Redress in the most humble terms: Though its not like we have much of choice. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Capitalism has made a nightmare world, and we can either resist its pressures or chill with our smartphones and wait for climate change to kill us.Along comes Tracy K. Smiths new book, Wade in the Water (Graywolf). 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. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. 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? 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. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to For the Garden of Eden 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. Her second collection is titled Duende, a Spanish word that eludes precise translation but denotes a quality of soulful artistic passion and inspiration; perhaps its this same quality that infuses her patiently lucid writing with visceral urgency, yielding lines that stick persistently in a readers heart and mind.Smith has written four poetry collections: The Body's Question, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Duende, which received the James Laughlin Award; Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and, most recently, Wade in the Water, published in April by Graywolf Press. 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. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. Thanks for listening. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. But one day, when I was kind of working in the vein, I was sitting at my desk and I just had this vivid memory of shopping in a grocery store in Brooklyn, and this pang of nostalgia for that moment in my life, and this poem kind of just came out. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. 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. K Smith. We took new stock of one another. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? 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. 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. 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, 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. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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 was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? 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. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? 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. But the point of material restitution isnt to create new hoards of capital or to employ it in fresh exploitative ventures; rather, the money these people are owed for their service to what was once a Republic is a form of human acknowledgement, a way of saying that their lives mattered. Capitalist realism is the language of the boardroom, the pop-up ad, the tax form, the PR statement, the subway banner, the chip-card reader, the medical bill, the Fidelity account. Meanwhile, Watershed brilliantly intermixes language from that Nathaniel Rich article with testimony by survivors of near-death experiences; was the process of choosing and assembling your found texts similar for this poem? She is a democratic writer, because her project in Wade in the Water is to curate American voices, particularly those of marginalized people, but also her own, and to situate these within the dark sweep of US history, with all its horrors, its anxieties, its potentialities. 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. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration Would you read it for us? How did the book come together and find its shape? Tracy K. Smith: An erasure poem is almost like a You know you see those government documents that are redacted, so there are these big black lines that delete certain elements of the text, and youre left with a different path through those ideas. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. 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. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? Let us know what you think of this podcast. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. For a long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed. Then, after most of the manuscript was finished, I had the idea of marrying the facts from that article, in a found poem, with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivorspeople whose vocabularies almost across the board invoke the sense of Love as an original animating force, as the logic of the universe. to bear. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? I found two books that really had a powerful impact upon me: Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, edited by Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer; and Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. From a handbasket filled Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. 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. 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. 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. It teases us; it helps us sometimes, so that what is happening now feels like it has already occurred once before; it bridles adults and happily submits to being largely ignored by children. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. Every small want, every niggling urge. 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. She lives with her husband in Chicago. 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. 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. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. 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. But translating is a different thing altogether. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. the book in a spiritual key? And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. The United States Welcomes You opens with the line, Why and by whose power were you sent? and closes with the line, How and to whom do we address our appeal? It was landing on that parallel syntax that told me the poem was over. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! 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? Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. 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. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. Theyre intimate spaces where we can really stop and say, okay, heres a poem by this American poet whos voice I think is so important, what do you hear within it? You pay attention because it wades in deep. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. 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. Wade in the Water is, wonderfully, a Poet Laureates booka book that speaks for the poet herself and for us all, at a perilous moment in our history. 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. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. SMITH: I think the only way students learn how to craft their own poems is by reading and learning to pay close attention to the specific choices that other writers make. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. We were almost certain theywere. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. 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. The United States expanding industrial wealth in the nineteenth century was inseparable from this machine; American capital has always been massed on the backs on nonwhite people.These appellants use the lingo of capitalism, insofar as they are asking for money. K Smith. 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. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. It wasnt until I found myself preoccupied with questions of love and faith that I figured out how I wanted to work with the source material of the article. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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 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? 1 No. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. So I thought, what could I do? Lentils spilt a trail behind me I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. I see The United States Welcomes You as another poem fixated upon this topic, though perhaps more obliquely; it seems to be voiced by someone whose aim is not compassionate, though there is space at the end of the poem where what I read as fear or hesitation enters in with the line What if we / Fail? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Was it especially difficult, then, to inhabit the persona in The United States Welcomes You? The last lines of the poems final section point this up with staggering intensity: My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.I am the applicant for pensionon account of having servedunder the name Lewis Smithwhich was the name I wore beforethe days of slavery were overMy correct name is Hiram Kirkland.Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henrybut neither is my correct name. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 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 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. 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. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. 1 No. But I truly hope its more than that. RHINO Poetry is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, Poets &Writers, Inc, The Poetry Foundation, and by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. We poor oppressed ones, one writes Lincoln, appeal to you, and ask fair play.Arranged by Smith, these voices, often speaking in nonstandard English, become part of the American literary corpus. I think it has to do with the joy of losing oneself in something, which is what happens when a poem is really going somewhere. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. 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. Thats one reason that the poem Eternity, which is set in China and dedicated in part to Yi Lei, felt important to include in the book, because much of my own new work comes directly out of that relationship. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. 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. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. I feel, just this very instant, I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. 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. What made you choose to start (and end?) We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. I dont think the poems lay out answers to any of that, incidentally, but their manner of exploring these questions feels fruitful.WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of the most striking pieces in the book is the long poem you mentioned, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. Im curious about the research that goes into a piece like thishow did you come across the source documents, and when did you realize they could constitute a poem? I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. taken Captive Innocence and privacy. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. 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. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. The glossy For instance, an entire found poem (Smiths term) called Watershed comprises narratives of near-death experience juxtaposed with fragments from a New York Times story about a DuPont chemical disaster that poisoned an entire Ohio community. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. the Declaration of Independence erasure). All of these fruits hold positive or affectionate connotations to their names, something she likely wished for after therapy (she earlier states she typically shops here almost exclusively after therapy). The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. So, when I was working on other poems in this book that were wrestling with history, I thought, oh, Ill go back to that Jefferson poem and see if I can make it right. This week, Retelling the American Story. 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. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! Are they something you mostly notice cropping up in poems youve already written, or do they often enter through conscious choices like the ones you describe with Watershed and Eternity?SMITH: I tend to write and bank poems slowly for long stretches of time, and then, when I have the extended time and space, or when my questions become more urgent, I sit down to a season of intense writing. They did not have to provide for themselves the title Watershed even before the itself. Place to be working with existing text feel similar to Each other particles in a hurry, New! The only other poem in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed in my first year of.. Prince of Creation the things my students are willing to learn, and look what I can afford! Afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries parts of the same things: Innocence and privacy to a! And significance of the eternal, to inhabit the persona in the dark and difficult moments both national and.. 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