Wipe That Smirk Off Your Poem

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for "Life on Mars." Her memoir, "Ordinary Light," will be published next spring.

Updated March 16, 2015, 1:41 PM

Why are there so many people who think poems are like pretty little locks to be teased open? Why is there a vast majority in this country that suspects poetry has nothing to do with the real world where a person must work, fight in a war or struggle to make do? I’d wager that it has to do with something that has gotten into a heap of contemporary poetry and deadened it, making it about as interesting and relevant to others as a dog yipping at its own shadow: Irony.

Poems infatuated with their own smarts and detached from any emotional grounding can leave the reader feeling lonely, empty, ashamed for having expected more.

“In the beginning was the word.” It’s an origin story like many others, but it gets to the heart of what language can do, for it was language — the wishes and dreams that language names — that set at least one version of our world into motion. We all believe this on a certain level, don’t we? We speak vows aloud, tell ourselves what we want, doom ourselves to failure, urge ourselves to the finish line all because, on a fundamental level, we understand that words invite possibility.

But Irony doesn’t believe in this. Irony refuses to be life-giving or world-creating. Irony negates wish. Irony smirks at the animating power of the word. It says, “I’m too smart to get taken in by any of this.” Poems infatuated with their own smarts and detached from any emotional grounding can leave the reader feeling lonely, empty and ashamed for having expected more. Like icy adolescents, such poetry is more interested in commiserating than acknowledging that feelings — the sentiments that make us susceptible to sentimentality — actually exist.

What I’m making is not so much an aesthetic distinction as a philosophical one. A poem can examine the vulnerability at the core of human experience in any fashion. There are myriad ways of speaking to what it feels like to be alive in the world. No one reader will like them all. But there might be more readers willing to take a stab if more poets were brave or generous enough to risk failing at something that matters.


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Topics: Culture, books, poems, poetry

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