Tracy K. Smith Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Tracy K. Smith's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Poet Tracy K. Smith's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 20 quotes on this page collected since April 16, 1972! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
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  • Joy is a part of my process. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that poetry, as a practice, necessitates a sense of joy. It's exhilarating to come into contact with the things we write into being. And a real sense of play and abandon – even when we are relying on hard-won technique, and even when the aim is deadly serious. How often do we get the excuse to stop, think, and then stop thinking altogether and try to listen to what sits behind our outside of our thoughts? Poets are lucky.

    Real   Writing   Thinking  
    "Interview with Tracy K. Smith – 'Poets are Lucky'". Interview with Michael Klein, blog.pshares.org. May 30, 2012.
  • Lizzie Harris's debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.

    Healing   Joy   Splendor  
  • Everything that disappears/Disappears as if returning somewhere

    Disappear   Ifs  
  • I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines.

    Long   Lines   Six  
    "Alternate Take: Levon Helm" by Tracy K. Smith, www.newyorker.com. September 21, 2009.
  • Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat.

    Brooklyn   Retreat   Kind  
  • I know that in a poem, even when the speaker is speaking from the poet's experience, there's always something that's borrowed, some authority that sits outside of the poet that the poem has claimed. There's a dramatic pitch that makes the speaker capable of saying something more courageous or stranger or simply other than what the poet would be able to say.

    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • I think tension between the intimate and the vast is at the heart of every poem by any poet, though of course the terms with which it is explored vary. Perhaps it is something we seek out in order to affirm that our small lives are tethered to something large and ongoing.

    Heart   Thinking   Order  
    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.

    Beautiful   Ideas   Rich  
  • I grew up in northern California in a town called Fairfield, which is kind of exactly between San Francisco and Sacramento, a small suburb. And I'm the youngest of five children.

  • 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.

    "Wipe That Smirk Off Your Poem". www.nytimes.com. March 16, 2015.
  • 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.

  • For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

  • We are here for what amounts to a few/hours,/a day at most./We feel around making sense of the terrain,/our own new limbs,/Bumping up against a herd of bodies/until one becomes home./Moments sweep past. The grass bends/then learns again to stand.

    Home   Past   Body  
  • When I was young, my father was lord Of a small kingdom: a wife, a garden, Kids for whom his word was Word. It took years for my view to harden, To shrink him to human size.

    Father   Kids   Garden  
  • If I call it pain, and try to touch it With my hands, my own life, It lies still and the music thins, A pulse felt for through garments.

    Pain   Lying   Hands  
    Tracy K. Smith (2007). “Duende: Poems”, Graywolf Press
  • History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice.

    Dog   Ice   History  
    Tracy K. Smith, “Sci-Fi”
  • Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

    Eye   Writing   Space  
  • I feel like the older I get, the truer it feels that I'm only going have an investment in a poem if it allows or forces me to bring something that's supremely me onto the page. I used to think that the speaker of a poem was talking to someone else, to some ideal reader or listener, but now I think that speakers - poets - are talking to themselves. The poem allows you to pose questions that you have you ask of yourself knowing that they are unanswerable.

    Source: www.guernicamag.com
  • Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

    Poetry   Events   Moments  
  • 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?

    Gold   Doe   Ends  
    Tracy K. Smith, “Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?”
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We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 20 quotes from the Poet Tracy K. Smith, starting from April 16, 1972! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
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