So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. You can read some of her poems on our website. Take it easy. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. It was so strange. 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. Each ashamed of the same things: Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth 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. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. The fact that indelible images of water lived in both Richs article and several memorable NDEs also suggested that this poem might engage in a useful conversation with the title poem. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. My poems strain for the kind of freedom to rise above Time on occasion, to see through it, to make use of what once (when I needed it) might have been invisible to me and what now (after the fact) can seem plain. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and how that can both deepen and lighten your sense of grief. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. Curtis Fox: Its one of the curiosities of your book, that to grapple with this dawning century you go back into history with poems in the voices of the enslaved and powerless, and you also make interesting use of the Declaration of Independence. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. In a technique that feels like the opposite of erasure, I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It accumulates voices from African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and also from their families. 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. And as many have observed since capitalism emerged (see William Blakes Satanic mills or Upton Sinclairs meatpacking plants), this tends to have baleful effects on how we conceive of social relationships and our own selves. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. The last couplet, which read You are not the only one / Alive like that, lodged in my mind: even lacking any context for the words, I felt electrified by the truth they managed so simply to express, and by the sense of wise, intimate authority the second-person address carried. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. It was Brooklyn. 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). 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. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. The same desolate luxury, She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus. It is, implicitly, formed out of lives meshed into communities and societies; in place of capitalisms brutal sorting of human beings, Smith proposes another world. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? I think we have reached a moment where we need new myths.WASHINGTON SQUARE: The titles and cover art of your two most recent collections suggest a sort of pairing: Life on Mars, with its image of the Cone Nebula, points to the cosmic, while Wade in the Water presents as more earthbound. That process involves weekly meetings where we are looking at and critiquing new poems, but also trying to listen to the themes and questions driving the work. Its been great. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! Every small want, every niggling urge. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. And if Trump has done anything positive for the country, hes inadvertently, by his own racist statements and actions, put the conversation front and center in American life. 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 The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. WebGarden of Eden What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, Usually only after therapy Elbow Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. I felt like my sonnet was off, I always felt like there was something I needed to fix in the last couple of lines of that poem. Its also the title of a poem in the books first section, and it reverberates in images of water throughout the collectionin the poems Watershed and The Everlasting Self, for example. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. Brought on a different manner of weather. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Her poems pose fundamental questionsabout love, time, mortality, and faith (Is It us, or what contains us? she asks in Life on Mars)and pursue them with imagination, rigor, a bold comfort with uncertainty, and an unswerving commitment to candor and humaneness. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking a few years ago with Gregory Pardlo, you mentioned that music, image, form and departure are the things Im conscious of managing in a poem. Can you say a little more about balancing these qualitiesand, perhaps, how you know when one or two of them want to predominate? 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. The glossy Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? All Rights Reserved. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. The ones / Whose wealth is a kind of filth. Lest this ecological connection seem like a stretch, know that environmental disaster haunts Wade in the Water. 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). And whats really exciting is its not a matter of me teaching people about these poems, its really a matter of us listening to each others responses, questions, associations. 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 This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Leaving therapy, she feels a profound longing for the grocery store, which becomes a sort of temple where spiritual and aesthetic desire mix (The glossy pastries! and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. Social media, this idea that if you have a life its only useful or only real if you can demonstrate it, I feel like the beginning of that frenzy or that appetite seems to line up in my mind with that period, yeah. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. 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. I think the topic has also just come up much more frequently and relentlessly in the years since Trayvon Martins murder.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Another subject you grapple with in Ordinary Light is belief in God. Or how you can sometimes see the humor in your own dire or embarrassing situation, and how that can be both frustrating and something you file away under Things that Will Be Funny in the Future. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? Due to the insinuation that this is an expensive shop, she reminisces of being in her thirties and seeing the The glossy pastries! and the Pomegranate, persimmon, [and] quince! sold there. But I truly hope its more than that. After all, it supposedly makes nothing happen, according to Auden (indeed, imagine a poem changing President Trumps mind on immigration), and it is the literary form for which capitalism has the least use, judging by its small contemporary readership.But poetry that tries to represent individual subjectivity is well positioned to depict life under capitalism and to render possible post- or anti-capitalist alternatives. the book in a spiritual key? Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Life On Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. Incidentally, the only other poem in the book whose title was chosen well in advance of the poems composition was Eternity. I knew that I wanted to write a poem that invoked a never-ending sense of scale. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau Redress in the most humble terms: It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. 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. 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. Then animals long believed gone crept down. Elbow sore at the crook The opening poems of Wade in the Water seem to locate the divine in the worldly, sometimes to humorous effect: God drives around in a jeep, and the Garden of Eden turns out to be a grocery store. And then theres that line in Eternity: as though all of us must be / Buried deep within each other. How does poetry foreground or grapple with distinctions between the self and others? Curtis Fox: So I wanted to ask you about your time as Poet Laureate, but before we get there, Id like to get straight to a poem. In October, Graywolf Press will Born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California, Smith now lives in New Jersey, where she directs and teaches in Princeton University's Creative Writing Program. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. We were almost certain theywere. To capacity. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. Attention to the stranger crossing any road in any town or city; patience with the awkward encounter, the unknown intention; respect for the other whom you do not know, but with a slightest stretch of mind, imagine you do. to bear. My thirties. She studied at Harvard University, where she joined the Dark Room Collective, a reading series for writers of color, created by Sharan Strange in 1988. 