The following post is by Neely Tucker, a writer-editor in the Library’s Office of Communications. It originally appeared on the Library of Congress blog.
Tracy K. Smith concluded her remarkable term as U.S. Poet Laureate with a speech and on-stage conversation at the Library of Congress Monday night, capping two years of travel, podcasts and community conversations across the nation.
Smith began her tenure with a packed reading at the Coolidge Auditorium in Sept. 2017, and she ended it on the same stage in much the same fashion, sharing the platform with five poets laureate from Hawaii to New York.
Speaking to an enthusiastic audience, she said she felt “indescribably lucky.” She had taken the post with the belief that poetry had always been good for the individual. Two years later: “More than ever, I believe it’s good for the collective, the community, even to something resembling the nation.”
The poet’s office in the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center, high in the Jefferson Building, features elegant furniture and dramatic, west-facing views of the U.S. Capitol Building and the National Mall, the Washington Monument in the distance. Smith, however, did not use the space as a retreat for ivory-towered contemplation.
Instead, she used the position for active outreach, working to expand poetry’s impact on multiple fronts. She, with a team from the Library, made seven trips across the country in an “American Conversations” tour, traveling from Alaska to Louisian