meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Log in
The Daily Poem

Tracy K. Smith’s “The Good Life”

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6729 Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today’s poem is one of those perfect distillations of a concrete emotion. Happy reading.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

0:08.1

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, June 30th, 2025.

0:12.7

Today's poem is by Tracy K. Smith, and it's called The Good Life.

0:17.5

I'll read it once off for a few comments and read it once more.

0:22.2

The Good Life

0:23.2

When some people talk about money, they speak as if it were a mysterious lover who went out to buy milk and never came back.

0:34.5

And it makes me nostalgic for the years I lived on coffee and bread, hungry all the time,

0:41.0

walking to work on payday like a woman journeying for water from a village without a well,

0:46.4

then living one or two nights like everyone else on roasted chicken and red wine.

1:00.1

The longtime literary critic for the New Yorker, James Wood, has this concept he refers to as thisness.

1:01.7

The friend of mine calls it, having been thereness.

1:04.9

And it's this idea that the right detail, the perfectly selected little piece of information, can do more than 100, 200, 300 words of

1:19.6

description if it is the kind of detail that only someone who has lived the experience could possibly know about or recall

1:30.8

or think to bring up in their description of a particular place or scene or mood or event.

1:38.6

And the beauty of that right detail that conveys the thisness or the having been thereness is that it can

1:48.3

actually engage your reader or listener in such a way that they complete the description for you.

1:55.6

They bring to the table the emotional experience that's attached to this event that you're trying to

2:03.6

narrate. And Tracy K. Smith, I think, does that so well in this poem. There is some very

2:10.6

literal description and exposition. The years I lived on coffee and bread. There's the slightly metaphorical description in the opening lines.

2:21.2

People talking about money like they might speak about a mysterious lover who slipped out one night and never came back.

2:27.2

But it's the final lines that really complete the picture and open up this poem into a much wider world of the reader's own subjective experience,

2:39.0

but even for those who haven't shared the experience, the ability to enter into a fuller version of what's being described here.

...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 18 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Goldberry Studios, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Goldberry Studios and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.