Library of Congress's Blog, page 75

Pic of the Week: Cherry Blossom Edition

Sometimes, for a moment or two, life is just about the depth of the colors in the world around us. And, as a writing professor always used to remind me, “Don’t forget to look up.” Shawn Miller, the Library’s photographer, always seems to keep that adage in mind. Here, looking up, is the dome of your favorite national library, framed by the cherry blossoms that make this time of year in D.C. special.

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

Crowdsourcing the Clara Barton Diaries? Let Miss Barton Come to Your Aid!

One of the Library’s crowdsourcing projects at By The People is “ Clara Barton: ‘Angel of the Battlefield,’ ” in which volunteers are transcribing the diaries of the legendary nurse.

  Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Library’s Manuscript Division, recently was working with Barton’s diaries, puzzling over a blurred name. For those of you drawn to such literary mysteries, and who might be intrigued to try your hand on the project, here’s a story of her detective work. Share your By the People stories with us, too!

I recently delved into Clara Barton’s diaries and stumbled across the kind of puzzle that makes my work so fascinating. My story might help you, as a kind of a how-to, in using the Library’s resources in your own research.

It began when I was looking into Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s biography, Clara Barton: Professional Angel. The task at hand was to determine if Pryor used Barton’s diaries to help document Barton’s work following the Sea Islands Hurricane of Aug. 27, 1893, which devastated South Carolina. Yes, it turned out: Pryor cited several dates, and quoted from Barton’s diary entry of October 1, 1893.

Here is that page, from Barton’s May 1893-May 1894 pocket diary. It is tiny, just 5.5 inches tall.

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On the project site, I noticed a volunteer had completed most of that Oct. 1 entry, and correctly added brackets for words that were illegible or speculative. Since several brackets overlapped the quotation supplied by Pryor in her book, I added the missing words to the transcription.

Then curiosity took hold. I looked at the other doubtful words. At least one was a name, which the original transcriber reasonably speculated was “Grace.”

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On the next page, though, in a sentence that reads, “Sent our telegram to…” the same name now looked more like “De G—-.”

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I was intrigued. I wanted to make that identification. But how could I find the name?

First, I turned to the Clara Barton Papers, available online through the Manuscript Division.  I looked in the General Correspondence series, which is arranged alphabetically by the name of the correspondent. Scanning the “D” names in the collection finding aid, I got a hit: “DeGraw, Peter V.”

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Ideally, for confirmation, in the “DeGraw, Peter V. and Emma” file, I would find a letter to Barton beginning, “I received your telegram of October 2….” That would have sealed the deal. Alas, this was a dead end. There was no such letter.

Still, I kept looking, and I discovered something nearly as good. Years earlier, in 1888, DeGraw had written a letter to Barton. On the back of it, Barton noted, “P. V. DeGraw,” in script that looked convincingly similar to her later diary entry.

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That was good, but not quite proof positive.

So, next, I went back to the Barton Papers. I consulted the Letterbook series, which contains copies of letters and memoranda, written by Barton and other Red Cross officials. It is arranged chronologically.

The June 1892-January 1894 volume was promising. An index at the front listed the page numbers of DeGraw correspondence, helping me hone in quickly. And there, on page 502, the mystery was solved. A copy of an Oct. 2, 1893 telegram sent by Barton to “P. V. DeGraw,” notified him that the Red Cross accepted responsibility for Sea Islands relief work.

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Telegram from Barton to P. V. DeGraw, October 2, 1893

The telegram includes Barton’s prediction that the work would involve meeting the needs of “thirty thousand people for eight long months with no aid from the Government,” which later accounts suggest was not far from the reality.

That was it. I had my mystery solved. I added in the name to the transcript, delighted.

I was not quite done, though. Barton’s own writings helped interpret another mysterious word in brackets… the final word on October 2:

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The transcriber recorded the last two words as “all [  ].” Could I solve that, too?

Barton, I knew, published books on her life and the work of the American Red Cross, so I again consulted the Barton Papers online. First, I went to the Related Resources page, and looked under the “selected Barton publications” list. The Sea Islands relief work comprises an entire chapter in “The Red Cross in Peace and War.” Reading that, I noticed that a passage on page 202 suggested a possible interpretation: “…the Beaufort Relief Commission, as appointed by the governor, was formally released as a committee and immediate re-elected by the Red Cross as its ‘advisory board’….”

