NewsPoet: Tracy K. Smith Writes The Day In Verse
Tracy K. Smith poses for a portrait outside of NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Friday.
Tracy K. Smith poses for a portrait outside of NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Friday.
Today marks the start of an exciting project at All Things Considered. Each month we'll be bringing in a poet to spend time in the newsroom — and at the end, to compose a poem reflecting on the day's news.
The first poet to participate is Tracy K. Smith. She has received degrees in English and creative writing from Harvard College, Columbia University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her latest book of poems is titled Life on Mars.
Smith sat down with All Things Considered's Melissa Block to talk about writing a poem in a hurry. She called the day she spent with NPR's producers "delightful, and a little terrifying."
But reflecting on the headlines isn't exactly a new activity for Smith. In fact, she said she often finds that news events are "things I am thinking about and wrestling with and trying to understand better." And for a poet, there's no better way to do that than to write.
See The Story That Inspired The Poem
Asked where she got the idea for this poem, Smith explained that she came to the morning news meeting at All Things Considered, where she got a preview of the day's stories. Then she sat down to do some background reading. "I just listened to what seemed to rise to the surface for me," she said.
It got easier when she found a point of view that she could identify with: One story by Ofeibea Quist-Arcton — about Nigerians fleeing violence in the north of the country — struck a particular chord. "The sense of individual lives and individual bodies gave me a starting point, Smith explained." Her poem responding to that story is below.
All Things Considered's Newspoet is produced and edited by Ellen Silva with production assistance from Rose Friedman.
'New Road Station'
History is in a hurry. It moves like a woman
Corralling her children onto a crowded bus.
History spits Go, go, go, lurching at the horizon,
Hammering the driver's headrest with her fist.
Nothing else moves. The flies settle in place
Watching with their million eyes, never bored.
The crows strike their bargain with the breeze.
They cluck and caw at the women in their frenzy,
The ones who suck their teeth, whose skirts
Are bathed in mud. But history is not a woman,
And it is not the crowd forming in a square.
It is not the bright swarm of voices chanting No
And Now, or even the rapt silence of a room
Where a film of history is right now being screened.
Perhaps history is the bus that will only wait so long
Before cranking its engine and barreling down
The road. Maybe it is the voice coming in
Through the radio like a long distance call.
Or the child in the crook of his mother's arm
Who believes history must sleep inside a tomb,
Or the belly of a bomb.
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