Tracy K. Smith Talks about her Year as a Rolex Protégée
You have not only become a student again, but are chancing your arm with prose, not poetry – for the first time.
Yes, this is my first piece of extended prose, the long gesture, needing to flesh scenes out, going after character. Lots of space. I am still trying to figure out how to do it. Hans Magnus has been good at helping me not to worry about that unending white space, waiting to be filled. If I am concerned about some big question – say, how to write about my father, Hans Magnus invites me to think small scale. He prompts me to write a scene, to remember what my father, an engineer, did in the house. When I was in therapy, my therapist encouraged me to think not about the next 10 years, but about the next eight weeks. Hans Magnus encourages me to focus on the next 20 sentences.
Do you see that there is an analogy between therapy and the mentorship?
Oh, yes. Both therapy and the mentorship are about giving me a solid footing on which to go forward. And in an obvious way, the memoir too has the structure of therapy, moving backwards through a life in order to move forward.
Do you think writing can be taught?
I know there are people who think it can’t be. I am not one of them. Working with someone on the technicalities of writing is possible, with someone with aptitude, working on scenes or helping them to clarify themes. It is possible to teach the villanelle, a structured, 19-line poem, for example. Hans Magnus saw my new volume of poems (Life on Mars) in manuscript – there are U.S. pop culture references in it that he asked me about. I hadn’t thought about this, as an American, having taken them for granted. His reading gave me a nudge. A useful one.
What do you think your mentor got from the mentorship?
Magnus shared with me some German translations that he has made of several of my poems, and, aside from being flattered and floored, I realize that, just as I have begun to carry around some piece of his voice and perspective with me, he too has been living with my voice inside his head – a really lovely emblem of the exchange.