Declaration

“Declaration” is a found blackout poem written by two-term US poet laureate Tracy K. Smith, one of America’s most renowned and celebrated poets today. The poem first appeared in the New Yorker online in October 2017. It is also part of Smith’s fourth collection Wade in the Water. “Declaration” is a contemporary lyric poem that takes fragments of the “Declaration of Independence” to highlight historical racial oppression and inequality in the United States. As a Black female poet who was the poet laureate in 2017, Smith uses her striking voice to focus on the hypocrisy of the concepts about freedom put forward in the “Declaration of Independence,” which did not consider ending slavery. Thomas Jefferson—who wrote much of the original document—was himself an enslaver. In “Declaration,” Smith turns Jefferson’s words about oppression caused by King George III back against Jefferson. She uses this seminal text in American politics to show the atrocities of the slave trade and the system of slavery that built the young nation. Above all, “Declaration” shows how these early failings of the United States government continue to have an impact on the 21st century.

The New Yorker published this poem two months after white supremacists (in)famously mobilized in Charlottesville, Virginia. This poem further follows the high-profile, brutal murder of African Americans by police that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States. Tracy K. Smith uses her platform as the US poet laureate to comment on racial violence.

Poet Biography

Tracy K. Smith was born on April 16, 1972, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and grew up in Fairfield, California. Her parents have “deep roots” in Alabama and were active in the mid-century Civil Rights Movement. Her mother was a teacher, and her father was an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. Smith wrote Life on Mars as an homage to her father’s life and work.

She studied at Harvard University—where she was a member of the Dark Room Collective—and graduated with her B.A. in 1994. Smith then earned an M.F.A. at Columbia University in 1997. After university, Smith was the Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 1997-99.

She then taught creative writing at Medgar Evers College, the University of Pittsburgh, and Columbia University. In 2006, Smith joined the faculty at Princeton University, where she became Chair of Princeton’s Lewis Center for the Arts in 2019. Currently, she is the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard University.

Tracy K. Smith won several awards for her poetry, including the Cave Canem Prize (2002) and the James Laughlin Award (2006) for her second collection, Duende (2007). Her volume Life on Mars won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2012.

Smith has five collections of poetry with Graywolf Press: The Body’s Question (2003), Duende (2007), Life on Mars (2011), Wade in the Water (2018), and Such Color (2021). In 2015, she published her memoir Ordinary Light (Knopf).

She served as US poet laureate from October 2017 to May 2019.

Her husband—Raphael Allison—teaches literature at Bard College. They have three children.

Poem Text

Smith, Tracy K. “Declaration.” 2018. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“Declaration” is a poem created by erasing lines from the “Declaration of Independence.” The poem alters explicitly the part of the historical document that lists the grievances of the rebelling colonists against the current head of their government: King George III. Smith points out in a Vox interview from early 2020: “There is a parallel journey that I can decipher here from the original founders of this nation and their grudge or their grievance against England as the colonial power and then this other population that has a similar trajectory that also has a kind of grievance” (Smith, Tracy K. “Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet Tracy K. Smith on the Purpose and Power of Poetry.” Interview by Ezra Klein. Vox. 27 Feb. 2020). This poem is a dialogue between “this other population,” or Black people of African descent whose ancestors were enslaved and subjected to the systems of oppression that built the United States. The poem reframes the white colonists’ grievances against George III as the suffering of Black people from the early days of colonial America up to today. These voices implore an undefined “he” to listen to them. In this way, “Declaration” gives voice and subjectivity to the enslaved Americans whose rights the “Declaration of Independence” and the early government of the United States omitted. The poem also parallels this vital document—which founded American democracy—with the US government’s centuries of systematic inequality against people of color.