Tracy K. Smith
Quick answer: Tracy K. Smith craft guide: cosmic imagery, erasure and elegy in Life on Mars and Wade in the Water, and what her found-poem methods teach working poets.
When Tracy K. Smith's father died, she wrote an elegy the size of the universe. He had been an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, and Life on Mars, her 2011 collection, mourns him through deep space, science fiction and David Bowie, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Born in Massachusetts in 1972, Smith went on to serve two terms as United States Poet Laureate, from 2017 to 2019, carrying poetry readings to rural towns most laureates never visit.
Two of her methods deserve any poet's close attention: scale-shifting, where intimate grief is set against cosmic distance, and documentary poetics, where existing texts are erased or arranged into poems. Wade in the Water, from 2018, built poems from the letters of Black Civil War soldiers and their families, and erased the Declaration of Independence into a new American document.
From telescope to archive
Smith's first book, The Body's Question, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2002, and Duende followed. But Life on Mars made her famous, precisely because it refused the usual scale of elegy: instead of shrinking to the hospital room, the poems zoom out until the lost father becomes part of the fabric of everything, and the darkness of space becomes a figure for what we cannot know about the dead.
Wade in the Water turned from the sky to the archive. Its central sequence arranges the actual words of enslaved and emancipated people, Civil War soldiers, their wives and mothers, into verse, preserving misspellings and rhythms, the poet serving as editor and witness rather than ventriloquist. Her memoir Ordinary Light fills in the life behind both books.
The signature moves
Her range is wide, but these strategies recur.
What her methods teach you
When an elegy stalls, change its scale. Write the loss from very far away, decades, orbit, geological time, then from very close, a shirt button, a phone message, and let the poem alternate; the distance makes the closeness bearable and the closeness makes the distance mean something.
Try documentary work with care. Find a public domain document connected to your family, town or obsession, a ship manifest, a court record, an old letter, and compose a poem using only its words, rearranged or erased. The discipline teaches you how much voice lives in arrangement alone, and it produces poems your imagination could not have invented.
Where to start reading
Life on Mars first, for the title sequence and the Bowie-haunted elegies. Then Wade in the Water for the erasure and found sequences, Duende for the earlier lyric voice, and the memoir Ordinary Light for context. Her anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, assembled as laureate, is also a generous map of contemporary American poetry.
What poets can take from this
- Write the same loss twice, once from cosmic distance and once from arm's length, then interleave the drafts.
- Erase a public domain document until the remaining words say what the document concealed.
- Compose a poem using only sentences from letters or records, changing arrangement but not words.
- Ask a metaphysical question in the plainest sentence you can build.
- Let a piece of music or a musician haunt a poem the way Bowie haunts Life on Mars, as atmosphere rather than reference-dropping.
Try it yourself
Write an elegy for someone using the vocabulary of their profession, a mechanic's, nurse's or engineer's words, and let one stanza zoom out to a planetary or historical scale before returning to a single small object they touched.
Questions
What is Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith about?
It is largely an elegy for her father, an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, refracted through space imagery, science fiction and David Bowie. It won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
What is the erasure poem in Wade in the Water?
Declaration, made by erasing the Declaration of Independence until the surviving words speak for the enslaved. The collection also arranges letters of Black Civil War soldiers and their families into found poems.
When was Tracy K. Smith US Poet Laureate?
She served two terms, from 2017 to 2019, and used the role to bring readings and conversations to rural communities across the United States.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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