For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes that poetry serves as a medium for self-exploration and reflection.
Tracy K. Smith's quote suggests that writing or reading poetry offers a valuable chance for introspection. It implies that the act of engaging with poetry allows individuals to question and examine their thoughts, feelings, and experiences, uncovering deeper insights about themselves and their perspectives.
In practice
A speaker at a literary festival sharing insights on the value of poetry in personal growth.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point.
How do poems grow? They grow out of your life.
[Short Talk on Sylvia Plath] Did you see her mother on television? She said plain, burned things. She said I thought it an excellent poem but it hurt me. She did not say jungle fear. She did not say jungle hatred wild jungle weeping chop it back chop it. She said self-government she said end of the road. She did not say humming in the middle of the air what you came for chop.
I think most people gain some sense of how to look at a painting, but no one ever teaches you how to look at a piece of silver.
I write screenplays in the middle of the night.
Sometimes it is the artist's task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.
I've never seen the devil create music.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.