Tracy K. Smith, America’s Poet Laureate, Is a Woman With a Mission

NY Times Magazine

To Smith, poetry is a shortcut to honest conversation, a way of getting past small talk to probe the spots where our culture is most sore. “Literature allows us to be open, to listen and to be curious,” she told me over lunch in Princeton, N.J., where she’s the director of Princeton University’s creative-writing program, not long before her trip. When she reads poetry, her voice is deep and clear, but in conversation she speaks so softly that I sometimes had trouble understanding her. “I want to just go to places where writers don’t usually go, where people like me don’t usually show up, and say: ‘Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?’ ”

So far as I know, she had not been to the country I was from - the States of Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri. Where Poetry does not exist.