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. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? It was no longer important or necessary, and I wanted to just listen to these fragments within this founding document, and feel the sort of startled andI dont know, just a sense of inevitability that those statements kind of gathered around themselves. Everyone I knew was living SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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multi-form elegies, all of Smiths work feels radically alivetraversing space and time; rife with cultural and historical references (to, for example, rock music; scientific research; classic movie scenes); and always illuminating with great care the complexities of consciousness and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. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. Onto the darkening dusk. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. SMITH: That poem was originally published as The Mowers. Then I read it in Washington, DC in 2016 and realized that the poems wish is for something graceful, wordless, grateful and sustaining to link these two imaginary strangers in common understanding. I liked setting up, via the title, the expectation of something rigid or dogmatic, and then allowing the poem itself to be gentle. 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). I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. 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 sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. 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. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. 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. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. Whats going on there? How did you arrive at the title, and what do you hope it suggests or encapsulates for readers?While working on the book, I had the experience of attending a ring shout and feeling so deeply moved and shaken by the performance of Wade in the Water. After that evening, I suspected that Wade in the Water was going to be the title of my book. Garden of Eden by Tracy K. Smith What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. Inspired by a photograph taken during a Black Lives Matter protest after city police killed Alton Sterling, a black man, the poem imagines a confrontation between state power and another African American body. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. And then our singing. The same desolate luxury, And whats really exciting is its not a matter of me teaching people about these poems, its really a matter of us listening to each others responses, questions, associations. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out She lives with her husband in Chicago. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. 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. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. 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. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? 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. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. 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. 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. Im Curtis Fox. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. / 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? 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. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. And as many have observed since capitalism emerged (see William Blakes Satanic mills or Upton Sinclairs meatpacking plants), this tends to have baleful effects on how we conceive of social relationships and our own selves. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. I like the way that project emphasizes that the various speakers and photo subjects have chosen to not only share parts of their own stories, but also decided how theyd like to be photographed. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. 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 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. 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. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. But the point of material restitution isnt to create new hoards of capital or to employ it in fresh exploitative ventures; rather, the money these people are owed for their service to what was once a Republic is a form of human acknowledgement, a way of saying that their lives mattered. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. 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. 1 No. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. Dang, you hear those birds? WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. 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 Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. My approach was to expand it, to maybe pull it apart and make it into a poem in different sections, and I looked through some of his letters, I looked through his will, and found through erasure different statements within those documents. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. WebSummary Semi-Splendid by Tracy K. Smith explores an argument from two perspectives.Both perspectives come from Smith, yet one is from a nice perspective, in which the poet typically just allows her boyfriend to win the argument, and the other perspective focuses on this moment, in which she stands up for herself and begins to 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. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Something flickers, not fleeing your face. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. Lentils spilt a trail behind me and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. and settlement here. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. Redress in the most humble terms: 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. 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. The glossy That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. From trees. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. The last couplet, which read You are not the only one / Alive like that, lodged in my mind: even lacking any context for the words, I felt electrified by the truth they managed so simply to express, and by the sense of wise, intimate authority the second-person address carried. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. 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. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. 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. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. 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!) The shoulders. Its not quite music, but the construction of these two parallel statements operated in a fashion similar to rhyme for me.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve said that writing your memoir Ordinary Light helped you work through your own thinking about race. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. 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. And then theres that line in Eternity: as though all of us must be / Buried deep within each other. How does poetry foreground or grapple with distinctions between the self and others? 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. L.I. 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. So, when I was working on other poems in this book that were wrestling with history, I thought, oh, Ill go back to that Jefferson poem and see if I can make it right. 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. 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. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people destroyed the lives of our Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. Her poems pose fundamental questionsabout love, time, mortality, and faith (Is It us, or what contains us? she asks in Life on Mars)and pursue them with imagination, rigor, a bold comfort with uncertainty, and an unswerving commitment to candor and humaneness. Home the paper bags, doing Where I seldom shopped, Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of 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 first line introduces the readers to both the casual 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 spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. In October, Graywolf Press will I am always asking poems to show me who we are, what we are connected to, what our actions and choices set into motion, and whether it might somehow be possible to become better at being human. What about you? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking a few years ago with Gregory Pardlo, you mentioned that music, image, form and departure are the things Im conscious of managing in a poem. Can you say a little more about balancing these qualitiesand, perhaps, how you know when one or two of them want to predominate? 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. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. 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. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? 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. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. 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. I also agree. 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. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. 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. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. Terrible. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. Have your process and preoccupations changed? 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. 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. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. Bank-balance math and counting days. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. Tracy K. Smith: Right. 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. Her second collection is titled Duende, a Spanish word that eludes precise translation but denotes a quality of soulful artistic passion and inspiration; perhaps its this same quality that infuses her patiently lucid writing with visceral urgency, yielding lines that stick persistently in a readers heart and mind.Smith has written four poetry collections: The Body's Question, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Duende, which received the James Laughlin Award; Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and, most recently, Wade in the Water, published in April by Graywolf Press. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. 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. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. 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. on the high Seas The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. 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. the book in a spiritual key? One quick way to define capitalism is to observe that it entails the dedication of all things, all human objects and ideas and actions, to profit, to the continual accumulation of wealth in private hands. 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. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? Would you read it for us? 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. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? The narrow untouched hips. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). I think it is the shift in vocabulary that reads loudest in the books, and that is really a private attempt at finding something newly engaging in my usual conundrums.WASHINGTON SQUARE: You direct the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University; though youre currently taking time off to focus on Laureate duties, youve taught and advised student poets for years. Poet Laureate of the United States; its a high perch for an American poet to land on. Teaching is inspiring for me. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. 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