Former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith's 'plea for the American soul'

Poet Tracy K. Smith's father was a powerful presence in her life. He was a NASA scientist "perfectly at ease in the never-ending night of space," as she wrote in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection "Life on Mars."

He was also a Black man, and a United States military veteran. And it was only after he died, that Smith discovered she had so much more to learn about him.

"Looking through his paperwork after his death really changed my understanding of who I had been growing up."

Today, On Point: former poet laureate Tracy K. Smith on the mysteries of fatherhood and freedom, and her "Plea for the American Soul."

Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. U.S. poet laureate from 2017 to 2019. Professor of English and African American studies at Harvard University. Author of "To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul."

Part I 

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Tracy K. Smith is one of America's most celebrated living poets. She's a Pulitzer Prize winner and former U. S. Poet Laureate. She won the Pulitzer in 2012 for her brave and tender collection, Life on Mars. As Poet Laureate, she traveled the United States from 2017 to 2019, listening to the poetry of life, tradition, and history in America's rural places.

That led to the project American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities. Her latest work is a memoir. It's called To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul. And she joins us today in the On Point studio. Tracy K. Smith, it is always a thrill to the heart and mind to both read you and talk with you. So thank you for coming back to the show.

TRACY K. SMITH: Thank you so much, Meghna. I'm really excited to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, I'd like to just start with a couple of letters that you have unearthed and include in the new memoir. And the first is a letter written in 1933. So why don't you just go ahead and read that to us?

SMITH:  Okay. "Governor B.M. Miller, Honorable Sir: I am writing you concerning my Reconstruction Finance Corporation job. It is so many meddlers here. Very near all of the colored folks have been cut off, some who hasn't got bread, and at the price now will not be able to get it, and have large families.

I was cut off this week. I didn't know anything about it until I was told today. I do think that since I'm of age, the folks should have asked me of my condition without taking someone else's word. I have a family of five, an aged and blind mother to help care for. She is in her late seventies. My wife has a very aged cousin of whom we have to help care for since she hasn't any husband or children or any close relatives to depend on.

We only get one dollar per day, and groceries are unreasonably high. 35 cents per package for meat; flour, 65 cents for 12 pounds; meat, 15 cents per pound for common kind of dry salt. It hasn't been a man on the job that worked any better than I. Either has it been a time that I've been late going on the job.

I feel like I haven't been treated just fair. And have such responsibilities on myself and several others with large families. It's only a few colored people on the job now. Now, if I have said anything to cause any offense, I humbly ask for appall. Kindly let me hear from you soon regarding this matter since I need some help or a job. Will work anyplace. I owe a store account now. Humbly yours, Simon Trixie, Sr., Colored, Sunflower, Alabama."

CHAKRABARTI: Who is Simon Trixie, Sr.?

SMITH: In going through census records around my family, my father's family, I learned that Simon Trixie, Sr. was a neighbor in the community where my grandparents lived during the Depression and actually the place where my father grew up — small town called Sunflower, Alabama, near Mobile. I think he's kin to my grandmother. There's some resemblance in photos I've seen.

But he's a Black man who struck me as incredibly courageous in signing his name to this, essentially this grievance, and this request that the state might see to it that they could make right or make good for the Black community that felt themselves to be on the front lines of the Depression.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. Tell me a little bit more about what he's trying to communicate here. There's a specific job or kind of work that he's talking about?

SMITH: Yeah, I guess, you know, part of the government programs that had helped to invigorate communities involved a Reconstruction Finance Corporation that brought in employment into southern communities. And I know that it — well, his letter indicates that there's, you know, Black workers and white workers who have jobs there. I can only imagine that the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow informed the kinds of jobs that those Black and white workers did. And also perhaps the layoffs that occurred when there were cutbacks.

What I see Trixie saying is that it's hard to be Black in a place where this imbalance exists. And that's a given. You know, I used to ask my dad who grew up in Jim Crow, Alabama, what that was like. And he said it was a fact of life. They felt it, but it wasn't always something that was discussed or complained about. It was worked with and around.

