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.
Interpretation
The quote critiques poetry that prioritizes intellect over emotional connection, leaving readers feeling unfulfilled.
Tracy K. Smith highlights the importance of emotional depth in poetry, arguing that works which focus excessively on cleverness without genuine feeling can isolate readers. Such poems may communicate an attitude of indifference, mirroring the emotional disconnection often felt in adolescence, and ultimately fail to resonate with the human experience of vulnerability and sentiment. This commentary calls for poetry that embraces genuine emotion and acknowledges the complexities of feeling.
In practice
In a literary discussion about what makes poetry impactful, one could reference this quote to critique works that lack emotional depth.
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.
They want me to write differently. Certainly I could, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I stand there before Almighty God, if I followed the others and not Him?
Just as most of us prefer to watch a trapeze artist work without a net, we like to be absolutely sure that a virtuoso is giving us our money's worth, and a seemingly effortless performance, no matter how spectacular it may be, deprives us of that slightly sadistic thrill.
You know, be an actor because you love to act. Don't be an actor because you think you're going to get famous, because that's luck.
I've never been one for keeping a journal, so my songs were my journals. They allowed me to express my feelings and let people know what was going on with me. I knew that somebody would relate.
It's weird because I see black gay characters on television all the time, but do I relate to them? Not always, because they're set pieces.
Sport is an art: it has incredible appeal everywhere on this earth, and it fills so many human hearts with passion that it's impossible to dismiss.
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