Tracy K. Smith's "Solstice"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 7 February 2024

⏱️ 7 minutes

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Summary

Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Smith is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), which won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet; Duende (2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essense Literary Award; Life on Mars (2011), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Wade in the Water (2018). In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. She has also written a memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction.In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is a professor of English and of African and African American Studies and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. She also hosted American Public Media's daily radio program and podcast The Slowdown, which is sponsored by the Poetry Foundation.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.
0:04.3	I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, February 7th, 2024.
0:10.0	Today's poem is by Tracy K. Smith, and it's called Solstice.
0:15.3	It's from her 2011 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Life on Mars.
0:20.0	I'll read it once, offer a few comments,
0:22.0	and then read it one more time. Solstice.
0:28.8	They're gassing geese outside of JFK. Tehran will likely fill up soon with blood. The times
0:35.5	is getting smaller day by day. We've learned to back away from all we say
0:40.6	and more or less agree with what we should. Whole flocks are being gassed near JFK. So much of what
0:47.9	we're asked is to obey. A reflex we'd abandon if we could. Times reported 19 dead today.
0:55.1	They're going to make the opposition pay.
0:57.9	If you're sympathetic, knock on wood, the geese were terrorizing JFK.
1:03.1	Remember how they taught you once to pray, eyes closed on your knees to any God.
1:08.6	Sometimes small minds seem to take the day. Election fraud, a migratory plague,
1:14.7	less and less surprises us as odd. We dislike what they did at JFK. Our time is brief. We dwindle
1:22.8	by the day.
1:37.1	What I find really fascinating about this poem is the way that Smith uses structure.
2:04.2	The ideas in the poem are very sporadically structured. It can be frustrating to read. It's hard to know where you're at any even moment. Threads are picked up and dropped. And yet, there is a consistent rhyme scheme, which suggests that on some level, the organization is very intentional,
2:11.9	that the random nature, or the seemingly random nature of the conceptual organization,
2:15.7	is really not random, but planned and intended.
2:22.7	The first stanza, we get what seemed like headlines. They're gassing geese outside of JFK. Tehran will likely fill up soon with blood. Then we get our first
2:27.7	mention of the times, which is shrinking day by day. And I think that's enough to suggest
	...

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