PART I.

THE BELIEVER: What do you see as your job as the poet laureate of the United States of America?

TRACY K. SMITH: The official duty of the poet laureate is to raise the public’s awareness and appreciation of poetry. Personally, I see this charge as one of fostering a greater sense of comfort with the art form, and a recognition that poems are useful tools for considering and bringing language to our most powerful feelings. In the twenty-first century, when our lives are full of distractions and sales pitches, I think poetry is a vitally rehumanizing force, something that can pull our relationship with language away from the vocabulary of the commercial marketplace and back toward the realm of genuine thought and feeling. It can also help to remind us that our own appetites, needs, and wishes don’t take precedence over those of anyone else.

BLVR: How do you navigate being the representative for poetry in a nation that some would say has chosen government representatives whose aims are antithetical to poetry? 

TKS: I feel fortunate to be able to speak publicly and on a national scale to the power and the necessity of real language—language that is unafraid to describe the world and the self with utter honesty. And I think readers crave this; they crave language that goes in pursuit of what is necessary and what is difficult. They crave language that speaks to the great questions, joys, struggles, losses, and hopes that we live with. On the road, I’ve been struck by the extent to which people, no matter who they are, are interested in pondering the lives of others. That’s one thing poems allow us to do, and I think it’s a valuable and necessary alternative to the language of mere “tolerance,” and the language of division that has infiltrated American politics.

PART II.

BLVR: Since the publication of your first book, The Body’s Question, do you feel any different about a word like responsibility?

TKS: I never really assented to a sense of responsibility in my writing until I had kids. At first, publishing books was more of an opportunity to enter into the public conversation that literature is. You do that as a reader, of course. But as a writer, publishing a first book made me feel like I was finally a member of a team. I still feel that way, which is also a relief, because I know I can do what is natural and useful for me, trusting that other writers are able to cover bases I can’t manage. Since having kids, though, I think a lot about responsibility, and not just in my...