Hopkins Hosts America’s Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

 

The Hopkins community filled the gymnasium on Friday, May, 4, 2018 to hear Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith share her work and creative journey. In his introduction of Ms. Smith, Head of School Kai Bynum encouraged students to prepare to welcome a poet in their midst by urging them to “stop, slow down, pay attention. Listen to the story between the words.”

Smith is America’s 22nd Poet Laureate, named to the position in 2017.   She is the author of three collections of poetry, and the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “Life on Mars.” She received her AB from Harvard University, an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and is presently the Director of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Ms. Smith spent the day on campus, speaking at assembly, fielding question and answer sessions with students in the library and concluding with an afternoon poetry workshop. Throughout the day, she spoke in detail, and with passion, of her creative process and the construction of a poem.  

In response to the question, “what is a poem?” Ms. Smith spoke about a poem as employing a “heightened rigorous use of language,” that seeks to marry different impulses and invokes the senses and imagination. “Where you start is not always where you end up,” she remarked. “It is an act of magic.”

Smith reminded the aspiring poets on campus that “there is nothing too small to observe in a poem.” A poem can be born from a phrase, an image, a sound, a feeling. “A poem gives us vocabulary for our own feelings.”

Each year during the month of April, Hopkins hosts a Celebration of Poetry and invites a nationally-known poet to campus. Previous poets include Billy Collins, Robert Pinsky and Naomi Shihab Nye.  The series is funded through the Ann Kneisel Library Fund.

Read more about Tracy K. Smith's visit in the New Haven Register.