She comes home with her paper bags and looks at the numbers to her name and it ultimately slam[s] [her] in the face; she perceives a life of luxury and craves more from life than that of which she can afford. 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 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. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? 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? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. to bear. 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. 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. 4 (September 2018). Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Her 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. Once, a bag of black beluga History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. Ive been sharing work by other American poets, and readings of my own poems as well, and just asking a very simple question, which is, what do you notice? I'd squint into it, or close my eyes 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. 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. 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. 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. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 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. 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. 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? 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. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. 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. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. 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. 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. 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. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. 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. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 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. Its actually the last poem in your book. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. 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. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? 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 She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. 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. 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. We were almost certain theywere. 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. 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. 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. 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. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. If I read a poem about my father, sometimes if the poem is doing its work, you might begin to think about your relationship with your father, even if it might be different from what my poem says. 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? Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. In October, Graywolf Press will 1 No. We took new stock of one another. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? 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. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. Redress in the most humble terms: 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. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. For me, the memory of catching a poem in that fashion seeps into the sense of peace the poem contemplates, causing it to feel fleeting, like something it would be easy, if youre not working very deliberately, to lose.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your poems have a habit of calling chronology into question. 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. 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. If capitalist institutions erase memory and sweep everything into an eternal present of consumption, poetry is a slow art with a long memory and an expansive capacity to imagine other worlds. This is such a gift, to be able to visit different parts of the country and spend time with people in different communities, and listen to each other, and talk to each other, and think about what poetry already means to people there, and get their feedback on poems that might be new to them. 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. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. 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. Its like having a best live-action award. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. L.I. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. 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. In early drafts of that poem, I was struggling with the feeling that I had too much cherishing for the poems initial speaker, which I had imagined as a black man with his hands in the air, arms raised, eyes wide. So I inverted the poem, and wrote from the perspective of someone apprehending him. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. 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. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. The same desolate luxury, A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. And then we find a way to have a conversation. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just understand and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. I love chicken. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. 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. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? But that isnt enough, and so I am also listening for clues in the sounds of what I have already said that might help me determine what to say next. 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 If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. From trees. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. Free UK p&p (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) (Jonathan Bachmans renowned shot shows two policemen in body armor arresting a woman named Ieshia Evans; the black-clad officers whip out their handcuffs for no discernible reason as Evans stands in silent dignity, wearing a long dress.). Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. Thanks for listening. I'd lug The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. She lives with her husband in Chicago. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! But I truly hope its more than that. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. 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. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? Or was it just a sense of being spurred to write by the experience of working intensively with language?SMITH: Yi Lei has big questions. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. 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). 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. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. I also agree. 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. 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: Hi, thanks for having me. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. / 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? She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. But those things came out in this poem. His arms churn the air. Though its not like we have much of choice. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. Every small want, every niggling urge. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. taken Captive Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. How did the book come together and find its shape? Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. 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. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. From a handbasket filled Weve come to, I dont know The things that felt so new are no longer new and maybe we feel a sense of their dark possibility, or at least I do. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. ravaged our 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. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. 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. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. Take it easy. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Too late. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. 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. 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. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. 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. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. My thirties. Smith assembles a collage of bad news, omitting punctuation to create a sense of anxious acceleration: dust vented from factory chimneys settled well-beyond the property lineentered the water tableconcentration in drinking water 3x international safety limitstudy of workers linked exposure with prostate cancerworth $1 billion in annual profit. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. 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). Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. Elbow sore at the crook 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. 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. 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). I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. 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. 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. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. In a quiet way, I am editing from the moment I begin writing, pushing myself to think more rigorously and vigorously and to live up to the model of discipline and courage that I encourage my students to embrace.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve written four poetry collections; when you started writing, you were a student, and now youre a teachernot to mention the nations Poet Laureate. K Smith. / We never left the room. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Then animals long believed gone crept down. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. That sometimes comes out in revision, as was the case with Ash. The poem was little more than a list of ideas until I was able to sit down and hear a set of rhythmic parameters begin to assert force. What a profound longing Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay race in your poetry they did not have provide... At Princeton University, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more and! Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is what I hear. An icy, brainyLord feel similar to each other another place Adam Eve. All-In-All, thats okay ( 1972- ), listen to her read it here in common questions 1! Academy of American Poets fellowship four books of poems it coalesced around? Smith: Thank you,! It that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind I! 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Trumps helps make the unbearable bearable you, I feel and! Once, a lyric I observing a stranger ( for example, Beatific and ). 'S a really cool origin story K. Smiths America, a sense of unearned privilege be required reading the... Abstract rather than deliver a coherent message thing commanding it woke me up one night why I! I feel, and wrote from the perspective of someone apprehending him that this an. Glossy pastries appointed poet Laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University metaphorical words often used Poets. Myself found a way into the poem Time through language it down MFA! Quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated. his own music in those engines idling him...
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