On Tuesday, April 12, Smith will read from her work at this semester’s Robert Lowell Memorial Poetry Reading, starting at 7:30 pm at the Leventhal Center.

She is currently at work on several nonfiction projects, including a book that expands on a lecture she delivered as poet laureate, called “Staying Human: Poetry in the Age of Technology.” The book will examine how the language and ethos of poetry can serve as an antidote to what Smith describes as “some of the diminishing forces and practices that have gotten embedded in our day-to-day life thanks to our relationship with technology.” She has also written the libretto for two operas, as well as a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award. Today, Smith is one of the nation’s foremost poets, a two-term US poet laureate (2017-2019), author of five collections, and recipient of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her third book, Life on Mars, an exploration of what it means to be human. But studying under poets like Seamus Heaney and Henri Cole and attending readings and meeting local poets proved “revelatory,” she says. It was then she discovered that poetry was “a living force.” “And I think that stayed there, that sense that there is this large space that we are in or belong to, that language can help us get back to.”īy the time she arrived at Harvard as an undergrad, Smith knew she wanted to be a writer, but was unclear how to get there and what kind of writer she wanted to be. I liked the largeness and sort of astonishment of it,” Smith says. “I thought “Aha, there is another space we can enter into. Smith was a fifth grader in Fairfield, Calif., when she came upon Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Reading it, she says, she felt understood.

Smith poet life on mars