But in his letter, I also hear him trying to make it clear to the governor what he imagines perhaps the governor doesn't understand. And that's one of the things that feels so compelling to me about this letter is that he's seeking to explain something, to set the record straight so that a form of justice could be served.

CHAKRABARTI: In the book, you write that the letter contains information that the census data from that time withholds, right? It makes Simon into a man, a full figure, rather than just a piece of data for the United States government.

SMITH: Yeah, I mean, what I love learning about in the letter, and I'm sure that this was part of his appeal, is that a household isn't just a household. There's always an interconnection, and there's a movement when someone needs help or care, they're taken in. And there's a sense of duty and commitment to others in the community and extended families and kin. And what I think that the Black community builds is a kind of patchwork.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm. These, um, historic documents that tell the story of a nation, even within one letter, sometimes they're very jarring, right? Because as he signs his name, it took me a while — honestly, it took me a while to figure out what that "Simon Trixie, Sr." and then parentheses, "COL," was. My mind just couldn't move on, couldn't really accept what it meant. Because I kept thinking, "Colonel, Colonel, Colonel," did he serve in the military? But that's not it at all.

SMITH: Right.

CHAKRABARTI: I mean, why do you think he felt the need to, to make that identification?

SMITH: On one hand I imagine that it's learned. Because if you live in a society where sorting according to race is a constant activity, it might be a gesture that is, you know, involuntary in some respects. But here I also feel like it's a way of saying, "I know. I know of what I speak because I'm in this boat. I want to identify myself as one of the passengers, if you will, in this boat."

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. So then in your new book, To Free the Captives, later on, you make a direct link in terms of the plea and language that Simon uses in 1933 to a letter that you found that your father had written, what, 40 years later Can we first — can you actually read that letter from, from your father? Yeah, it's almost 44 years later that, that he writes it.

SMITH: Mm-hmm. "I am a career airman. This debt of $1,030.63 arose from the shipment of household goods from Hampton, Virginia to Fairfield, California in October 1975. The shipment was considered overweight for my grade.

I was assigned to Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, in 1972 after completing a Southeast Asia tour. Upon my arrival at Langley, no base housing was available, which required me to purchase a house on the local economy at Hampton, Virginia. In 1975, the 314th T. A.W., of which I was a member, deactivated, and I received a non volunteer assignment to Travis Air Force Base, California.

During the three years at Langley, I had accumulated the necessary furniture, appliances, and clothing to accommodate my family of seven. The assessed weight of my belongings outweighed the designated limit for my grade. Which resulted in the indebtedness to the government. Upon my arrival at Travis Air Force Base, there was no base housing available due to renovation. This required me to purchase a house on the local economy at Fairfield, California.

Although the equity received from the sale of my house in Hampton, Virginia did not constitute a loss, it was not adequate for a down payment on the house purchased here in Fairfield. Therefore, a loan was secured from the Travis Federal Credit Union to accommodate that requirement.

I now have five children in school, of whom two are attending college. The attached Air Force Form 2451 comprises a summary of my financial status. To be burdened with this additional responsibility would impose a grave hardship, which I am financially incapable of enduring. Therefore, I respectfully request remission and cancellation of this indebtedness."

CHAKRABARTI:  This is a letter your father wrote in 1977 or thereabouts, right?

SMITH:  Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: Clearly he's — he was in the Air Force.

SMITH: Mm-hmm.

CHAKRABARTI: And it's referencing, I guess, a debt that he incurred because moving expenses were more than he was allotted by the Air Force.

SMITH: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. There's a lot to discuss in this letter, but as we head into a break, first of all, you didn't know it existed prior to him passing away.

SMITH: No, I did not. I inherited his papers. And I almost feel like my father said, "Could you open that box? Could you open this envelope? Could you look at this letter?" And what I learned was a story of, you know, a moment of fright. I can imagine my father feeling accused of wrongdoing of, you know, acting in bad faith.

