I had to say to myself, 'I haven't written enough about blackness, yet it's part of my consciousness and my lived experience.' I had to get over that anxiety of 'I haven't done this before.'
Interpretation
Embracing personal identity and experiences can be daunting, but it's essential for authentic expression.
In this quote, Tracy K. Smith reflects on the importance of acknowledging one's personal experiences and identity, especially regarding topics like race and blackness. She highlights the internal struggle and anxiety of confronting her own experiences in writing, indicating that the process of self-discovery and expression is a crucial part of her artistic journey.
In practice
In a speech about cultural representation in literature.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point.
I try to improvise like Les Young, Louis Armstrong or someone else I admire. What comes out is what I feel.
Try to distill the character of your subject. Understand how he moves, thinks, acts. It's difficult to put into words. Consider each drawing as a problem that did not exist before, and then try to solve that problem to the best of your ability. That i what caricature is all about
Magic has universal appeal. I don't believe in magic in the way that I describe in my books, but I'd love it to be real.
As musicians and artists, it's important we have an environment - and I guess when I say environment, I really mean the industry, that really nurtures these gifts. Oftentimes, the machine can overlook the need to take care of the people who produce the sounds that have a lot to do with the health and well-being of society.
I've always considered myself an actor first and foremost.
Writing for television is completely different from movie scriptwriting. A movie is all about the director's vision, but television is a writer's medium.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.