by NPR Staff
Tracy K. Smith was NPR's first NewsPoet.
We're celebrating this month by hearing from young poets about how they chose — or were chosen by — poetry, and why poetry — one of the oldest human art forms — still matters.
Poet Tracy K. Smith won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2012 collection Life on Mars; she also served as NPR's first NewsPoet, spending a day in the newsroom and writing about her experience there.
She tells NPR's Scott Simon that poetry still has the power to change lives. "I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them."
Smith teaches creative writing at Princeton, and she says her students often start out exploring everyday, surface issues in their poetry, "which has to do with dorm life and college experience," she says, "but as we push forward into the semester and as they read more, they start to think about things that maybe take them out of their own points of view." Smith says she encourages her students to write "persona poems," in the voices of other people they may or may not know, "to see if the poem can be a way of teaching them about another kind of experience. But they also have, you know, a lot of poems that have to do with the things that never go away for us, like love or grief."
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She tells NPR's Scott Simon that poetry still has the power to change lives. "I work with a lot of young people who have poems that are changing their lives, that they're eager to talk about, but every now and then when I meet someone, maybe someone of my parents' generation, and I tell them that I write poetry, they'll begin to recite something that they memorized when they were in school that has never left them."
Smith teaches creative writing at Princeton, and she says her students often start out exploring everyday, surface issues in their poetry, "which has to do with dorm life and college experience," she says, "but as we push forward into the semester and as they read more, they start to think about things that maybe take them out of their own points of view." Smith says she encourages her students to write "persona poems," in the voices of other people they may or may not know, "to see if the poem can be a way of teaching them about another kind of experience. But they also have, you know, a lot of poems that have to do with the things that never go away for us, like love or grief."
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