That distinction gets complicated once you open the booksbut I wonder if you do see these collections as particularly complementing or speaking to each other? It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Poetry wasnt really on my radar thenat least nothing contemporarybut I was taking a required composition course, and in the classroom I spotted a poster bearing some lines from a poem. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess I was really thinking about the moment when our desire to be public people became such a ravenous appetite. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im also curious, hearing about how you created the found poemsare there any poets whose work has inspired or instructed you specifically in this domain of found/collaged poetry, or poetry that incorporates historical source documents?SMITH: I have taught CD Wrights One Big Self, in both the poetry and photography formats, to my students in the past. ravaged our WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. How did the book come together and find its shape? Race is one of the chief subjects of Wade in the Water, a site wherein my wish to contemplate the elusive nature of compassion gets played out. One quick way to define capitalism is to observe that it entails the dedication of all things, all human objects and ideas and actions, to profit, to the continual accumulation of wealth in private hands. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. The point of capitalism is to get more capital, which allows you to either procure stuff (things or experiences) or just hoard the lucre, deriving a weird pleasure from that. That work is something I can do when I dont have any ideas for poems, and it draws me into conversation with another poetic sensibility. We are not the isolated commodity seekers that capitalism and its armed enforcers demand we become, but rather all of us must be / / Buried deep within each other (Eternity). She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. 1 No. What about you? Teaching is inspiring for me. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. When she writes about love and desire, they are vehicles for the philosophical examination of humanity, of the ways we respond to authority, and more and more they are vehicles for thinking about the plight of the earth. But before we get to the analysis, lets briefly summarise the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. On the sixth day of Creation, God created man in the form of Adam, moulding him from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7), breathing the breath of life into Adams nostrils. Garden of Eden by Tracy K. Smith What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. I didnt set out to write a found poem, but when I got far enough into that research, I understood that I didnt want to merely metabolize all of these other real voices and then speak something imagined or invented out in my own voice; rather, I wanted to make space for these very compelling voices to speak to a reader the ways they had spoken to me. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Once I have a body of realized poems that feels substantialsay, 30 or 40 pagesI start to hunt for the different things the poems seem to be saying to one another in an effort to decipher what is missing. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im intrigued by the extent to which youve referred to this poem as an autonomous entity: it seems to be voiced, what I read as fear or hesitation. Are there some poems that seem more or less transparent to you, more or less within your understanding and control, than others?SMITH: Oh, sure. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. We were almost certain theywere. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I thought that this conversation about how incapable we as a nation are of having a conversation across political difference or racial difference, that motivated me to think about how poetry might be a kind of bridge. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. To capacity. But I truly hope its more than that. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. Too late. But in other events, Ive gone into almost curated spaces, like rehab facilities or churches, or we have an upcoming trip that will take us to a retirement community. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. Lentils spilt a trail behind me In part, I think its true to say that the selves Im most committed to in that book are the ones our culture continues to make most vulnerable: women, people of color, the lonely and disenfranchised. 4 (September 2018). Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. Take it easy. Yet everyone lived with a sense of innocence and privacy. People are leading lives where they cannot afford rich and luxurious things and are ashamed of that, yet they also hold onto fear; they are afraid to let people see their actual status. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? And for that to be unmitigated. Thats the emphasis in each of my workshops, though sometimes we use themes to determine the readings, or we look at a specific type of poemsay long poems or poem cyclesover the course of the term. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. Or, generally, have some personae in your work been more challenging to access than others?SMITH: Sometimes, as in the case ofThe United States Welcomes You,a persona is a last resort. Tracy K. Smith: I think about the incredible systematic and orderly attempts to negate black life throughout the history of this country, and then I think about the voices and the contributions to democracy that Blacks have offered, and those two things speak really powerfully to each other. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. The couplet looped in my head for weeks, and when I finally resorted to Google, I learned it was from Smiths first collection, The Bodys Question.I borrowed her books from the library and found them full of lines like the ones that had hooked me. Smith mingles these themes in The World is Your Beautiful Younger Sister, where the body of a woman stands in for the planet itself; Smith plays on old Western conceptions of nature as a female resource to be commanded by men and their technologies. She lives with her husband in Chicago. