Tracy K. Smith Quotes

So much of my poetry begins with something that I can describe in visual terms, so thinking about distance, thinking about how life begins and what might be watching us.

Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.

time never stops, but does it end? and how many livesbefore take-off, before we find ourselves beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.

For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.

Everything that disappears/Disappears as if returning somewhere

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice.

When I was young, my father was lord Of a small kingdom: a wife, a garden, Kids for whom his word was Word. It took years for my view to harden, To shrink him to human size.

I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines.

If I call it pain, and try to touch it With my hands, my own life, It lies still and the music thins, A pulse felt for through garments.

I grew up in northern California in a town called Fairfield, which is kind of exactly between San Francisco and Sacramento, a small suburb. And I'm the youngest of five children.

Brooklyn is kind of my writer's retreat.

everything/ that ever was still is, somewhere