Jo Reed: On February 11, you’re doing a live virtual reading to mark Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, which does seem particularly pertinent this year. Can you tell me why you decided to participate and what is it that you want to provoke in people?
Tracy K. Smith: I think we’re constantly being reached if you will by history feels literal to me. I think the stakes that Lincoln faced and the lives that the Civil War was fought to let’s say change the status of-- I guess there were some who wanted to maintain the enslaved status for blacks in this country but I’m one of those people who believes that the Civil War was absolutely fought about slavery; I know very eloquent scholars who are able to suggest otherwise but I don’t buy it. And so I am interested in that conversation. I’m also interested in the fact that there is some way that that perspective, perhaps not about something as abhorrent today as slavery but about a mind-set that says privilege and even a sense of superiority, can be designated by race. That’s something we need to talk about. That’s something that poetry can help us close the distance on. I have a long poem in “Wade in the Water” that’s derived from Civil War letters and deposition statements. Many of those letters were written to Abraham Lincoln out of a sense of urgent desperation: Please help me. Please get fair pay for me. Please help my son. Can you tell me am I free or not? Those voices feel relevant to me. They don’t feel foreign, they don’t feel historic, and I think that the mind-set that allowed people to storm the capitol is proof that this nineteenth-century perspective isn’t gone. I feel like I could say more but there is something really startling about the fact that Abraham Lincoln is probably one of the most relevant Americans we can think of at this moment.
Jo Reed: In your work, history is often a shadow that shapes the present. It’s not as though the figure shapes the shadow; it’s the shadow that shapes the figure. I wonder if you’d mind reading your poem “Declaration” and then telling us a bit about it.
Tracy K. Smith: Okay,
“Declaration”:
He has
sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people
He has plundered our—
ravaged our—
destroyed the lives of our—
taking away our—
abolishing our most valuable—
and altering fundamentally the Forms of our—
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for
Redress in the most humble terms:
Our repeated
Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.
We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration
and settlement here.
—taken Captive
on the high Seas
to bear—
So that poem is obviously drawn from the text of the Declaration of Independence which I was reading as a way of trying to listen to history a little bit differently than I habitually had or maybe had even been taught to and trying to see if there was another story or another message within a document like the Declaration of Independence that could be useful to my understanding or even our collective experience of the twenty-first century. And what I found when I looked at it closely was that this narrative of the nature of black existence in this country leapt off the page, and I wrote that poem now maybe three or more years ago but reading it in 2021 after the summer that we’ve endured with so much violence against blacks and so much violence heaped on top of violence because of the fact of outcry and protest that poem is very haunting to me.