But what I really came to understand was the quiet, constant way that my parents provided for us through difficulty without letting any of the five of us know that there was anything like struggle happening. Which felt like an incredible burden and an incredible gift to be on the receiving end of.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: The two letters that we — that you read to us a few minutes ago. There's — it's more than an echo, it's the American story told again and again. Because here we have two Black men, your father and Simon Trixie, being honest about their lives and making a plea to the government. Can you tell us more about why that the similarity between the two felt so important to you?

SMITH: Yeah, well one thing that I often think of is that when more and more people tell a quiet version of the same story, it feels like a form of gospel in a way. It urges me to imagine that this is a human facet of our larger collective story. In this case, one that has to do with our experience of race and the ways that America does and does not listen fully to what's happening within Black lives.

In my dad's case, this letter felt important to me, not just because this person had, you know, lived among among his — my father's — ancestors, but because Simon Trixie's letter articulates the sense of grievance, the sense, "I feel I'm not being treated just fair," are his words, that my father doesn't say.

You know, my father — and I can imagine as someone in the military, decorum and restraint are incredibly important traits — as a Black man in the military, I know he was subject to a different kind of scrutiny. All of the stereotypes that had affected Black servicemen in my grandfather's generation — even my father's older brothers who served in World War I — observed as if they might be lazy or cowardly or as if they have to be kept in check, even by white soldiers at the same rank. I know that's a historic trend.

And so I imagine my father doing his best to comply with this military, you know, kind of like "government-ese" letter that he received and also to, in a level tone, say, "These are the circumstances. These are exceptional circumstances. I was denied the benefit of housing not once, but twice. I purchased houses on the open market not once, but twice." Even to say, you know, "I acquired the necessary belongings to support my family of seven," is a way of saying, "Look, how can a single grade ceiling on shipment apply to every single person?"

And so I like harmonizing in my imagination. Bringing in Simon Trixie's voice, full of energy, full of breath, full of stories, even, you know, meddlers and family members, helping my father's case to be made — even if only to me or to us now.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm. When you listened to your father's energy guiding you to this letter and you read it. Did it change your conception of him? Let alone of you and yourself?

SMITH: It really did. You know, one of the character traits that my father had was discipline. And for us kids, it meant we had to be on point all the time, you know, like, obedient and orderly and doing our best in school. And now I understand that he was held — it wasn't just that he held himself to those standards, but he was held to a standard of almost exaggerated poise as a Black man in the U. S., but also in one of the most hierarchical institutions within the United States. And I felt honestly finding this letter, that he wanted me to know more about who he was and what his life had been like. And it shed light on myself, you know, on my assumption that we had everything we needed and it came easily.

CHAKRABARTI: And this gets to the heart of one of the themes that you explore in the book. You know, I call it a memoir because it is a personal memoir of you and your family. But it's also, if you look deeply at any one American family, you see a memoir of this country as well. And you have this remarkable observation that when we say, you know, we value freedom in America, that you say there's a difference between the free and the freed. And you consider yourself one of the freed.

SMITH: Right.

CHAKRABARTI: Explain that.

SMITH: Yeah, I mean, the way that these lives are sorted and subject to different terms of possibility was one really clear example that our positions within this country are different depending on which racial category, class category we fall into. And that there's a larger trend that that is governed by. And so in my vocabulary, I have come to accept that there are those in this country who we see as free, as having always been free, as deserving nothing less than full freedom. And they occupy this status in part because they appear to descend from histories of power. And in this country, they're inevitably connected to race, to whiteness.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm.

SMITH: And the myth of this designation is that power is inherent, that it comes naturally, that you're born not only into it, but with it. When in reality, we know that history reveals power is always won through violence. Through, you know, in some cases, treaties that have been scrapped, bungled. And that there's blood involved in creating the powers of — the hierarchies of power.

