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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.

Tracy K. Smith

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Tracy K. Smith
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: April 16
Poet
Writer
Falmouth
Cornwall
Tracy Smith
Poetry
Ashamed
Icy
Emotional
Expected
Grounding
Leave
Lonely
Acknowledging
Feeling
Empty
Sentimentality
Actually
Smart
Susceptible
Feelings
Exist
Detached
Smarts
Make
Interested
Sentiments
Infatuated
Like
Reader
Poems
Adolescents

More quotes by Tracy K. Smith

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If I call it pain, and try to touch it With my hands, my own life, It lies still and the music thins, A pulse felt for through garments.
Tracy K. Smith
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Often it is a moment rather than an event that makes a poem.
Tracy K. Smith
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I've been beating my head all day long on the same six lines.
Tracy K. Smith
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I think tension between the intimate and the vast is at the heart of every poem by any poet, though of course the terms with which it is explored vary. Perhaps it is something we seek out in order to affirm that our small lives are tethered to something large and ongoing.
Tracy K. Smith
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We are here for what amounts to a few/hours,/a day at most./We feel around making sense of the terrain,/our own new limbs,/Bumping up against a herd of bodies/until one becomes home./Moments sweep past. The grass bends/then learns again to stand.
Tracy K. Smith
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Everything that disappears/Disappears as if returning somewhere
Tracy K. Smith
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History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice.
Tracy K. Smith