Pulitzer Prize Poet makes a visit to the students of Longford School

The students and teachers of Mean Scoil Mhuire had quite a visitor last Friday as Tracy K. Smith, the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States and a Pulitzer Prize winner came to talk to them about her work.

Tracy K. Smith is originally from Alabama in the US and has since lived nationwide. She attended Harvard University where she studied under the late great Séamus Heaney. Now she is a professor at Harvard University.

The gym, where she was speaking, was filled with the girls of Meán Scoil Mhuire. There was no whispering or chattering amidst the rows of seats, as most would expect to hear in a hall full of teenagers, instead, the crowd was all ears, enamoured by the icon standing before them.

Tracy began to speak, it was strange to see someone such as her in a school in Longford, in the middle of Ireland far from her home across the sea. One would expect someone so impactful, so acclaimed both in and beyond her field to feel intimidating, she has served in one of the highest positions a poet or any writer can, and received an award that most only dream of.

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However, Tracy was warm and relatable. She spoke to the students before her like they were her own, as if she were their teacher, as if she knew them.

She addressed the audience saying, “Thank you so much for such a warm welcome and for having spent time reading, and thinking and perhaps even writing about my poems.

“I hope that what I say here today will be helpful to you and that we can have a conversation, I’m very eager to hear any questions that you might have.

Tracy has had quite an influence on these girls not just as a role model but in their academic careers as well, she is after all included in their Leaving Certificate curriculum.

“As a writer, I will tell you there is nothing in a poem that seeks to be unnoticed,” she said to the senior cycle students.

“Anything that alerts you to a question that you might hold or to a memory that you might live with, that makes you feel or notice things that might surprise you.”

She began by reading a poem she had translated with a colleague and followed it with one of her own.

Tracy does not see poetry as simply a medium of art or storytelling but rather a conversation. One that takes place across time and place.

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“It ignores the borders of nationality, of race, of death, of ideology and seeks to grapple with what it means to be alive.”

This sentiment is clear through Tracy’s work. Each piece contains all sorts of questions concerning the world around her such as space and time, life and death, and the history of slavery in America, taking a long hard look at the rampant culture of racism and hate that still exists in the country and across the world today.

In her talk Tracy touches on what inspires and drives her writing, this followed a question put forward by one of the students in attendance.

“I write about things that worry me,” she said.

Speaking to the ‘Longford Leader’ Tracy explained how the world around her influences what she puts on the page and how she processes these worries through her art.

When asked about how the current political climate has been driving her she said, “I always say that difficult political moments are a good time for poetry, so I feel like there will be a lot that poetry will help me to think through and a lot that I’ll turn to poetry for clarity on.”

Tracy’s poem ‘The United States Welcomes You’ is an example of this. The poem, which she read on the day, tells the story that many People of Colour, not just in America but across the world have unfortunately been subjected to, police brutality.

The poem was published in her book ‘Wade in the Water’ just one year after the tragic deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castille, from Minnesota, whose life was cut short just 15 minutes away from where George Floyd would later be killed in 2020

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Tracy’s poetry also deals heavily with grief, a feeling that touches everyone eventually. She reads two poems, Elegies, one for her mother who passed away when Tracy was 22, and one for her father who passed away when Tracy was pregnant.

The poem ‘Joy’ is an elegy for her mother. It is a sequence made up of four parts, one of which the senior cycle students are currently studying.

Tracy explains that the poem is a way of talking to her mother and reckoning with the afterlife.

“I know you are far, infinitely far. But you watch in a way one of us might pause for a moment to watch a frenzy of ants, wanting to help to pick up the crumb and put it down close to their hill,” she recited. It was one of the first poems she wrote for her book, Life on Mars.

Tracy discussed the impact of her mother's death, and how she would continuously write poems about her loss.

“I realise now that what those poems sought to do was solve the problem of her dying.

“Somehow bring her back, which is an impossibility.”

Tracy eventually began to use her poetry as a tool to contact her mother, to speak to her through the vastness that separated them, she did the same with her father.

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Life On Mars is an ode to her father's death and life, in particular, using space as a metaphor in so many ways throughout the book. The metaphor is especially potent seeing as her father worked on the Hubble telescope.

Her poems didn’t just help her, however. Her sister Wanda Smith-Schick was also in attendance.

Wanda is instantly recognisable with five colours in her hair and purple lipstick, her style matches her bubbly personality, and she lights up once asked about her sister. Pride pours off her.

“She was very aware even as a child, she was like a little miniature adult, she started writing when she was five.”

At the end of the talk, Tracy is almost invisible behind the massive crowd of students lining up to speak with her. Each holding books and paper ready for her autograph.

The excitement among the girls is echoed by the teachers who are also among the crowd.

After they dispersed Tracy spoke with the Longford Leader. She discussed her poem, ‘The Great Personal Privation’. The poem is from the perspective of two women who are enslaved in 1849, responding to a real letter written by their oppressor essentially saying they will never be free.

“Putting yourself in a state of receptivity that invites poems or makes poems possible, is also inviting a lot of empathy,” she explains when discussing the feelings that the poem stirs up.

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“It’s a way of saying, I’m bringing my own experience and perspective to this material but I’m also trying very hard at the same time to submit to another person's experience.

“I think that’s one of the miracles that language makes possible, that we can throw ourselves toward another experience and hope to be changed by it.”