And so on the other end of the spectrum, there are those of us who are not free, but rather freed, meaning we appear to descend from histories of subjugation, of forced migration, of enslavement. We are people who historically have been acted upon by the free. And our hopes, our capacity to voice grievances and be heard willingly are therefore quite limited. And this makes sense to me in historical terms, but it really seared to understand that they're not historical terms. They're the active, ongoing terms that dwell in the American imagination. I don't like them. And I imagine many others in both categories do not like them. And I wonder if recognizing that can give us energy to reconfigure what we belong to.

CHAKRABARTI: If I may, this was a really powerful idea that you put forth in the book, and over the past couple of days I've been dwelling with it, right? And A, because you write so beautifully about your father. My father passed away last year, so as I was telling you before this show, this book really landed in my life in a very profound time. And I was thinking of — I was almost like hearing his voice having a dialogue with me as I was reading your book.

And, you know, he used to look at this concept of freedom through kind of a South Asian, Buddhist and Hindu lens, and he was always — he would always talk about, you know, true freedom is freeing yourself from attachment, right? That's a very Buddhist look at that state of being. But then he would, in the next heartbeat, admit that there was no way he could do that because of his profound attachment to his family, living and no longer living. And that got me thinking, in the sense that you're speaking about what it means to be free versus freed in America, I don't think any of us are actually free.

SMITH: Right.

CHAKRABARTI: Because we, by virtue of being in this country, living in this country, we are all attached to that very history and present that you are talking about. And so, you know, and I point that out not because I want people to feel guilty about that, but just accept the truth of that and and think about how that makes us freed in in the present moment and what that means for us as as individuals in a country.

SMITH: Yeah, my sense is with you. No one is free in such a system. We're either struggling to ascend to do what little we can to make this status of freed go farther or, consciously and unconsciously, we are working to defend our freedom, uncontested though it may be against being encroached upon by, you know, people who have less and want more.

And this is what feels so sinister to me. It's involuntary. And the terms of regard, the ways that we see one another, the degrees of trust and suspicion that arise based on the status that we can instantly correlate to people, it informs our view of ourselves, our choices, our fears. It makes us small.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And part of that being freed and not completely free for all of us, I think comes from what you exactly said, that we've considered liberty, true liberty, as almost as a zero sum game. Right? American history has instilled that in us, that any conception of welcoming more people into the concept of being free means losing it ourselves, or someone might feel they're losing it themselves. That's a tragic part of our history. But nevertheless, also in in reading Simon's letter versus your father's letter, there's a profoundly positive story, I think, there.

Because in your in your Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Life on Mars. Wow. It's been 11 years. No, do I have that right? I can't do math right.

SMITH: I think you're right, yeah?

CHAKRABARTI: 11 years. And it still stays with me because your father also was, you know, he was a scientist that worked on the Hubble telescope. He and your mother raised five children, who are all, you know, at the pinnacle of their professions. It's profound, I think, in terms of what — I don't know if progress is the right word, but the evolution of America as seen in your family.

SMITH: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Different possibilities become available generation by generation. My dad was an engineer who worked as a contractor on the Hubble project, a massive project that spanned the country. He was in California. He received his training in the Air Force. But I feel like I want to say he wasn't a scientist in the sense of, you know, professors at universities, because he didn't hold a bachelor's degree.

CHAKRABARTI: Right.

SMITH: He was educated and trained on the job in the Air Force, and he was qualified to do this job for that reason. But I say that because the archive, the personal archive, revealed that that was still a limitation for him.

By some act of fate, he got this contract position. And when it ended, he was back on the job market. And I found on, you know, that same box, a letter from the government saying you've been denied eligibility for this other defense contract position through the government for lack of education.

