The new U.S. poet laureate, Tracy K. Smith, considers the writing of poetry “a superpower.”
“A good poem teaches you to look at the ordinary world and see something completely new within it.”
On Thursday she was interviewed by Charlie Rose on the CBS Morning News. He asked, “Why did you become a poet?”
“I loved what poems did for me as a reader. Even as a child I loved the sound of language and the sense of surprise that poems could inspire.”
The Friday poem this week is ‘The Good Life’ from the 2012 Pulitzer Prize winning collection, ‘Life On Mars: Poems’.
The Good Life
When some people talk about money
They speak as if it were a mysterious lover
Who went out to buy milk and never
Came back, and it makes me nostalgic
For the years I lived on coffee and bread,
Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday
Like a woman journeying for water
From a village without a well, then living
One or two nights like everyone else
On roast chicken and red wine.
Tracy K. Smith ‘Life on Mars: Poems’ 2011
Photo credit: Shawn Miller/Library of Congress
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