Could “all [ ]” actually be “our board.” hurriedly written in a small pocket diary? I think so, but the reviewer of my addition to the transcription will be the judge.

So, to sum up: Through the efforts of previous transcribers, my consultations of the collection finding aid and the Barton Papers, plus Barton’s own writings, the diary entries for October 1-2, 1893, may now be complete.

This might seem like a considerable effort for a short text. But I hope that this example of using numerous parts of the Barton collection to solve its mysteries might help other transcribers understand the context in which Barton wrote about her relief work, and offer ideas about how to track down the people and groups who were part of her universe.

Plus, who are we kidding? The detective work is fun!

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Superheroes, Superteams

This is a guest post by Megan Halsband, a mild-mannered reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division, who may or may not have a superhero secret identity and a cape at the ready. Wonder Woman’s day job, film fans will recall, is an art historian in the Louvre. Megan, meanwhile, is an art historian who works at the world’s largest library. Hhmmmm. Here, she writes about superhero team building and one of Wonder Woman’s early appearances. Coincidences, all? We’ll never tell. 

 

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Avengers, no. 1 (1963).

Ahh, the superhero team – where would comics be without them? No Avengers, no Birds of Prey, no Watchmen, no Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (my favorite)! From the beginning superheroes, anti-heroes, and villains have joined forces to create some epic comic stories. And you can come and read them here at the Library of Congress in the Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room.

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Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, no. 1 (1984).

One of the earliest teams, the Justice Society of America, appeared in All Star,no. 3 (Winter 1940). While Doctor Fate and the Spectre (two of the original members) might not be as well-known now as some of their other team members (Flash and Green Lantern), the Justice Society of America has included major characters such as Wonder Woman and Black Canary over the years as well.

 

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All Star Comics, no. 3 (Winter 1940).

 

 

 

The Silver Age of comics introduced some of the most popular teams of today – the aforementioned Avengers – as well as the X-Men, the Justice League, Doom Patrol, and the Guardians of the Galaxy (to name a few).

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Marvel Super Heroes, no. 18 (January 1969).

 

 

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X-Men, no. 1 (September 1963).

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Justice League of America, no. 21 (August 1963).

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World’s Best Comics, no. 1 (1941).

And then there are the Team-Ups. Remember when Superman, Batman, and Robin teamed up in 1941 in World’s Best Comics (later World’s Finest Comics)? There was also that time when the Justice Society of America met the Justice League in August 1963. There were even entire series, like Marvel Team Up and Marvel Team Up Annual, devoted to team-ups. In this case usually Spiderman and someone else.

 

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The Ren and Stimpy Show, no. 6 (May 1993).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are so many others from Watchmen, Teen Titans, and Suicide Squad to Alpha Flight and Powerman and Iron Fist. And there were teams and team-ups that were downright curious – like the Forgotten Heroes in Action Comics, no. 545 (July 1983) or when Spiderman joined Ren & Stimpy.

Got a favorite team/team-up? Tell us in the comments!

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Inquiring Minds: Carolyn Bennett, Teacher-in-Residence

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Carolyn Bennett. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Carolyn Bennett teaches music at Wheeler Middle/High School in North Stonington, Connecticut. This year, however, she’s taking a break from the classroom — with the goal of adding to her instructional repertoire.

She is working with the Library’s Learning and Innovation Office as a teacher-in-residence, researching online resources at the Library that she and other teachers across the country can incorporate into the classroom. At the same time, she is contributing to a National Association of Music Education (NAFME) curriculum-development project that draws on digitized materials at the Library.

Here, Bennett answers a few questions about her experience at the Library.

Tell us a little about your teaching.

I teach students in grades 6 to 12, specializing in chorus, piano, guitar, theory and general music. My goal is to equip my students to be self-sufficient, musical people for the rest of their lives through listening perceptively, performing effectively and composing creatively. Pursuing these musical skills builds so many qualities that allow us to live full, human lives: cooperation, determination, innovation, confidence.

What inspired you to apply for residency at the Library?

Much of the repertoire I present to my students — folk songs from around the world, spirituals, pieces built on the 12-bar blues progression — is powerfully tied to the identity, history and viewpoint of its creators. Students need resources to make the context for these pieces come alive. Often, searching for resources would lead me to primary sources at the Library. I was intrigued by the opportunity to spend a year immersing myself and sharing my discoveries with music-educator colleagues.

Which collection items stand out to you so far?