And so I think about this man who, you know, had launched children into universities — my brother was in medical school at that time — going back to square one. The next job he took was as an aircraft technician, back to being an airman. And I think that is also a reminder of the guardrails that are somehow in place against a sense of freedom that can just be taken for granted.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Well, thanks to the brilliance of your poetry, your father looms very large in my mind. (LAUGHS)

SMITH: Mine, too.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm wondering if you could actually read the poem that really refers specifically to this portion of his life that's in that Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Life on Mars. So this is the final part of your poem, My God, It's Full of Stars.

SMITH: Mm-hmm.

"When my father worked on the Hubble telescope, he said they operated like surgeons, scrubbed and sheathed in papery green. The room a clean cold and bright white. He'd read Larry Niven at home and drink scotch on the rocks, his eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years, when we lived with our finger on the button. And struggled to view our enemies as children.

My father spent whole seasons bowing before the oracle eye, hungry for what it would find. His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise as if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never ending night of space.

On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons for peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died. We learned new words for things. The decade changed. The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed for all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe.

The second time, the optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is. So brutal and alive, it seemed to comprehend us back."

CHAKRABARTI: I have read this poem, Professor Smith, a hundred times and it never fails to lose its walloping power on me. Thank you so much for reading that to us. Again, thinking of your father and this memoir — or meditation, more is how your book, your new memoir reads. You talk about, frequently, the American soul. That is a phrase used often, especially in political parlance, like "the battle for the American soul." In your mind, in the exploration you're undergoing in the new book, how do you define what the American soul is?

SMITH: Well, I spend some time thinking about the individual soul in the book because I feel that when we claim a power or capacity like the soul en masse, it's one thing. It's like a trend or a tide. But when we think about what it might mean in the individual life and afterlife, it feels larger to me. And it feels like choice is involved in how we listen to it, what it does.

In my mind, the soul is something that aligns us clearly within terms of choice and values within our human lives, but it's also an eternal facet of existence. And to me, that means we exist on a scale that is larger than a single life, larger than a human time. And also there is probably a larger sense of accountability that lives within that construct.

And so when I think, "All right, what does it mean for a nation to have a soul?" It means there are countless lives working together with a sense of accountability to one another, but ideally within a sense of accountability to maybe the large abstraction of justice or good and power begins to fall away in that framework and, and perhaps to become beholden to something bigger.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Smith, I asked you earlier about your definition of the American soul, but the whole concept of a soul, I mean, you start the book with it, right? And it comes up again and again. And there were other phrases that really captured my attention: "American imagination," "American institutions. Are there sort of concepts that you really explore deeply — or you did explore deeply in the process of writing and thinking about the book?

SMITH: Oh yeah, well I've been thinking about the American imagination a lot in recent years because it's something that we are initiated into quite seamlessly. And it determines so much about how we see others, but even ourselves, and many of its terms feel contestable. And as somebody, you know, who descends from Black Southerners with a religious practice, the soul, for me, is a kind of joyful given. But I also understand that's not the case for everyone.

And another term that helps me describe the largeness that I'm imagining, for people who are skeptical of the religious connotations of a word like "soul," is "consciousness." Which I think contains what we know, what we are guided by that we aren't consciously aware of. Consciousness can travel immeasurable distances through the imagination, through memory, through intention.

And so I wonder if that is another form of container for the, the collective energy, choice-making and the constructive capacity of the imagination, um, not just singly, but when aligned in a group like, you know, like a nation. If that's another sense of what soul might stand for in this book.

CHAKRABARTI: And you're also not speaking specifically about individual consciousness, right? I mean, to use the cliche, a collective consciousness as well?

SMITH: Yeah, I like that idea. But so much of the practice that also underscores my own thinking has been individual and meditation and thinking about history. I think it begins with making a choice as an individual. Do I want to see what I've always been taught to see? Or am I willing to do the difficult or even sometimes destabilizing work of seeing clearly what is present and probably more emphatically, what hides within the terms and the givens that we've been offered?

CHAKRABARTI: One thing that I've noticed in the past several years of your work is the importance that you give to quietness. You've mentioned that in terms of Simon's letter. Quietness, meditation, your podcast is called The Slow Down. Slowing down, giving yourself time and space to hear the unheard and maybe seeing the unnoticed. Why do you think that's so important when thinking about the capacity or the room for improvement in terms of the individual soul?

