The Good Life

Published in the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Life on Mars (2011), “The Good Life” is a short lyric poem written by the United States Poet Laureate Emeritus Tracy K. Smith. Appearing in the final section of her third book, “The Good Life” asks the basic but profound question: how can a person live a life of satisfaction? While Smith’s book is characterized by its focus on outer space and science fiction, this poem grounds itself in simple, everyday language even as it asks cosmic-sized questions about happiness, wealth, and actualization.

Poet Biography

Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts in 1972, but raised in Fairfield, California. She began reading and writing poetry in elementary school, where she was particularly taken with the work of Emily Dickinson. Smith attended Harvard University in the 1990s, where she was one of the few undergraduates to join the Dark Room Collective literary group. After Harvard, she earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Following her graduate work, Smith continued on in academia, teaching at a variety of institutions before landing a faculty position at Stanford University, where she taught for over 15 years. Today, she is a professor at her alma mater Harvard University. She has written four award-winning books of poetry and one

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