How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? Then animals long believed gone crept down. 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: I have, and I didnt know if I would. 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. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. 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. But translating is a different thing altogether. 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). On the dawning century. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. 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. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Im talking about the many products, services, networks, trends, apps, tools, toys, as well as the drugs and devices for remedying their effects that are pitched to us nonstop: in our browser sidebars, in the pages of print media, embedded in movies and TV shows, on airplanes, in taxis and trains and even toilet stalls. But the poet respectfully appropriates them, placing each within her linguistic universe, where things like line breaks and image patterns matter, and as such the erasure is partly undone. I feel, just this very instant, One of the closing lines is an eerie warning: its global. The worlds first great carbon empire, the United States, is committing suicide, but at least some people are getting richer.The books center is I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. This long poem, divided into sections based on different voices, consists of material Smith culled from the letters of black Civil War veterans and their wives, children, siblings, and widows, many of whom wrote to President Lincoln asking for financial assistance, in many cases pay that was owed them. 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. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. 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. He has plundered our Redress in the most humble terms: I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. 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. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. 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 Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. the book in a spiritual key? But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. His arms churn the air. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. Bank-balance math and counting days. 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. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. 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. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. The known sun setting 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. 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. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, teaching at Princeton, named the US Poet Laureate in 2017, and already freighted with laurels (her previous book, Life on Mars, won the 2012 Pulitzer), Smith is no undiscovered talent. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. From short lyrics to erasures to sectioned, multi-form elegies, all of Smiths work feels radically alivetraversing space and time; rife with cultural and historical references (to, for example, rock music; scientific research; classic movie scenes); and always illuminating with great care the complexities of consciousness and embodiment. 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. L.I. A tea they refused to carry. I often think of a wonderful Marie Howe poem called The Star Market which begins: The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday. These are the old, the sick, the people a healthy young person might recoil from. 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. 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 struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. 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. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. Im listening for possibilities in meaning and emotional tone, and trying to make useful formal decisions, in a way that is more similar than different to what happens when I am writing. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. I think it has to do with the joy of losing oneself in something, which is what happens when a poem is really going somewhere. 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? Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. 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. The final poem, An Old Story, exposes our tendency to destroy our own world by reminding us of the Biblical storm that drowned all life except for Noah, his family, and the pairs of animals he saved on his ark: After the storm, it is song that changes the weather, tempts the animals to come down from the trees where they had shelteredin an ark made of wood but not by us. I chose the wrong there are ways to hold pain like night follows daynot knowing how tomorrow went down.it hurts like never when the always is now,the now that time won't allow.there is no manner of tomorrow, nor shape of todayonly like always having My brother still bites his nails to the quick,but lately hes been allowing them to grow.So much hurt is forgotten with the horizonas backdrop. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. In the poem, Declaration , by Tracy K. Smith, the author is able to criticize a powerful document and bring to light the racial injustices in modern-day society. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. Usually only after therapy The author is efficient in pointing out that the men that once wrote and fought for equality, were the same to enforce and bring upon laws that oppressed Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. 1 No. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? 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)? Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? Poetry does not really resonate with me. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? 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. ravaged our She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. 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. Can I get you to read An Old Story? 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? the Declaration of Independence erasure). Everyone I knew was living Though its not like we have much of choice. I'd lug 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. 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. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. 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. How did the book come together and find its shape? The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. on the high Seas Do you enjoy it? She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. But those things came out in this poem. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. 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 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). He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. And then our singing. 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. On Montague Street Terrible. to bear. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? Home the paper bags, doing So I thought, what could I do? SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. Its refreshing to hear from a Poet Laureate who holds all of these diverse concerns in her mind and in her voice, from our national tragedy to a four-year-olds refusal to eat her dinner. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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? 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. 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. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. 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. Im thinking particularly of your poem Ash, which, compared to some of the other poems in Wade in the Water, feels especially, conspicuously (and beautifully!) I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. I think it urges the viewer to submit to the terms and values of the subjects rather than cling to any pre-existing sense of what dignity or autonomy ought to look like. Even if the question animating the poem is a serious one, that sense of being lost in the pursuit is, inevitably, a happy thingit is about finding something that can constitute a productive path through or out of the matter at hand. 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. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. 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. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? 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. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? Its like having a best live-action award. 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. Her I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. Brought on a different manner of weather. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. 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 story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. Teaching is inspiring for me. 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. 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. 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. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). 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. In October, Graywolf Press will My thirties. 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. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. What made you choose to start (and end?) Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. 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. Someone has likened it to the poem in my previous book called The Good Life which is about being so hungry, and having a job but not making enough money. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. The glossy As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. All Rights Reserved. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? 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. 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. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau I 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. 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. To capacity. 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. 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. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. 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. 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). Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. 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. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. (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.). And let it slam me in the face 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? The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. Underlying meanings behind small phrases get you to read an Old Story its. Poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases exists in our lives, even though the ultimate act to. From John Self, the stubborn, the only dream like that that would... 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