Smith was on the second leg of a multistate journey she is undertaking as the poet laureate of the United States (officially abbreviated Plotus). “I liked giving it a title that suggests a really dogmatic poem and then having it behave the way it does,” she said. “They’re doing their work, and every now and then they stop and look over toward where the other person must be, and there’s something that goes back and forth.” She renamed it “Political Poem,” the title under which it appears in “Wade in the Water,” her new collection, out from Graywolf Press this month. “There’s a line: ‘held/in that instant of common understanding,’ ” she continued. We had come from Adams Run, S.C., where Smith had just given a reading. “It’s a poem that has this wish for effortless comprehension,” she told me one morning in February as we drove east, accompanied by a small entourage from the poet laureate’s office, along Route 17 toward Charleston. The library is only a few blocks from the Capitol, and Smith, reflecting on the poisonous climate of the election, suddenly realized “The Mowers” had a political meaning. Two years later, in December 2016, Smith read the poem at a birthday tribute to Emily Dickinson, one of her longtime favorite poets, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. With a nod to Robert Frost, who was a mainstay at Bread Loaf for 42 years, Smith called it “The Mowers.” Every so often, one raises his arm - “Hello!” “You there!” - and the other responds in kind. It imagines two mowers more than a mile apart, cutting grass all day long. She sat up in the night and wrote down the poem. “If I wake up, I can get it,” she told herself. At first she thought it was by another poet, but as she reached the end, she realized it was her own. Smith dreamed she was reading a poem printed on a wall. One night in the summer of 2014, when she was teaching at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont, Tracy K.
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