The glossy pastries! WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. And then our singing. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. 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. 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. My natural process is to try and distribute the weight of the poem across these mechanisms, but I get very excited when the poem has other plans for itself and leans more toward a rhythmic energy, or toward the rigid structure of rhyme or repetition. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. 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. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. Have your process and preoccupations changed? Free UK p&p On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. 1 No. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. 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). 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. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? 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. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. Our repeated 4 (September 2018). 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. 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. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. 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. 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. 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. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. When she writes about love and desire, they are vehicles for the philosophical examination of humanity, of the ways we respond to authority, and more and more they are vehicles for thinking about the plight of the earth. Home the paper bags, doing Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. She lives with her husband in Chicago. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. 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. 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. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. 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. Yet everyone lived with a sense of innocence and privacy. People are leading lives where they cannot afford rich and luxurious things and are ashamed of that, yet they also hold onto fear; they are afraid to let people see their actual status. Her term will be up in April of 2019. 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. Do you enjoy it? I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. Even a simple poem like The Good Life grew large, for me at least,when the image of a woman journeying for water from a village without a well arrived. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. For the Garden of Eden 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. 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. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . 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. Im Curtis Fox. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. That work is something I can do when I dont have any ideas for poems, and it draws me into conversation with another poetic sensibility. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. 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. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from Thanks for listening. I had the same problem choosing my poet. She does something trickier and more important: her work conjures up, with vivid particularity, at the level of the individual, what it is like to live under late capitalism. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. In a 2016 interview for The Iowa Review, you commented, I never have figured out how to talk about race in my poetry in a way that feels authentic and organic, and Ordinary Light is a book in which Im thinking so much about race. Wade in the Water seems to engage this topic compellingly and with great assurance. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. 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). 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I thought that this conversation about how incapable we as a nation are of having a conversation across political difference or racial difference, that motivated me to think about how poetry might be a kind of bridge. I feel, just this very instant, 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. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. 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. 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 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? Like a lot. 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. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. I think we have reached a moment where we need new myths.WASHINGTON SQUARE: The titles and cover art of your two most recent collections suggest a sort of pairing: Life on Mars, with its image of the Cone Nebula, points to the cosmic, while Wade in the Water presents as more earthbound. 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. On the dawning century. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. 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. 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. 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. 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. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. Take it easy. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. Would you read it for us? Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. How did the book come together and find its shape? Anyone can read what you share. 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. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. You pay attention because it wades in deep. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? I wanted to find a way of reminding myself that our 21st Century moment isnt self-contained; somewhere and somehow, it has bearing upon what happens moving forward throughout all of eternity, even after we humans are gone from this planet. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. What about you? Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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. K Smith. 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. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. Lentils spilt a trail behind me Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. 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. What are you really getting at there? Tracy K. Smith: Right. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. In October, Graywolf Press will I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Leaving therapy, she feels a profound longing for the grocery store, which becomes a sort of temple where spiritual and aesthetic desire mix (The glossy pastries! Come together and find its shape did you fill in that blank as you.. Everyone lived with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk ( line 1 ) perhaps steering its. These are the Old, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface way that humor exists in lives. Old, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface seemed to capture the mood of our historical.... Figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness often feels joyful your best poems read. 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