Lowell Mason was an early proponent of music’s place in public education. In 1837, he became America’s first public-school music teacher. He jointly compiled “The Boston Glee Book,” a choral anthology for schools, which the Library holds. Many of the pieces charmingly address concepts that are still relevant in today’s music classroom. I can’t wait to perform “Come Sing This Round with Me” with my choir next year. By singing pieces from this anthology, students can directly participate in a historically American value: the belief that education, including arts education, is an important gift we freely give to the next generation.

In 1940, Irene Williams met with Ruby and John Lomax to describe her early years in slavery. In an audio recording in the collections, she recalls church services and sings a beautiful rendition of “Keep Your Lamp a Trimmed and Burning.” This is a piece my middle-school choirs have performed several times over the years. How powerful for them to hear it directly from a woman who survived slavery!

I have shared other gems through posts on the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog.

What is your involvement in the NAFME curriculum-development project?

Supported by a grant from the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources program, the National Association for Music Education has been developing lesson units that introduce students to primary-source materials from the Library. Published units run the gamut: from enabling advanced high-school orchestras to contextualize Aaron Copland to inviting second-graders to explore creative movement with the Victor Orchestra on the National Jukebox. The lessons align with national core arts standards and are available online.

This year, my project team has focused on composition: How can the Library’s primary sources inspire students to think more creatively? Students in pilot tests are analyzing unconventional nursery rhymes from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division; they are investigating the contexts that gave rise to various work songs; and they are writing original soundtracks to Edison films. I’m eager to hear the students’ final compositions and also to witness how primary sources can deepen the ways students think about music.

How would you describe the value of the Library’s collections for teachers?

A group of 3-year-olds recently visited the Young Readers Center, and I was invited to sing “Sally Go Round the Sun” with them. In 1934, 19-year-old Alan Lomax, traveling with his father, had heard eight girls singing the song and insisted they record. This impulse to curate and preserve would stay with Lomax his whole life, later leading astronomer Carl Sagan to invite him to work on the Golden Record project in which phonograph recordings were launched aboard the Voyager spacecraft in 1977.

Of course, I didn’t share this story with the 3-year-olds, but it was my personal fascination:  Lomax’s musical imagination, captured by going “round the sun” in 1934, led to him compiling the first album to exit the solar system decades later.

The group and I had a grand time learning the song and trying out the movements described by several sources in the Library’s collections. Afterward, one older chaperone shared that she had sung this song in her own childhood. She had completely forgotten it until she heard the music and saw the children play. The music led her to rediscover a part of herself that she could now share with her young students.

To me, this shows the value of the Library’s collections: They connect us to other places, other times and, most importantly, other people. Teachers can use the Library’s treasures to bring the voices of the past into the minds of the future.

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My Job: Raymond White

One of the treats of the Library is having Raymond White show you the handwritten, working lyrics of “Do-Re-Mi” from “The Sound of Music,” with words crossed out and added in…and then sing them, showing you how Rodgers and Hammerstein developed the song into the international sensation it became. We asked him about the rest of his job in the March/April edition of the Library of Congress Magazine.

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Photo by Shawn Miller

How would you describe your work at the Library?

Fascinating. And varied. Some days, it’s acquisitions — the papers of jazz great Billy Strayhorn, or a collection of long-lost manuscripts of composer Samuel Barber, or holograph scores of Beethoven or Brahms or Franz Liszt or Felix Mendelssohn or Richard Wagner. Other days, it’s exhibitions — preparing materials for loan to other institutions or for exhibit here at the Library. And displays for Music Division concerts and lectures and for Madison Council meetings. And from time to time tours, research orientations and assisting distinguished music scholars and performers in their research. Writing a press release, a blog post, a condolence letter. Variety is a constant, and it’s part of what makes my job endlessly interesting.

How did you prepare for your position?

I began as a childhood musician, taking piano lessons and singing in a children’s choir. I came to the Library with degrees in music and in history and a plan to pursue graduate work in museum studies. After a short time, however, the opportunity to work with the music collections hooked me, and, as the saying goes, I have never looked back. In 1986, I became the first student to complete the then-new music librarianship dual degree program at Catholic University, and I subsequently did additional graduate study in music at the University of Maryland.

What have been some of your most memorable experiences at the Library?

