Tracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet and former United States Poet Laureate (2017-2019), who has written four books of poetry (The Body’s Question, Duende, Life on Mars, and Wade in the Water), one memoir (Ordinary Light), as well as translated a book of poems by Yi Lei. She has also published an anthology of poetry called American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time. In the introduction to that anthology, she states that one of the reasons she loves poetry is because poetry offers the opportunity to meet speakers that she would “never get the chance to meet were it not for the poem. Because the distance between us is too great” (Smith, Tracy K. Introduction. American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, by Graywolf Press, 2018.). Her poetry seeks to explore issues beyond the personal, searching for connections we have to each other. As US Poet Laureate, the third African American woman to hold that position, her mission was to reach a broad American audience, despite the seemingly deep divisions in society that might make such a bridge impossible.

The title poem from Wade in the Water (2018) is about this power of art to bridge distance not only to each other but also to the past. “Wade in the Water” is about encountering and listening to a stranger with love, even when the act of love is a difficult one, burdened with the pain of history. The speaker is at a performance of the Gullah Geechee, descendants of the formerly enslaved. During their ring shout performance, the speaker is transported into the past as she suddenly begins feeling some of the pain of the enslaved runaway who must wade in the water to escape those who are hunting her.

Despite a melancholic tone haunting the poem, Smith infuses the poem with love for the Other. This love helps to heal the wounds of the past, showing how art can allow for transformation from a painful legacy.

Poet Biography

Tracy K. Smith, born in Massachusetts in 1972, was raised in the suburbs of Fairfield, California, the youngest of five children. In Smith’s memoir Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction, she explained that when her father and mother moved to California from Alabama, they left something painful:

[They left] pain […] best summed up by the bevy of things the South had done to people of my parents’ generation: the civil rights activists hosed down by police, the young black men and women sitting stone-faced at all-white lunch counters or behind jailhouse bars (Smith, Tracy K. Ordinary Light: A Memoir. Knopf, 2015, p. 71.).

Her father worked at Travis Air Force Base, an engineer who eventually worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, and her mother was a teacher. Growing up, Smith loved reading. “I thrilled at the way simple words on a page could lift me up and carry me away from myself, away from being a nine-year-old black girl in Northern California in the 1980s and set me down in any kind of elsewhere” (Smith p. 95).

In fifth grade, she discovered the power of poetry, moved especially by Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody.” When she went away to college at Harvard, she began seriously writing poetry, inspired not only by her favorite authors of the past but also by some of the professors at Harvard, especially Seamus Heaney. She began reading her poems at the Dark Room Collective, a reading series featuring writers of color. She earned her master of fine arts in creative writing at Columbia University, writing poems for what would later be her first book. The Body’s Question (2003) was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a prize awarded to the best first collection of poems submitted by an African American poet.

She started teaching at Princeton University in 2006, where she is now the director of the creative writing program. Her second book of poetry, Duende (2007), won the James Laughlin Award. Her third book of poetry, Life on Mars (2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Smith was then named the 22nd United States Poet Laureate. During that time, she published her fourth book of poetry, Wade in the Water (2018). She also hosts a podcast, The Slowdown, in which she reads and discusses her favorite contemporary poetry.

Poem Text

Smith, Tracy K. “Wade in the Water.” 2018. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker narrates her experience attending a performance of the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters. The Geechee Gullah are direct descendants of enslaved West and Central Africans who lived and worked in the coastal islands of Georgia and South Carolina. The performers sing and dance, shuffle and shout, in a circular choreography, re-enacting worship songs and other rituals that can be traced back to the time of slavery.

In the first two lines of the poem, one of the performers walks up to the speaker, telling her, “I love you” (Line 2). The speaker describes the impact of that statement, as she immediately believes this stranger’s declaration of love. But the complexity of this love, which involves embracing the past, also pains her greatly. The performer goes on to tell other members of the audience, “I love you, / I love you” (Lines 7-8). As the affirmations of love continue, more pain overwhelms the speaker as she recalls imagery of what their ancestors endured, held by “rusted iron / Chains” until they were finally set free (Lines 15-16).

Near the end of the one-stanza poem, the speaker narrates how the performers re-enact a person fleeing from slavery by going into the water to elude capture. The speaker uses the pronoun “us” (Lines 23-24) to include herself, imagining she is there with the girl who is trying to escape. She urges the girl to run away from the dogs and the guns. The end of the poem is an invocation to God, questioning God about the love and promise he has for his people.