verbal striptease."
"Tracy Smith speaks many different languages. Besides the Spanish that graces the 'Gospels' of her book's opening section,Smith also seems perfectly at home speaking of grief and loss,of lust and hunger,of joy and desire,which here often means the desire for desire,and a desire for language itself....She seems to speak in tongues,to speak about that thing even beyond language,answering 'The Body's Question' of her title," said Kevin Young.
About Smith's second book,Duende,Elizabeth Alexander writes:"Tracy K. Smith synthesizes the riches of many discursive and poetic traditions without regard to doctrine and with great technical rigor. Her poems are mysterious but utterly lucid and write a history that is sub-rosa yet fully within her vision. They are deeply satisfying and necessarily inconclusive. And they are pristinely beautiful without ever being precious.”[24][note 1]
Smith has received praise throughout her books for her questions on relationships,identity and sexuality.[25][26]Hilton Als of The New Yorker writes:"Part of the gorgeous struggle in Smith’s poetry is about how to understand and accept her twin selves:the black girl who was brought up to be a polite Christian and the woman who is willing to give herself over to unbridled sensation and desire."[27]
Her book Ordinary Light:A Memoir,about race,faith and the dawning of her poetic vocation,was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2015.
Smith lives in Massachusetts with her husband,Raphael Allison,and their three children.[30] Allison is the author of Bodies on the Line:Performance and the Sixties Poetry Reading (2014). The family previously lived in Boerum Hill,Brooklyn.[31]
2008 Essence magazine's Literary Award for Duende.[42]
2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Life on Mars (Graywolf Press), "a collection of bold, skillful poems, taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and pain."[2]
↑Elizabeth Alexander also writes about Smith’s use of the concept of duende: “Writers and musicians have explored the concept of duende, which might in English translate to a kind of existential blues. Smith is not interested in sadness, per se. Rather, in the strange music of these poems I think Smith is trying to walk us close to the edge of death-in-life, the force of hovering death in both the personal and social realms, admitting its inevitability and sometimes-proximity, and understand its manifestations in quotidian acts. This dark force is nonetheless a life force, which, in the poem 'Flores Woman,' concludes 'Like a dark star. I want to last.' If Duende were wine, it would certainly be red; if edible, it would be meat cooked rare, coffee taken black, stinky cheese, bittersweet chocolate. Tracy K. Smith's music is wholly her own, and Duende is a dolorous, beautiful book."[24]
References
12"Tracy K. Smith". Academy of American Poets. Retrieved April 18, 2012.
12Chiasson, Dan (August 8, 2011). "Other Worlds: New poems by Tracy K. Smith and Dana Levin". The New Yorker. pp.71–73. Review of Life on Mars. Chiasson notes that "...it's fitting that to write about the Space Age Smith turns to forms that predate the modern world (including a terrific example of the villanelle, that old troubadour invention, about the euthanizing of geese at J.F.K. Airport)." The villanelle is "Solstice".
↑Paul, Crystal (April 13, 2016). "12 Books Of Poetry By Writers Of Color For a More Inclusive National Poetry Month". Bustle. Retrieved October 28, 2020. Smith's father was one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Telescope project, and this collection pays homage to him and his work. Futurism and space come together in this imaginative collection that begs to be called sci-fi poetry.
"Fiction review: Duende". Publishers Weekly. May 21, 2007. Federico García Lorca famously described duende in relation to flamenco music, but understood it as the dark wellspring for any artistic endeavor. As interpreted by Smith in her Laughlin Award–winning second collection, duende is the unforgiving place where the soul confronts emotion, acknowledges death and finds poetry. Starred review of Smith's second collection.
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