By MARSHA MERCER
If the frenzied pace of life and the blitz of breaking
news have left you desperate for a time out, there’s help from an unlikely
source: the federal government.
Tracy K. Smith, the poet laureate of the United
States, has a new podcast.
I hear you: “Oh, great, another podcast. Just what we
need.” But wait. “The Slowdown” invites us to do just that every weekday – slow
down.
It’s only five minutes, and you don’t have to be an
English major to enjoy the experience.
Smith starts each episode with a thoughtful meditation
on something she has done or seen that connects to the poem she then reads. Her
voice is calm and friendly, her insights are engaging and the poems she chooses
are conversational and unfussy.
“The Slowdown” is a counterpoint to the constant clash
and clang of everyday life. It provides a pause, time to step outside ourselves
and think about something we normally wouldn’t.
“Life is fast, intense and sometimes bewildering. But
poetry offers a way of slowing things down, looking at them closely, mining
each moment for all it houses,” Smith said when announcing the podcast. It launched
Nov. 26 and will air on public radio stations starting next month.
I was among journalists who interviewed Smith by phone
last year soon after Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden appointed her the
nation’s 22nd poet laureate. I wondered if she was up to the post that’s
been held by such distinguished poets as Robert Frost and Rita Dove.
But Smith has proved to be an able poetry advocate,
taking poems to rural places through her American Conversations tour and using
today’s technology to summon us to “see the world more clearly through poetry.”
The poet laureate receives a $35,000 stipend and
$5,000 travel budget annually, but, no, this is not your tax dollars at work.
The position is funded through a private endowment that
established the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center in 1937 and
contributions, as they say, from people like you. The podcast is sponsored by
the Poetry Foundation, based in Chicago, and supported by the center.
The poet laureate post was officially called
Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress until 1985, when Congress
dreamed up the clunky title Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library
of Congress. Robert Penn Warren served under both
titles, 1944-45 and 1986-87.
Smith, 46, earned a B.A. from Harvard and a master’s
in creative writing from Columbia. She teaches at Princeton and is the author
of four books of poetry and a memoir.
She won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for “Life
on Mars,” which the Pulitzer jury called “A collection of bold, skillful poems,
taking readers into the universe and moving them to an authentic mix of joy and
pain.”
The poet laureate is not political, and Smith believes
poetry can bring people together.
“I dreamed of using poetry as a way of building a
bridge between people in cities and university towns, where poetry festivals
and reading series are quite common, and those in rural parts of the United
States, where such programming doesn’t often reach,” she wrote in a blog post.
“Because poems put us in touch with our most powerful
memories, feelings, questions and wishes, I imagined that talking about poems
might be a way of leaping past small-talk and collapsing the distance between
strangers,” she wrote.
Her travels to New Mexico, Kentucky, South Carolina,
Alaska, South Dakota, Maine and Louisiana have included stops to read and talk
about poetry at libraries, community centers, a veterans’ home and a women’s
prison.
She edited “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our
Time,” an anthology with work by 50 living American poets, published in the
fall.
“Poetry invites us to listen to other voices, to make
space for other perspectives, and to care about the lives of others who may not
look, sound or think like ourselves,” she said.
So spend five minutes with “The Slowdown.” Let me know
where it takes you.
© 2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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