"Something We Need": An Interview with Tracy K. Smith

Abstract

Tracy K. Smith. Photo by Igor Solis. [End Page 858] This interview was conducted by telephone on June 30, 2004, between College Station, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York, where Tracy Smith lives. ROWELL:The Body's Question is the title of your collection of poems, your very first collection of poems, in fact. What does that title mean? How do you want it to serve us, your readers? SMITH: The title was something that came to me only after I started thinking of my individual poems as a unified body of work. I realized that, more and more, the poems were valuable to me as sites of questioning and exploration rather than for their ability to lead me to answers or resolutions. Once I allowed myself to enter into unknown territory with no clear idea of how to get myself through or out of it, I felt much freer and much more willing to engage with difficult material. The fact that the right question can be more important than its answer was liberating for me as a writer—and as a person. That must have been in the back of my mind when I was thinking of a title for the collection. The body is also rather important, thematically, in the book. Only two poems in the book deal directly with the death of my mother; however, that is something, which informed a lot of the writing that came before the writing of the poems, which make up the manuscript. One way or another, I was still grappling with the idea of the body as a site for experience, memory, and loss. Having come out of a long period, during which most of the poems I was writing were, in one way or another, poems of grief, I think I saw the poems that made up The Body's Question as my first steps back into the world of the living; my first attempts to consider myself as an adult, and to think about the body as a site of discovery and joy. ROWELL: How do you want us to use that title? Some titles of books are directly related to the texts that follow. Some titles evoke the very purposes or central subjects of texts. And there are some titles that don't seem at all related to the books they mark. SMITH: There's one moment in the book where the title sneaks its way into the poem. It's the end of one of the sections of "Joy," where the speaker says, "I know you are [End Page 859] deciding / That the body's a question: / What do you believe in?" To me, that's a grave question, not because of its implications in the afterlife, but because it guides the choices we make as people in this world—even the choices we make as readers or observers. What is important enough to lean toward, to listen to, and to remember? Maybe a reader who's really in sync with my sense of the title will use that question as a starting point, and move through the book realizing that much of what we don't ordinarily choose to draw from—the voices we barely notice, the details we're more comfortable avoiding—can change (or save) our lives. ROWELL: "Joy" contains a number of lines about the body: "the body as memory," "the body as appetite," "but the body is cautious," for example. SMITH: Right. In some ways the body is really a metaphor—not just in the poems, but also in our everyday lives. Its inclinations and responses can help us to see more clearly who and what the self is. It announces our connection to that which is beyond the self, and yet it's riddled with hesitancy and appetite and longing. In spite of all its givings and misgivings, most of our experiences are visceral, are things that inform the self by way of the body...