![]() Lately her mind has been on the idea of compassion, and she is using her pulpit as poet laureate to bring the Word to places on the map often overlooked by the culturati: a church in South Carolina, an opioid treatment center in Kentucky. Whether contemplating the worm inside the mescal bottle (“Its last happy exhalations, / Lungs giddy, mouth spilling / A necklace of minuscule bubbles”) or deep-space images of dust funnels and stars (“We saw to the edge of all there is / So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back”), there is always some underlying ache for “those moments where you don’t have control, where you wish something could overtake you, which I think is a big part of what being alive is about,” she says. In her work, Smith hurls herself through the weather of human feeling: love and loss, desire and need, dread and awe. This past March, Smith was appointed to a second term. Last year, Smith attained one of poetry’s highest honors when the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, acting on the consensus of more than a hundred poetry authorities nationwide, named Smith the US Poet Laureate for 2017–18. ![]() She won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for her collection Life on Mars, and her coming-of-age memoir Ordinary Light was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award. Smith has been listening ever since, her crystal-clear receptiveness and hunger for contact leading to four books of emotionally potent, revelatory poetry. “I remember her saying that there is energy all around us, communicating with us - if only we could listen,” Smith says. Yet here was Clifton, in class, intimating that her dead husband was not exactly dead. Kathryn Smith had been a devout Christian, proper and gracious, the backbone of the family, and she and Tracy, the youngest of five children, had had an intense bond. Clifton, a visiting professor and one of America’s most beloved poets, often spoke about the interplay of her personal life and her writing, but one story was of particular interest to Smith: after Clifton lost her husband, strange poems began coming to her, as if from outside her own mind - poems that were telling her about the future.Īt the time, Smith, a young graduate student, was still mourning the loss of her mother, who had died the year before of cancer. Smith ’97SOA sat in a classroom in Dodge Hall at Columbia University, listening to the poet Lucille Clifton talk about her late husband. ![]()
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