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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. On Montague Street She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Tracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). The first line introduces the readers to both the casual toneof the poem and draws them in to the discussion with which the poem is concerned, prompting them to read the next line in order to answer the question implicitly posed in the first. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. 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. The glossy pastries! 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. 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. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! 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. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. 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. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. 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. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. WebGarden of Eden story: summary 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 Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. All Rights Reserved. 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. He has plundered our 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. Teaching is inspiring for me. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. Her writing contests the deeply isolating structures of capitalism by imagining self and nation as a collaborative condition, one that must be endlessly reconstructed and defended in the face of xenophobia, sexual violence, economic ruin, social anomie, and political disintegration. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. Her Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. 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)? I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. 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. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. 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. 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. 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. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. 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. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). 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. I had the same problem choosing my poet. Once, a bag of black beluga His comic jogCarries him nowhere. 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. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. Song allows us to hope for new connections: The interior sections of Smiths collection lift up others voices and names, to which she joins her own. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. I also agree. 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. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. 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. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. This poem is set in the beginning of the shift in our perspective, this idea that privacy is something that we can live above, in a way. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. What about you? Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. 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. So I did that with this document, and what I found myself doing was deleting the text that was most specific in reference to England, and listening only to the first half, in many cases, of statements. 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. 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. 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? The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. 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. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. To capacity. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . Poems are so great because they urge you to start thinking in honest and even vulnerable terms about your own life and your own experiences. 1 No. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. 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. I'd lug [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. 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? It was Brooklyn. The glossy I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. We were almost certain theywere. 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. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. I dreamt that I was in a hotel where there was a mural of that poem, which was by him, painted on a wall, and I was reading it aloud to somebody who was with me. 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. You can read some of her poems on our website. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. The same desolate luxury, It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for. Let us know what you think of this podcast. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" 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. For the Garden of Eden According to the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, this mental architecture almost inevitablybarring unusual cultural circumstances or great personal fortitudetakes the form of capitalist realism, which consists in the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it (Fishers italics). WebPoet, librettist, and translator Tracy K. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States and is the Roger S. Berlind 52 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she also chairs the Lewis Center for the Arts. 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. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. 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. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? 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 If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. Onto the darkening dusk. 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. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. Smith and I corresponded by email about writing, reading, teaching, and her latest collection.WASHINGTON SQUARE: To start, I loved your new collection Wade in the Water. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. 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. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. 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. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for 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. 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. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. Free UK p&p 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. / The wood was never spent. In Wade in the Water, the first section of Eternity begins It is as if I can almost still remember and closes with trees Ageless, constant, / Growing down into earth and up into history. Any thoughts on the challenges and possibilities of processing (or traversing) time through language? You know, popular myths that we cleave to as Americans, and there are a lot of poems in this book that have titles that are biblical. 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). My thirties. 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. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. I suppose those two choices speak to some of the overarching themes I consciously wanted the book to cleave to.WASHINGTON SQUARE: This last comment makes me wonder about your process assembling a book. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. 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. 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. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! On the dawning century. Curtis Fox: So thats the opening poem in your book, and as you said, its set in the early years of the century when the poet was more {innocence}, but there are hints that all is not well, and you write Everyone I knew was living / The same desolate luxury, / Each ashamed of the same things: / Innocence and privacy. 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). I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. and settlement here. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. Life on Mars is pointed into the future as a way of reckoning with all of that, while Wade in the Water takes up history in a similar effort. 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. 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'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face The known sun setting On the dawning century. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Tracy K. 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