Wade in the Water

Smith found her poetic voice as an undergraduate at Harvard once she discovered the Dark Room Collective, a reading series for writers of color that was started in 1989. This energized Smith to create contemporary poetry that did not shrink from political considerations. As she stated in an interview, “I’ve heard so many stories from writers of color who found themselves feeling alone in spaces where their peers just weren’t willing or able to accept the notion that concerns of race, culture, identity, and geography were valid components of poems” (Lee, Esther. “Interview with Tracy K. Smith.” Atlanta Review, vol. 22, no. 1, 2015.). Discovering an African American literary community with a wide range of influences and styles during her undergraduate years at Harvard jumpstarted her writing, as she had widely divergent and exciting examples of how writers of color, many of them were her peers, could navigate the personal and the political.

As an African American poet who has served as US Poet Laureate, the third African American woman to serve in the post, she is aware of the poetic traditions she represents and seeks to grapple with. She is also aware of the need to bring such poetic traditions to a wider audience. When she was appointed poet laureate a year after the 2016 presidential elections, one of her first missions was a road trip to rural America, where she hoped to share and discuss poetry as a way to bring communities together around the common language of poetry, despite the seemingly vast political divide in America.

As “Wade in the Water” suggests, Smith writes about how love and compassion for the Other is the way to bring strangers together. Her poetry is full of quiet observation that allows one to seek to understand the other. Some critics have characterized her work as similar to the two other African American women who served as US Poet Laureate, Rita Dove and Natasha Tretheway. “Dove and Tretheway, like Komunyakaa and Smith, write formally oriented and outwardly quiet poems; indeed [Kevin] Quashie identifies them in the tradition of the Black quiet” (Greaves, Margaret Ann. “Vast and Unreadable: Tracy K. Smith, Astronomy, and Lyric Opacity in Contemporary Poetry.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 61, no. 1, Spring 2020.). Smith resists the urge to demonize and stereotype the Other, instead seeking to build empathy through her meditative observations.

The tone of “quiet” observation is not passive. She continues to seek out the intersection of the personal and the political. She wants to bring forgotten voices to the forefront of her poetry. Smith realizes that lyric poetry has often been confined to a narrow interpretation of the self, a self that does not expand to a political self. She desires to disrupt such narrow traditions, expanding the personal to include the political. She hopes to include as many voices and reach as many ears in building an American poetry, in creating an inclusive US.