Some have involved the surprises that sometimes accompany acquisitions. Seeing for the first time the lead sheet for the original version of “God Bless America” — which was not known to have survived. Holding in my hands for the first time the holograph manuscript of Rachmaninoff’s two-piano version of his Symphonic Dances. Reading for the first time the previously-unknown letters from George Gershwin to his psychoanalyst. And then there are events which are just by their nature memorable: I have participated in displays of materials for many notable visitors, including French President Macron and Gershwin Prize recipients Smokey Robinson and Paul McCartney, for whom I sang an unused lyric from Irving Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business”!

Why are the Library’s Gershwin collections important and what are some of your favorite pieces from it?

Those collections are important because of the combination of two factors: the significance of composer George and lyricist Ira coupled with the richness and vastness of the Library’s Gershwin holdings. The Gershwin Collections support research into George and Ira’s careers as well as their lives — what they did, what they thought and who they knew. Among my favorite items from the collection are two letters dating from September 1936, shortly after the Gershwins had traveled to California to write for the silver screen. On Sept. 18, George wrote to his New York secretary: “We are giving a big party Saturday night for [playwright] Moss Hart’s new teeth, he having had all sorts of things done to his teeth with porcelain. We expect about seventy-five people.” And four days later, George reported to a friend, “We had about a hundred of the Hollywood notables all together in our house in honor of the unveiling of Moss Hart’s new teeth. The party lasted until after six in the morning and a good time was apparently had by all.”

Pic of the Week: Zimbabwe Edition

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Mokoomba performs during a Homegrown Concert Series event, April 15, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller

Mokoomba is a six-piece, multilingual Afro-Fusion band from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. In the midst of their 2019 North American tour, they popped into the Library for a dreads-swinging lunchtime set at the Coolidge Auditorium. It was part of the American Folklife Center’s Homegrown concert series, and it was (probably) more fun than any lunch you had this week.

Revealing Rare Rivera

This piece from John Hessler details the analytical work being done on paintings by the great Diego Rivera that are held by the Library. It was published in the Library of Congress Magazine’s March/April issue.Diego Rivera was by all measures one of the most important Mexican artists of the 20th century — his large-scale murals in San Francisco, Mexico City, New York and Detroit helped transform the style of public art and brought new ideas from the Parisian avant-garde to the Americas.

In the early 1930s, American writer and art critic John Weatherwax approached Rivera about illustrating an English translation of “Popol Vuh,” the Maya creation myth. Long fascinated by ancient indigenous cultures of Mexico and Mesoamerica, Rivera agreed. He produced a series of watercolors and gouache paintings to illustrate the text — paintings that in part derive their layouts, color palettes and themes from early Mesoamerican books or codices.

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Tana Villafana and John Hessler conduct testing on a historic painting by artist Diego Rivera in the Preservation Research and Testing Division, September 10, 2018. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Weatherwax’s translation was never published. But, today, the Library holds three of the watercolors — largely unknown to art historians and the public — in its Jay I. Kislak Collection. A team of Library curators and scientists recently used advanced imaging and analysis techniques to examine the underdrawings, paints and pigments — an effort to better understand the works for art historical purposes and to inform their conservation.

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The team digitally photographed the paintings at multiple wavelengths spanning the ultraviolet through the visible and into the near-infrared, a technique known as hyperspectral imaging. In this process, discrete components of an object — inks, glues, parchment — respond in unique ways to the different wavelengths.

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To get a more precise sense of the paints and pigments Rivera used, they employed fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy, which uses a white light source and a spectrometer to measure the amount and the color of light reflected from an object. And to analyze chemicals and elements in the paintings, they used X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, a process that nondestructively bombards the paintings with high-energy X-rays in precisely defined locations, inducing elements in the pigments to emit secondary X-rays that can be captured and analyzed.

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Meghan Wilson conducts analysis on a historic painting by artist Diego Rivera in the Preservation Research and Testing Division, September 10, 2018. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Preliminary results — to the team’s surprise — show the artist used very different pigment and paint palettes. For curators and scientists, the project makes clear the new knowledge that can be gained when they collaborate to better understand the collections — and that the sciences and the arts are full of hidden surprises.

“Game of Thrones” and Dragon Warfare

“Game of Thrones” is back for its final season, and the fate of Westeros may well depend on how the ice dragon (Viserion), now the winged weapon of the White Walkers, fares against his still-living counterparts.

