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From W be easy Chicago this is Nurdette I'm Tricia Bobita and I'm Greta

Johnson and today we are talking with the 22nd poet

laureate of the United States Tracy K. Smith. Tracy is the author of several volumes of

poetry including one that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 called Life on Mars that's inspired in

part by the fact that her dad worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. It also has a

little something to do with David Bowie. Tracy has also written a memoir and she's working on a libretto for an opera.

We'll talk to Tracy about all that and her obsession with near death experiences.

And we'll also talk to her about how her mission as poet laureate is to make poetry as accessible as possible across the United States including rural America.

She's all about making sure that poetry can be like a daily normal act, which I think is so great because so often we think of poetry

as this like super fancy hyper literary thing that's like not super easy to just like dip into

for a minute and enjoy and then move on with your day.

Yeah, no, I'm afraid of poetry. I'm poetry phobic. Tell me more. I'm poetry phobic.

I'm not proud of the fact that I'm poetry phobic, but I think that probably the primary reason I've never gone through with applying for an

MFA program even though I'm really interested in writing is that all of the course lists

include poetry classes and I'm scared to poetry.

Or at least I was, until I heard Tracy K Smith

explain that it doesn't have to be scary

and that she can find poetry in all sorts of places

even in the number one song in the summer.

...