Some poems are just expressions of joy or love, but even those poems seem to arise out of this feeling that is different from what I thought it would be, the stakes are higher than I thought they were. Smith: There’s always an itch, a question, an anxiety, or apprehension that starts a poem for me. Smith BU Today: How do you approach a poem? This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity. The event marks the first time the Lowell series has been held in person since the pandemic struck.īU Today spoke with Smith, who is a Harvard University professor of English and of African and African American studies, about her writing and how her work has changed in recent years, what she discovered on her visits to rural communities during her tenure as poet laureate, and what poetry gives us that other art forms do not. She is also an editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal, one of the country’s oldest poetry publications. She’ll be joined by Kirun Kapur (GRS’00), the prize-winning author of two collections of poems, Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist and Women in the Waiting Room, and the director of the Amherst College creative writing program. On Tuesday, April 12, Smith will read from her work at this semester’s Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading, starting at 7:30 pm at the Leventhal Center.

She is currently at work on several nonfiction projects, including a book that expands on a lecture she delivered as poet laureate, called “Staying Human: Poetry in the Age of Technology.” The book will examine how the language and ethos of poetry can serve as an antidote to what Smith describes as “some of the diminishing forces and practices that have gotten embedded in our day-to-day life thanks to our relationship with technology.” She has also written the libretto for two operas, as well as a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award. Today, Smith is one of the nation’s foremost poets, a two-term US poet laureate (2017-2019), author of five collections, and recipient of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her third book, Life on Mars, an exploration of what it means to be human. But studying under poets like Seamus Heaney and Henri Cole and attending readings and meeting local poets proved “revelatory,” she says. It was then she discovered that poetry was “a living force.” “And I think that stayed there, that sense that there is this large space that we are in or belong to, that language can help us get back to.”īy the time she arrived at Harvard as an undergrad, Smith knew she wanted to be a writer, but was unclear how to get there and what kind of writer she wanted to be. I liked the largeness and sort of astonishment of it,” Smith says. “I thought “Aha, there is another space we can enter into. Smith was a fifth grader in Fairfield, Calif., when she came upon Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Reading it, she says, she felt understood.

Life on mars poet smith