Declaration by Tracy K Smith

“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.