SMITH: Yeah. I think that we know and understand vastly more than we give ourselves credit for. We're creative beings. We have knowledges within us. But there are things that take time to make themselves felt. And I can't stop thinking that the rush within which we live, our societal rush, the human, you know, traffic that we're pushed into, the pressure to instantly respond and instantly decide and then speak.

I can't help but thinking that that understands how much we possess if we only slow down. And I feel like we're being made small. We're being made very good consumers by the fact that we don't have the reflective time. We've gotta grab and decide instantly because it's convenient. And because the tide of daily movement insists upon us making convenient choices.

CHAKRABARTI: It's the way we measure our aliveness, I'd say, these days.

SMITH: Mm-hmm. "I'm so busy. I only got five hours of sleep." And somehow that's a badge of honor. When to go to the discomfort of silence and to fill it with genuine reflection and observation, for me, that's when hard questions begin to emerge. It's when the realizations that I've long sort of avoided or put off sort of make themselves felt.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm. So in this room, by the way, thank you for helping create this space right now where we can do that slowing down and reflection. What is the plea? I mean, it's in the subtitle of your book. What is the plea that you're making? I said "to" the American soul earlier and that's wrong — prepositions are important. What's the plea that you're making for the American soul?

SMITH: Well, one facet of it has to do with thinking about the incredible richness that dwells within Black life, but within the lives of the freed, who have countlessly been made to improvise new forms of support, develop terms of self affirmation when the wider imagination is saying you're small, you're suspect.

And I think that it also has to do with institutions, homemade institutions that replace, you know, like the governor's office that didn't really help Simon Trixie. And so I think things like love become institutions for us. Things like faith — and not blind faith, but a faith that's built and claimed. Faith that says "I can do this and I'll show you how." Those feel like tools that our nation might begin to prize more actively.

And then I guess the other part of the plea is it's pointed toward the failure and the slapdash nature of anything that's done with a rush and with a sense of scarcity and with the sense that power and power alone is the aim. In the lives of my father's family and other communities like theirs, freedom, what little freedom was attained, wasn't hoarded, it was given away. Doors were opened, even the sacrifices that I saw my parents — or now understand my parents — made so that their children could maybe cover a little bit more distance. To me, that's a way that freedom is multiplied. It's not multiplied when it's hoarded or when it's wielded.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm.

SMITH: And so these are terms I would like us to begin to honor. These are practices that, you know, emerge from the American grain, but they're not centered therein.

CHAKRABARTI: Ah, yes. I see exactly what you mean. And sometimes not only are they not centered, but we kind of stumble away, we stumble further away from them. And I kind of feel like we're in one of those moments right now as a nation which is why there's another concept that you introduce in the book about "civic sobriety."

There's a section actually, we've got it before you, I'm wondering if you could read it to us. It begins, yeah, it's on page 209. And you kind of, you describe how you can, one can see America if using the metaphor of folks in a bar.

SMITH: Yeah. I'll read it and I'll just gloss it by saying this is a kind of parable in a way.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

SMITH: "One night, two friends might sit drinking together until things haze over, and one friend says a thing, or the other friend does a thing, or both together make a choice they know in their rightful minds they ought not to. Harm ensues. Someone is scorned or handled or stolen from. And the one friend there beside the other, consenting in silence, is caught somehow, too, in the shame of that harm.

Both go home. Each sleeps it off then wakes to a vague knowing, acknowledged the next day with a shrug, a choking-up the pair covers with hiccups of laughter. It is a pact. It binds them to one another. It is heavy. Together, they slump to support it. If one puts it down, the weight of it will fall to the other. So they shoulder it. They soldier on. Over time, between them, there are many more such nights. Eventually, the whole fabric of their friendship grows knotted with compromise.

