Flowers For Socrates

by NONA BLYTH CLOUD

Writing a weekly column about poetry is sometimes frustrating. It’s a subject that so many people in my country find “irrelevant” to Modern Life.

But if three contestants in this week’s Jeopardy! Teachers’ Tournament had been reading my column, they would probably have known the correct response to the last clue in the “African-American Firsts” category:  This woman was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. There was even a picture of her.

Not one of the three teachers, including a young black woman, rang in.

“Who is Gwendolyn Brooks?” (She won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry)

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) published over 20 books of poetry, and she was also the first black woman to be U.S. Poet Laureate (1985-1986)

If you only know two names of African American women poets, you should know Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks. (I think you should also know Audre Lorde **, but then she’s one of my personal heroes, and I’m crazy about her poetry.)

However, it isn’t just African American women poets that even teachers can’t name.

Quick, who won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry?

Frank Bidart (1939 – ), for Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016

(In the photo, he’s wearing the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry medal, which he also won)

You may not have heard of him because Bidart is a Californian. Since most major publishers are in New York City, which notoriously regards California as Utterly Lacking in Culture, it often takes even longer for the merit of work by California poets to be recognized.

And who is the current U.S. Poet Laureate?

Tracy K. Smith, another African American woman poet, who also won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 2012, for Life on Mars. Her term as U.S. Poet Laureate was recently extended through 2019.

And – surprise! – she is the actual topic of this week’s column. Sometimes, I just have to vent.

Tracy K. Smith (1972 – ) was born on April 16, 1972, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the youngest of five children. She grew up in Fairfield, California, but then headed East. She studied at Harvard, where she joined the Dark Room Collective, a reading series for writers of color, and then went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. She returned to California, just for a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University (1997-1999), and then went East again.

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Convergence is one of the most important ideas about the Universe. It’s looking at how really different branches of science are still fundamentally linked. A number of 19^th century scientists from different disciplines, including William Robert Grove, Hermann von Helmholtz and William Rankine, worked on the nature of energy and its conservation, at about the same time that Charles Darwin was working on his theory of evolution by natural selection. This led to scientists to thinking about the convergence of scientific ideas, and how they connected to the Universe.

I think convergence is even bigger than that. Ideas from “unrelated” fields, like the Arts and Religion, also converge with Science. Smith’s poem about the sounds of the universe comes not just from motion picture soundtracks, but also from Radio Astronomy recordings, a frequent inspiration for soundtracks of SciFi movies. 

The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

The first track still almost swings. High hat and snare, even
A few bars of sax the stratosphere will singe-out soon enough.

Synthesized strings. Then something like cellophane
Breaking in as if snagged to a shoe. Crinkle and drag. White noise,

Black noise. What must be voices bob up, then drop, like metal shavings
In molasses. So much for us. So much for the flags we bored

Into planets dry as chalk, for the tin cans we filled with fire
And rode like cowboys into all we tried to tame. Listen:

The dark we’ve only ever imagined now audible, thrumming,
Marbled with static like gristly meat. A chorus of engines churns.

Silence taunts: a dare. Everything that disappears
Disappears as if returning somewhere.

“The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” from Life on Mars, © 2011 by Tracy K. Smith – Graywolf Press

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