Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smithis an American poet and educator. She has published three collections of poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize for a 2011 collection, Life on Mars. About this collection, Joel Brouwer wrote in 2011: "Smith shows herself to be a poet of extraordinary range and ambition. ... As all the best poetry does, Life on Mars first sends us out into the magnificent chill of the imagination and then returns us to ourselves, both changed and consoled."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 April 1972
CountryUnited States of America
Poems infatuated with their own smarts and detached from any emotional grounding can leave the reader feeling lonely, empty and ashamed for having expected more. Like icy adolescents, such poetry is more interested in commiserating than acknowledging that feelings — the sentiments that make us susceptible to sentimentality — actually exist.
Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.
time never stops, but does it end? and how many livesbefore take-off, before we find ourselves beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.