By Patricia Thrushart, Cofounder, Poets Against Racism USA
In 2018, I began researching the life of a Philadelphia washerwoman who joined the Underground Railroad sometime in the 1830s. Formerly enslaved, she had a story that was difficult to draw out for many reasons—her enslaved status when born, the lack of consistent records from that period, her race and position in society. To put her life in context, I busied myself with the task of learning everything I could about the Underground Railroad, especially in Pennsylvania. This effort led me to the first-person narratives of abolitionists, antislavery activists, railroad operatives, and freedom seekers.
Their testimony haunted me. I remember thinking how little I knew about these voices, how they were slipping out of our collective memory. With that realization I decided to memorialize them in a series of poems that became a book, Inspired by Their Voices, published in 2021. It was my first experience with found poetry. As I wrote, I realized that I couldn’t improve on their original words; that with some curating and spatial arrangement, and perhaps a bit of editing, they were as powerful as anything could be. I hadn’t heard about the subgenre of found poetry, so I didn’t understand that what I was doing was a legitimate poetic form. I worried that I could be seen as plagiarizing, but it felt right to capitalize on the power of poetic craft as a way to enhance the original testimony. I shouldn’t have worried. When I read Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water, I connected the dots about found poetry.
Smith’s book, written when she was Poet Laureate of the United States, was published in 2018 by Graywolf Press and went on to be shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize and named a finalist for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. I bought it as part of a resolution I had made to read at least one book by every contemporary US Poet Laureate. It would become an inspiration.
In this work, Smith embraces the concept of found poetry—and, specifically, the use of erasure—adroitly and compellingly, with sources including The Declaration of Independence, the writings of slave owners, and letters written by African Americans during the Civil War. In the latter section, she preserves the spellings and grammar of the originals, some written to President Abraham Lincoln, parsing out the phrases by electing just the right point to turn the line or insert a space, almost like a breath.
Mr abraham lincon
I want to know sir if you please
whether I can have my son relest
from the arme. He is all the subport
I have now his father is Dead
and his brother that wase all
the help I had…
The writer of this letter goes on to say that her son has been wounded twice and has had nothing to send her, that she is old and her “head is blossoming for the grave.…” These voices spring from the page into the reader’s heart, eliciting emotions as raw as the day the letters were originally written. They remind us of our common humanity, the things that matter, what despair feels like, and hope.
The found and erasure poems are not the whole of Wade in the Water; Smith’s fully original work is just as deeply felt, and, when written about her family, provides a visceral connection to the voices from the past. In the poem “Dusk,” for example, Smith writes about her daughter:
What woke to war in me those years
When my daughter had first grown into
A solid-centered self? I’d watch her
Sit at the table — well, not quite sit,
More like stand on one leg while
The other knee hovered just over the chair.
Other poems are directly focused on social justice, like this one sparked by a photo and titled “Unrest in Baton Rouge”:
Our bodies run with ink dark blood.
Blood pools in the pavement’s seams.
Is it strange to say love is a language
Few practice, but all, or near all speak?
Even the men in black armor, the ones
Jangling handcuffs and keys, what else
Are they so buffered against, if not love’s blade
Sizing up the heart’s familiar meat?
We watch and grieve. We sleep, stir, eat.
Love: the heart sliced open, gutted, clean.
Love: naked almost in the everlasting street,
Skirt lifted by a different kind of breeze.
These are the truths waiting for the reader who delves into Smith’s poetry. We do indeed watch and grieve in the face of injustice, but also must eat, sleep, live, and try to come from love. Because of poems like this one, Tracy K. Smith’s Wade in the Water is required reading for anyone with a commitment to exploring social justice and contemporary issues through poetry.