Tracy K. Smith Quotes

I made a conscious decision to take my life and career in a different direction. I started working on a play, and also, by attending Burning Man for several years, I was incredibly stimulated by the art there. I increasingly wanted to be a part of it, and focused on what I wanted to say as an artist.

When you ask, did writing change my life? It totally changed my life. It gave me my life.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

I'm finding things out about myself as a person - as a writer - as I write, and so are the people who listen to what I do. But they have this additional aspect of how they take the stuff that I do, and so it broadens the work, and it creates this strange connection.

My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me.

I was raised around a lot of artists, musicians, photographers, painters and people that were in theater. Just having the art-communal hippie experience as a child, there wasn't a clear line that was drawn. We celebrated creative experience and creative expression. We didn't try and curtail it and stunt any of that kind of growth.

The privilege I've had as a curator is not just the discovery of new works... but what I've discovered about myself and what I can offer in the space of an exhibition - to talk about beauty, to talk about power, to talk about ourselves, and to talk and speak to each other.

Part of the reason that I moved to Los Angeles is that even though my mom introduced me to all kinds of music, I really wanted to work on having my own identify, on being who I am and doing what I do, and seeing how people responded.

I think maybe one day I'll go back to music. I don't know. I don't know if sometimes you lose a passion or you don't lose it, it becomes more personal and less about sharing it with everyone.

I really think I've found me finally in the music. You know, I had put an album out before, 'Embrace Me,' and it's been seven years since that. So I was discovering who I was. And I still am discovering, but I think now I know a little bit more of who I am. So that's what's pushing me.

My identity started developing through the songs I was writing.

Joanne' is a progression for me. It was about going into the studio and forgetting that I was famous.

It took me a long time to find my own voice, even after I started making my own music.

When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like another country you can't reach.

My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes.

Everyone has doors in the living room of their lives that they assume are locked. Doors that lead to artistic expression. People say "I have no talent -- I can't dance or sing or paint or write poetry or play an instrument." More often than not the doors are not locked, just closed. One may turn the handle, open the door and pass through into a larger life space.

The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - "can we really reach each other.

One of these poems I wrote after having been here only a month. The other, I wrote this morning. In the space between the two poems, I have found acres of grace

Nobody will stop you from creating. Do it tonight. Do it tomorrow. That is the way to make your soul grow - whether there is a market for it or not! The kick of creation is the act of creating, not anything that happens afterward. I would tell all of you watching this screen: Before you go to bed, write a four line poem. Make it as good as you can. Don't show it to anybody. Put it where nobody will find it. And you will discover that you have your reward.

I called it a baptism in flaming ink that forced me to shed my shyness about recognizing myself as a poet and to accept the fact that life had never given me any choice in the matter. And then I had to discover exactly what that meant.

Art isn't only a painting; it's anything that changes someone for the better, any nonanonymous interaction that leads to a human (not simply a commercial) conclusion.

The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in what he creates.

There's very little of the intentional about the business of writing poetry, as least as far as I can see.

The most available example of how poetry works for a poet is yourself, and yet you'll probably be the last one to know exactly how you're serving the art and how the art is serving you.