Top 35 Tracy K. Smith Quotes
#1. Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.
Tracy K. Smith
#2. I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines,
Tracy K. Smith
#3. We are here for what amounts to a few/hours,/a day at most./We feel around making sense of the terrain,/our own new limbs,/Bumping up against a herd of bodies/until one becomes home./Moments sweep past. The grass bends/then learns again to stand.
Tracy K. Smith
#4. We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,
That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.
Tracy K. Smith
#5. From time to time, i think of him watching me
from over the top of his glasses, or eating candy
from a jar. i remember thanking him each time
the session was done. but mostly what i see
is a human hand reaching down to lift
a pebble from my tongue
Tracy K. Smith
#6. I feel most alive, most electric with faith, breath, and courage, when I think of God as a current that runs through all that is. Not by will or by choice. Not as a benediction but because there are laws even God must obey.
Tracy K. Smith
#7. I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
Tracy K. Smith
#9. Listen: the dark we've only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,
marbled with static like gristly meat. a chorus of engines churns.
silence taunts: a dare. everything that disappears
disappears as if returning somewhere.
Tracy K. Smith
#10. We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
Tracy K. Smith
#11. Lately, I've been thinking about the difference between poetry and prose, and as I've experienced it, poetry is insistent. It allows for images and statements to operate in a single space and resonate powerfully without the application to be elaborated upon and narrated.
Tracy K. Smith
#13. Some like to imagine
a cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,
mouthing 'yes, yes' as we toddle towards the light,
biting her lip of we teeter at some ledge. longing
to sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best.
Tracy K. Smith
#14. When my father died, those years when he was working on the Hubble came back to me, and it seemed fitting to imagine him as having somehow merged with the large mystery that the universe represents.
Tracy K. Smith
#15. I don't know how anyone can see the Hubble 'Deep Field' image and not feel like something else is going about its business out there.
Tracy K. Smith
#16. 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.
Tracy K. Smith
#17. 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.
Tracy K. Smith
#18. 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.
Tracy K. Smith
#19. I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
Tracy K. Smith
#20. Lizzie Harris's debut collection, Stop Wanting, crafts images and lines of such arresting splendor that I am very often driven to joy at the feats of beauty and healing that language is capable of bringing into being.
Tracy K. Smith
#21. I feel like it's a gift for any writer to be recognized like this.
Tracy K. Smith
#22. Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
Tracy K. Smith
#23. I have kept journals at different times in my life. And a lot of my early notebooks became places where I would just think on the page, trying to parse what I was feeling, to find out what I was thinking.
Tracy K. Smith
#24. A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point.
Tracy K. Smith
#25. For me, a poem is an opportunity to kind of interrogate myself a little bit.
Tracy K. Smith
#26. 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.
Tracy K. Smith
#27. I think humans have always felt watched back by whatever is out there flickering in the distance. What excites me is what the imagination creates, not simply in explanation of what is there but also to explain or justify the feeling of awe and attachment that the heavens inspire.
Tracy K. Smith
#28. I am keenly aware that in writing about my mother, I am writing about my aunts' sister, and that in writing about my grandmother, I'm writing about their mother. I know that my honesty about how my view of these people has changed over the years may be painful.
Tracy K. Smith
#29. [ ... ] the body is what we lean toward,
tensing as it darts, dancing away.
but it's the voice that enters us. even
saying nothing. even saying nothing
over and over absently to itself
Tracy K. Smith
#30. Keetje Kuipers' poems are daring, formally beautiful and driven by rich imagery and startling ideas.
Tracy K. Smith
#31. 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.
Tracy K. Smith
#32. Time never stops, but does it end? and how many lives
before take-off, before we find ourselves
beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
Tracy K. Smith
#33. I had written here and there about my mother in my poems. There are poems for her in my first and second books.
Tracy K. Smith
#34. Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.
Tracy K. Smith
#35. Look, I want to say,
The worst thing you can imagine has already
Zipped up its coat and is heading back
Up the road to wherever it came from.
Tracy K. Smith
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