If you’re still reading, you know that the HBO series is based on George R.R. Martin’s books, which are, in turn, loosely based on England’s Wars of the Roses, the dynastics battles that raged between 1455-1485. No doubt you are aware that medieval battle was not for the faint of heart. But Martin’s use of dragons in his “A Song of Ice and Fire” epic is not as fanciful as one might think. One of the medieval era’s most influential military war manuals really did sketch out the idea of using a dragon on the battlefield.

Behold, knaves, we give you the dragon war machine of yore:

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Illustration from manuscript of “De re militari,” Roberto Valturio, ca. 1460. The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

Try not to tremble from its awesomeness.

This is from “De re miltari” (“On military matters”) an illustrated folio written by Roberto Valturio, an Italian engineer and technical adviser to Sigismondo Malatesta, the Renaissance Lord of Rimini, who commissioned it. The volume no doubt drew upon a famous Roman manuscript of the same name, but the woodcut illustrations, attributed to Matteo de’ Pasti, are truly original. The nearly 400-page volume, written between 1446 and 1456 in manuscript form (of which the Library has two copies in the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection), gained wide popularity across Europe. Malatesta — a powerful prince, patron of the arts and military ruler — distributed these to royal houses, such as those of Louis XI. This was not hubris. His family was so famous than a wife-killing ancestor was included in Dante’s “Inferno.”

“The intention was to send it out to kings and important statesmen throughout Europe,” says Stephanie Stillo, a curator in the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division. “It’s interesting to think why Malatesta would do it. There are no military secrets. It’s all pretty well-known. But it’s sort of a power play, this commander sending out definitive military manuscripts that are extraordinarily illlustrated.”

When it was printed in Verona in 1472 (after Malatesta’s death), it became the first book printed with technical or scientific illustrations, and was the second book printed in all of Italy. So profound was its impact, so ubiquitous were its standards, that Leonardo da Vinci used it as a reference volume.

For the military man, the volume drew on well-established principles of siege warfare. There are a few technical drawings of cannons (the newest thing at the time), but most are of battering rams, catapults and ladders for scaling castle walls. Some of these are beautifully rendered, with decorative heads of rams or wolves. On the “these projects are in research and development” front, there are sketches of rudimentary flotation devices, one apparently made from pig skin — with the pig’s head still attached. There’s even what could be called an early cherry-picker, in which soldiers could be hoisted above castle walls, so that they could fire down on the enemy. Over time, the book became ingrained in medieval history. It is well known to scholars today.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the people working on ‘Game of Thrones’ consulted this,” Stillo says. 

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Illustration from manuscript of “De re militari,” Roberto Valturio, ca. 1460. The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

But in the book, in the midst of so much 15th Century practicality, of such utilitarian means of warfare, there is, at the flip of the page…well, a dragon. In the manuscript copies that are hand-colored, it is of a modest green, with sharp eyes, large wings and three horns. The military idea seems to be a medieval update on the Trojan Horse — a mysterious device that could be rolled up to castle walls. Note the claw-covered wheels and the stomach flap that opens out and up, so concealed troops could leap into battle. In some editions, there are openings for cannons from its haunches. In all of them, though, the dragon is wearing a stately hat and shooting gargantuan arrows from its mouth.

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Detail from “De re militari, “Roberto Valturio, 1472 printed edition. The Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Library of Congress.

“Nobody knows quite what to call it,” Stillo says. “It’s just a floating, rolling…dragon war machine.”

We regret to report that there are no surviving battle reports of this device actually in use, and we are pretty sure people would have remembered if it had. Still, in that era of grim military tactics and brutality, it is hard to blame Valturio or Malatesta for this flight of fancy. The good tactician seeks advantage in surprise, and nothing would have been more surprising in the midst of medieval battle than to see this monstrosity looming in the mist.

Notre Dame Cathedral in the 1860s

The world is mourning the fire-ravaged Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. Built over a 200-year period between 1163 and 1345, the cathedral has periodically lapsed into disrepair over the centuries. Here are photographs taken in the 1860s, when photography was a new medium and the cathedral’s spire had been recently restored.

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Facade of Notre-Dame de Paris. Photograph by Edouard Baldus. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

 

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View from spire of roofs, statuary, and gable. Photo by Charles Marville, ca. 1860. Prints and Photographs Division, LIbrary of Congress.

 

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The spire, with cityscape beyond. Photo by Charles Marville, ca. 1865. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

 

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Panorama de Paris. Photo by Charles Soulier, ca. 1865. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

The Prints and Photographs Division also has one of Viollet le Duc’s books about his restoration of Notre Dame, which included providing the new spire.  The entire book is online.

