Back to Earth by Tracy K. Smith

originally published on the Graywolf website in 2013

It took me a long time to figure out how to break the silence that followed the completion of Life on Mars. For me, a silence following a finished book is normal, something I’ve come to expect and, in a strange way, to trust. Perhaps it feels like confirmation that I’ve really arrived at the end of a discrete cycle. Nevertheless, there comes a point where I begin to wonder what it would feel like to say something again, and the first poems that I find myself coaxing feel tentative, fledgling.

Around the same time that I was feeling those first desires to get back to the page, I received an invitation to participate in a poetry project on the Civil War, part of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. It seemed like the perfect challenge—something that would pull me firmly out of the zone that Life on Mars had examined, and get me thinking and listening in a direction that might never have occurred to me otherwise.

Once I began thinking about the Civil War, and trying to come up with a question for myself to pose of that contentious period of American history, I realized that the point of interest for me had to do with race. So much of the debate around the war itself, and around our contemporary understanding of it, has to do with the ways that the Civil War has or has not been framed as a conflict over the institution of slavery. In this country, we seem to fall into two camps: those who agree that the war was about freeing the slaves, and those who do not. I have my own opinion about that question, and so I thought it might be more interesting to tap into an area that I knew and had heard little about: what did blacks have to say about their own experience during the war?

I found a pair of extremely helpful books that included the full text of letters written by black soldiers and their family members during the war and in the years just after, as well as verbatim transcriptions of depositions given by black veterans and their survivors attempting to prove their claims to veteran’s pension. I was so compelled by the urgency, the dignity, and the commitment to the ideals of democracy that characterized the authors and claimants. It became clear to me rather quickly that the best way of breaking my own silence would simply be to move over and give these men and women the opportunity to “speak” through my poem—or, rather, to allow myself and my potential readers to take those actual, factual voices in unison, without the filter or intrusion of my own voice. The result was a found poem, a kind of composite of various pleas and arguments and assertions about the nature of justice, freedom and nationhood. For me, as the author—or, rather, the curator—the fabric of their voices felt like a kind of poetic bedrock, a radical and logical shift in direction from a previous collection that had sent me into the vast and mysterious reaches of the universe.

The first part of “I will tell you the truth about this, I will tell you all about it”:

                                                Carlisles Pa. Nov 21 1864

Mr abarham lincon

I wont to knw sir if you please

whether I can have my son relest

from the arme        he is all the subport

I have now         his father is Dead

and his brother that wase all

the help I had        he has bean wonded

twise   he has not had nothing to send me yet

now I am old and my head is blossaming

for the grave and if you dou I hope

the lord will bless you and me

tha say that you will simpethise

withe the poor          he be long to the

eight rigmat colard troops

he is a sarjent

mart welcom is his name

Note: Nov. 21, 1864: Letter from Mrs. Jane Welcome to Abraham Lincoln

Tracy K. Smith’s poem, “I will tell you the truth about this, I will tell you all about it,” will be included in Lines in Long Array: A Civil War Commemoration, Poems and Photographs, Past and Present, to be released this fall (National Portrait Gallery; distributed by Smithsonian Books). The 136-page book contains twelve newly commissioned poems on the Civil War by major contemporary poets, including Tracy K. Smith.