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) In Garden of Eden, the first poem in the collection, Smith remembers shopping at a grocery store in Brooklyn that was actually called the Garden of Eden. What happens to our relationships with others under these conditions which have resolved personal worth into exchange value, as Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto? L.I. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? I also agree. Inspired by a photograph taken during a Black Lives Matter protest after city police killed Alton Sterling, a black man, the poem imagines a confrontation between state power and another African American body. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Thanks for listening. WASHINGTON SQUARE: In addition to the found poems in Wade in the Water and your previous books, youve also written erasures (including an erasure of the Declaration of Independence) and translated poetry from the Chinese. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). SMITH: The older I get, the more I begin to think of Time as not just a force or a law of nature, but as a presence we live alongside, someone rather than something. WASHINGTON SQUARE: In Ordinary Light you recall your first poem, written in grade school and titled Humor. These days much of your work deals with weighty topics, though youve said in other interviews that writing often feels joyful. Like the couplet that led me to her work, Smiths writing seems often to spring from an empathetic impulse, animated by common human experiences and invested in the insight we can gain by watching and listening to each other. I wanted to draw-in the sense of the living spirit at the heart of that nights encounter, and at the heart of the tradition of the ring shout itself: the sense of love and deliverance, of faith and compassion, of justice and survival.Watershed was a poem I knew I wanted to write. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. Someone has likened it to the poem in my previous book called The Good Life which is about being so hungry, and having a job but not making enough money. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Curtis Fox: The poem ends with an erasure, it ends ambiguously, taken Captive / on the high Seas / to bear as you just read, and its with a dash there at the end. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau-du-Roi, a fishing village in the Carmargue, on the Mediterranean coast of France. WebSummary Semi-Splendid by Tracy K. Smith explores an argument from two perspectives.Both perspectives come from Smith, yet one is from a nice perspective, in which the poet typically just allows her boyfriend to win the argument, and the other perspective focuses on this moment, in which she stands up for herself and begins to His comic jogCarries him nowhere. Is it strange to say love is a languageFew practice, but all, or near all speak?Even the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not loves bladeSizing up the hearts familiar meat? Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. In fact, I think I picked up the pace on my own new poems, and wrote the bulk of Wade in the Water, precisely because of my work on Yi Leis poems. What made you choose to start (and end?) I think it urges the viewer to submit to the terms and values of the subjects rather than cling to any pre-existing sense of what dignity or autonomy ought to look like. At the time, I wasnt writing many poems; I was working on my prose memoir, and feeling, somewhat guiltily, that it might be a good idea to take the opportunity to produce a new poem. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. Its not quite music, but the construction of these two parallel statements operated in a fashion similar to rhyme for me.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve said that writing your memoir Ordinary Light helped you work through your own thinking about race. This would be a democratic project: a writer who takes it on would have to imagine a community where individuals arent just monads bouncing around the economy but are instead subjects whose lives matter regardless of how much or little capital is attached to them. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. K Smith. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face The known sun setting On the dawning century. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). While I labored to find Her latest book is Wade In The Water. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. A few years ago, actually several years ago now, I wrote a sonnet that I contributed to an anthology called Monticello in Mind, that was edited by Lisa Russ Spaar, and they were poems about Thomas Jefferson. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. Capitalism is the enemy and the stakes are high, because one of the only defenses against the degradations of our market-driven culture is to cleave to language that fosters humility, awareness of complexity, commitment to the lives of others and a resistance to the overly easy and the patently false.Embedded in all this is a specific conception of history. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. In a recent podcast of her conversation with Curtis Fox of the Poetry Foundation, Tracy K. Smith says that being Poet Laureate is a kind of service (Off the Shelf, July 31, 2018). Poetry allows us to bridge our differences, to remind ourselves that we do have things to say to each other, that we are interested in each others lives and vulnerabilities. In this new collection, Smith explores, mourns and even celebrates those vulnerabilities, both national and individual. Its like having a best live-action award. His arms churn the air. The final poem, An Old Story, exposes our tendency to destroy our own world by reminding us of the Biblical storm that drowned all life except for Noah, his family, and the pairs of animals he saved on his ark: After the storm, it is song that changes the weather, tempts the animals to come down from the trees where they had shelteredin an ark made of wood but not by us. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. After you read this poem by the former U.S. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. The core of the book, because it was the poem I had written earliest in the process, always seemed to me to be the long Civil War poem, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. That poem was commissioned for an exhibition of Civil War photographs at the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery back in 2013. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration This week, Retelling the American Story. He has plundered our I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Whats going on there? Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. Brought on a different manner of weather. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. So I thought, what could I do? I imagined my Civil War poem would be a one-time exploration of its time period, but when I came back a few years later to writing poetry, the concerns I found myself wrestling with were rooted in similar questions of history, race, compassion and justice. Everyone hunkers down alone with their stuff, just as capitalism wants it.Two vicious features of the system, which Im hardly the first to note, are its enforcement of rigid hierarchies (think about the racial pay gap, for example) and its wholesale razing of the biospheric life-support systems that allow civilization to exist in the first place. And I remember, I was sitting reading this document, and suddenly I got to the region where all of these complaints against England were being raised, and I felt that they were speaking so clearly to the history of black life in this country, and suddenly everything else that I was working on, that I thought I wanted to gather around the idea of Jefferson, just went away. Its been something I will be sad to cease doing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to go out across the country at this time in particular. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. But translating is a different thing altogether. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. Each one of us is a collaborative condition, The Everlasting Self puts it.Smith isnt a political theorist, psychologist, historian, or polemicist, though her poetry metabolizes elements of those discourses. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. Men with interests to protect seduce and extract pleasure from a young person, making her believe / / It was she who gave permission, just as patriarchal industrial capitalism has plundered the youth of mother Earth.Those awful, awful men. Similarly, Theatrical Improvisation draws on the voices of immigrants as well as those who targeted them in the months before and after the 2016 Presidential election. I had been powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in January 2016. They do a lot to remind us that we do have things to say to each other, that were interested in one anothers lives and vulnerabilities. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? 1 No. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. Im Curtis Fox. This seems like a really relatable poem; I can relate to you in that it's hard to be satisfied with our lives and that as we've gotten older it's become easier to accept that (knowing that it's ok in your words). She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Home the paper bags, doing WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. How did you arrive at the title, and what do you hope it suggests or encapsulates for readers?While working on the book, I had the experience of attending a ring shout and feeling so deeply moved and shaken by the performance of Wade in the Water. After that evening, I suspected that Wade in the Water was going to be the title of my book. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. Some of these events have happened in large public spaces, so its been a matter of reading and then having maybe a public Q&A or more of a back and forth afterward. Its exciting and also a bit frightening to be moving through someone elses imagination and vocabulary, trying to render that work into English with what feels, hopefully, like an indigenous sensibility. The gesture of writing an appeal and appending ones name to it parallels her lyric recuperations, because both replace capitalisms terms (where individuals are parts of a vast machine dedicated to profit) with the changeable conditions of authentic selfhood, where every breath matters even if it produces nothing that can be monetized. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. For the Garden of Eden The dead speak.The poem bores deep into the nations roots, back to the Civil War, which momentarily created opportunities for African Americans to participate in democracy as voters and officeholders, craftsmen and farmers, teachers and doctors; as free agents in America, not chattel. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. My natural process is to try and distribute the weight of the poem across these mechanisms, but I get very excited when the poem has other plans for itself and leans more toward a rhythmic energy, or toward the rigid structure of rhyme or repetition. God then planted a garden eastward in Eden (2:8), containing both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (2:9). Adam is tasked with keeping or maintaining the garden. God tells him he can freely eat of every tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for to eat of that tree would be to die. In the poem, Declaration , by Tracy K. Smith, the author is able to criticize a powerful document and bring to light the racial injustices in modern-day society. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? 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