Tracy K. Smith Bids Farewell as U.S. Poet Laureate

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Tracy Smith shares a laugh with Vogue Robinson, poet laureate of Clark County, Nevada (Las Vegas), during Smith’s farewell event as U.S. Poet Laureate. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Tracy K. Smith concluded her remarkable term as U.S. Poet Laureate with a speech and on-stage conversation at the Library of Congress Monday night, capping two years of travel, podcasts and community conversations across the nation.

Smith began her tenure with a packed reading at the Coolidge Auditorium in Sept. 2017, and she ended it on the same stage in much the same fashion, sharing the platform with five poets laureate from Hawaii to New York.

Speaking to an enthusiastic audience, she said she felt “indescribably lucky.” She had taken the post with the belief that poetry had always been good for the individual. Two years later: “More than ever, I believe it’s good for the collective, the community, even to something resembling the nation.”

The poet’s office in the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center, high in the Jefferson Building, features elegant furniture and dramatic, west-facing views of the U.S. Capitol Building and the National Mall, the Washington Monument in the distance. Smith, however, did not use the space as a retreat for ivory-towered contemplation.

Instead, she used the position for active outreach, working to expand poetry’s impact on multiple fronts. She, with a team from the Library, made seven trips across the country in an “American Conversations” tour, traveling from Alaska to Louisiana, holding readings in rural areas that are not on the typical literary circuit. She typically read from a poem, then asked the crowd, “What did you notice?” and let the conversation go where it willed.

While at home in New Jersey, she recorded more than 100 episodes of “The Slowdown,” her five-minute daily poetry podcast. She also edited a volume of poetry, wrote an opera libretto, penned essays for the New York Times and others, all while maintaining her position as the director and professor of creative writing at Princeton University.

It all combined, she said, to make her rethink what poetry might mean for an often bruised country.

“I was…very determined to push back against the pervasive narrative of America as a divided nation,” she told the crowd at the Coolidge. “The narrative that says people in the rural heartland have nothing in common, not even a shared language, with those living in urban centers.”

Jennifer Benka, president and executive director of Academy of American Poets, a non-profit agency dedicated to supporting the art form, moderated the on-stage conversation. She said that Smith’s grassroots approach had expanded the horizons of dozens of national and regional poetry organizations. “Because of you and the work that you’ve done,” Benka said, “we’ve begun a conversation about how we are serving rural communities in our poetry programming and that’s not something we’ve talked about before.”

Smith and Benka were joined on stage by Vogue Robinson, poet laurate of Clark County, Nev. (Las Vegas); Tina Chang, poet laureate of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Kealoah, poet laureate of Hawaii; Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, poet laureate of Oklahoma; and Adrian Matejka, poet laureate of Indiana.

Smith arrived in Washington just a few hours before the event, stepping off a train at Union Station and rushing into a whirlwind last day. She settled into her office in the Jefferson Building for the final time, beaming.

“When I’m in this room I feel really grateful to be a part of the history that it represents,” she said. “I think about Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Bishop and Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey (all former poets laureate). I think about these people who are so important for me as a reader and as a poet.”

The office, and its civic duties, had compelled her to think about poetry not so much as an introspective art, she said, but more often in its role in the public square. That triggered a change in her own poetry, she said.

Poetry, she came to realize, “is something that could make us better at listening to, and being compassionate toward one another as citizens. I think that just being called upon to talk about the art form in those terms has made me think in ways I wouldn’t normally have done. I’m used to thinking about craft-based questions, as a professor, in terms of my own work. But I’ve been thinking more socially and, you know, conceptually. I think my sense of even how I approach different voices is larger as a result.”

Smith was born in Massachusetts in 1972, raised in California, and educated at Harvard, Columbia and Stanford. Her  third book of poetry, “Life on Mars,” won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize, and her memoir, “Ordinary Light,” was a 2015 finalist for the National Book Award.

She was the 22nd Poet Laureate of the U.S., and the first chosen by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Her most spine-tingling moment at the Library? When, as background research for a video tribute for Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday celebration, she pored over his things in the Library’s holdings.

“There were his eyeglasses, his cane, a bust of his hands, and some notebooks of early versions of “Leaves of Grass,” she laughed, “and that was pretty transcendent.”