The Good Life

Tracy K. Smith published “The Good Life” in her third collection of poetry, Life on Mars. This book, which explores her relationship with her father (who worked on the Hubble telescope), outer space, mourning, and justice, was published in 2011 and received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. While the influences for the book are widespread and numerous, it is perhaps the literary movement with which Smith is most commonly associated that provides the most informative context.

After attending the funeral of literary giant James Baldwin in 1987, a small group of Black poets and students decided to form a Cambridge-based reading series to highlight the literary work of Black writers and students. The reading series, which eventually became a full-fledged literary group, grew into the Dark Room Collective, which lasted about a decade and was dedicated to celebrating Black voices in poetry in an academic environment that was largely white. Although she was not a founding member, Tracy K. Smith was an active part of the Collective along with writers like Thomas Sayers Ellis, Sharan Strange, Carl Phillips, and Kevin Young.

The Dark Room Collective, which birthed the still active Cave Canem Foundation supporting the voices of underrepresented African American writers, had an important impact on Black poetry, Smith’s poetry, and American poetry in general. The Collective celebrated experiment and imagination in poetry, refocusing the struggle of racial oppression from a necessary central topic to an always present feature of the individual poet’s exploration of their identity. Smith’s Life on Mars is concerned with family, science fiction, and space, a broader range of themes than you might find in most poems of the Harlem Renaissance, say, though always informed by and wrapped up in issues of race.