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. Dang, you hear those birds? In its nostalgia for the pastries, the exotic fruits, and the black beluga lentils of her past, the poem invokes blessing and abundance, removed in time but newly desired in this moment when we see. WebAnalyzes tracy k. smith's "life on mars" as an elegy as a whole with many poems pertaining to death and s struggle with the loss of her father. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? 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. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. 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. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. My approach was to expand it, to maybe pull it apart and make it into a poem in different sections, and I looked through some of his letters, I looked through his will, and found through erasure different statements within those documents. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. What are you really getting at there? 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? Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. Several poems in Wade in the Water were written after translating poems of hers called In the Distance and Green Trees Greet the Rainstorm.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Section III of Wade in the Water ends with a Political Poem: a vision of workers cutting grass and communicating intermittently by raising their arms. She didn'tKnow me, but I believed her,And a terrible new acheRolled over in my chest,Like in a room where the drapesHave been swept back. Mattan Masri- Week 16: Animation is not a Genre, Bella Furst Week 1 | Ranking Chicken and Why Chicken Nuggets are the Best, Bella Furst | Week 20 "The United States Welcomes You" by Tracy K. Smith, Bella Furst Week 4 | "Garden of Eden" by Tracy K. Smith. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. I was dreaming that I was reading aloud a mural that had been made of a Carl Phillips poem, when suddenly my waking mind broke in to say: Thats not a Carl Phillips poembut if you write it down it can be yours! I woke up and struggled to remember and reconstruct the lines Id read in the dream. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes 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, Moreover, my sense of the nearness of the pastthe way that our public grappling with race and racial prejudice has begun to feel so much like a throwback from an earlier timeignited the urgent wish to hear something in an earlier periods voices that might be useful at this moment in the 21st Century.The title Wade in the Water comes from an African American spiritual, which seems apt for a collection that thinks so much about faith, race, and history (especially the Civil War), and for a poet whose previous book took its name from a song, too. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. Capitalism, Fisher intones, is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.Is there any alternative to the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen (Fisher again)? Copyright 2008 - 2023 . I think it is the shift in vocabulary that reads loudest in the books, and that is really a private attempt at finding something newly engaging in my usual conundrums.WASHINGTON SQUARE: You direct the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University; though youre currently taking time off to focus on Laureate duties, youve taught and advised student poets for years. He has plundered our SMITH: I think the aim of most poems is to erase some measure of the distance between one person and another, usually between the poems speaker and its reader, or between the poems speaker and its subject. I see it as my job to draw these things out, and offer the kinds of questions and observations that will help students move further into their strengths as writers, and to follow them toward an organic and genuine sense of their own deepening themes and questions. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? / We never left the room. At the end of the day, our lives arent quite the way we wish they were and it can be difficult to come to terms with that. On the dawning century. 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. Would you read it for us? Lentils spilt a trail behind me Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. This gives even her most personal poems a decidedly political charge: they feel revolutionary in their openness of spirit, their attention to a range of voices. 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? Though its not like we have much of choice. Yes, these are black voices that have been effaced from history, buried in government archives and exhumed by a few scholars on whose work Smith draws. The first trip was to Sante Fe, New Mexico, to the Santa Fe Indian School and some neighboring pueblos, and I realized this is joy. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Those banked poems help me get started, but inevitably the work generated during that intense period is characterized by recurring themes, images, vocabulary, and obsessions. WebTracy K. Smith is a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Not just me, not just people who are fresh out of whatever you do in the first years after graduate school into adulthood, thinking that Ill be happy if I can almost afford the things that I want, if I can somehow find a way to buy what life seems to offer to other people. 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. Let us know what you think of this podcast. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. Can I get you to read An Old Story? Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. 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. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. 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. Curtis Fox: And the poem ends ominously, as if were about to be kicked out of the Garden of Eden, not only the store but innocence in general. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). Doing so would mean transforming language in its social, political, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions; it would mean altering how we speak in public, of other people, and in private, to ourselves.Poetry might not seem like the best way to catalyze a revolution. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. Youve talked a bit about Wade in the Waters genesis, but more broadly, how early on do you typically begin to sense a manuscripts overarching themes? I love you,I love you, as You flinch. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. And let it slam me in the face I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? I claim pension under the general law, argues one appellant; (i shall hav to send this with out a stamp / for I haint money enough to buy a stamp), another says in closing his letter to the President (all italics and spellings original).In an endnote Smith refers to such texts as erasure poems, a somewhat ironic term. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. The narrow untouched hips. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. 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. So I thought, what could I do? 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. 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. This is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps.Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Eden. It is set in the dawning century of the neoliberal universe, where everything is a market; the speaker is a thirtysomething New Yorker scraping out a life in the long tail of the Great Recession, a specter that looms over many poems in the collection. In my earlier work, persona poems have been a tool by which Ive sought to learn something about some other experience or perspective that is remote from my own. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. Parenting is such an intimate experience, but we have all been parented and many of us have struggled through these moments when our childrens voices trumpeting their separate identities are both miracle and monumental challenge. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? She lives with her husband in Chicago. ravaged our 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. 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. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. Declaration uses erasure to repurpose Thomas Jeffersons litany of complaints against King George, evoking the slaves forced migration to this country and their experience here of unspeakable oppression. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Everyone I knew was living The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. I am always asking poems to show me who we are, what we are connected to, what our actions and choices set into motion, and whether it might somehow be possible to become better at being human. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. I had the same problem choosing my poet. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and 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. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem.
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