Do you see it? Can you make it out? The borders and treaties, the acts and pacts, the decisions, deflections, and denials, the growing body of history, the integrity of a nation, and how essential sobriety ought to be to such an enterprise?"

CHAKRABARTI: So what does sobriety mean in this context?

SMITH: I think it means honest accountability. Acknowledging what has and what has not been done, and committing to act in response. You know, to make things right and, you know, the concept of sobriety is important to me because I quit drinking about six or seven years ago and I realized that drinking helped me avoid being honest with myself in so many ways and certainly assenting to the kind of selflessness that makes the duty of parenthood possible.

But as I began to think about the mechanisms of denial and "permission" that drinking or substance invite, I started thinking about nationhood. And I started thinking about the things we quietly tolerate, bear, and file away when — or perhaps because — we understand they dim the lights on all of our professed values of freedom, of democracy, of opportunity and justice.

CHAKRABARTI: Again, I'm pulled towards your use of this word "quiet." Because right now there's so much when when demanding accountability, there's so much resentment and anger that can go along with it. And I'm not casting judgment over that, but more saying, it sounds like what you're saying is it's a completely different experience to sit quietly with the question of accountability or the clarity that comes from it. Again, not to drive people towards a sense of guilt, but just a deeper understanding. We have a challenge though, as you said earlier about daily life. In this country right now makes finding that space and that that moment to be with yourself and reflect on the nation maybe a little more challenging.

But I just want to shift gears a tiny bit here because we're running out of time and it's breaking my heart. One of the things that always just takes my breath away  when I'm in conversation with many of the people who've been on this show who are really just the tops of their games is how they are so at one with their talent that it's like imbued in every cell of their body. And you are definitely one of those people. And in regards to sort of not just how you see the world, but how you talk about it. Obviously your poetry is profound. But even the way you're speaking now, there's a cadence of gentle musicality, the way you wrote the prose in your book. I mean, did you, did you notice that? Did you notice that that's how you carry yourself in the world?

SMITH: Well, I'll just answer that question from the prose in the book. I had to adopt a different compositional method in order to have the courage to go into these questions as they relate to my family, to me, and to this larger body that we together constitute. And so logic wasn't going to cut it for me. The traditional method of writing an essay with an argument in mind and moving forward to illuminate all the evidence for that argument, that wasn't helping me. Because I had questions. I had dis-ease. And sound helped me approach possibilities and realities that I would otherwise have wanted to recoil from.

So listening rhythmically to the momentum of language, which says, "That's right, keep going," was really helpful for me. Otherwise, I think all of the things that you're talking about, like, "It's hard" or "I don't want to do it." "It's ugly work." I'm as susceptible to them as anybody else. I had to find a method that gave me courage and that generated a momentum that could not be resisted.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I find that poetry and that kind of use of language often can, can pierce the, I don't know, the edifice that hyperintellectualism can put between ourselves and the truths we need to acknowledge.

One more question. Again, I'm coming back to your, to your 2012 book, and I had you read that excerpt from My God, It's Full of Stars. That last line. "So brutal and alive, it seemed to comprehend us back."

SMITH: Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: How did you write that line?

SMITH: Well, I was writing that section of the poem not only thinking about my dad, but also looking at some of those Hubble images, the vastness of the Hubble deep field image, which shows millions or more galaxies. And the sense of awe that it imparted was helpful to that last line. "Understanding, " which was a word that could have gone in that sentence, felt so paltry in a way. It felt human, limited or capped. And "comprehension" felt larger, but it refused a little bit of the consolation that the human might crave. And that difficult place felt exciting to me.

CHAKRABARTI: Mm-hmm.

SMITH: It put us in the midst of a scale that we're not in charge of.

CHAKRABARTI: Well, Professor Smith, I can tell you that your work over the years and including the new book have constantly put me in that space of being in awe of how you help us comprehend ourselves and our nation. So, thank you so very much for joining us today.

SMITH: Thank you. What a joy and a gift.