Revisiting Tracy K. Smith and Melissa Range

This week, the podcast is divided into two parts with one subject—poetry. Part 1 is excerpts from my 2018 interview with poet Melissa Range. Her collection Scriptorium mingles history with the personal as Range explores how language is used and abused—who speaks with authority? Whose language is dismissed? What do we preserve and how? From medieval illuminations to Appalachian slang, Range discusses the joy and creativity that’s found in the vernacular. Scriptorium was chosen for the 2015 National Poetry Series by my second guest Tracy K. Smith who also wrote the foreword to the book.

Part 2 of the pod excerpts my 2021 interview with 2017-2019 US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.  Today’s podcast  focuses on her collection Wade in the Water a wide-ranging series of poems that reflect on history and contemporary America. Smith looks at both with an unflinching eye that mixes compassion and outrage with her lyricism and attention to language.  Smith’s work sings to us of possibility while demanding an acknowledgment of what was and is.  Again, we are compelled to grapple with: Whose voices are heard? What is preserved?  Smith discusses the power of poetry to open up historical narratives and complicate contemporary assumptions by speaking intentionally with a multiplicity of voices.