It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. 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. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. 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. 1 No. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. 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. 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). And I remember, I was sitting reading this document, and suddenly I got to the region where all of these complaints against England were being raised, and I felt that they were speaking so clearly to the history of black life in this country, and suddenly everything else that I was working on, that I thought I wanted to gather around the idea of Jefferson, just went away. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 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. 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? Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. 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. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im also curious, hearing about how you created the found poemsare there any poets whose work has inspired or instructed you specifically in this domain of found/collaged poetry, or poetry that incorporates historical source documents?SMITH: I have taught CD Wrights One Big Self, in both the poetry and photography formats, to my students in the past. 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. The shoulders. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. Thanks for listening. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. The known sun setting When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. 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. 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 It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. 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. Everyone I knew was living 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. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. taken Captive Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. 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. Home the paper bags, doing Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. SMITH: The older I get, the more I begin to think of Time as not just a force or a law of nature, but as a presence we live alongside, someone rather than something. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? 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. 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. Terrible. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. to bear. I suppose those two choices speak to some of the overarching themes I consciously wanted the book to cleave to.WASHINGTON SQUARE: This last comment makes me wonder about your process assembling a book. 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 its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. Too late. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. 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. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. 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. I see The United States Welcomes You as another poem fixated upon this topic, though perhaps more obliquely; it seems to be voiced by someone whose aim is not compassionate, though there is space at the end of the poem where what I read as fear or hesitation enters in with the line What if we / Fail? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Was it especially difficult, then, to inhabit the persona in The United States Welcomes You? SMITH: I think my strength is the image. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. And let it slam me in the face 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. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. 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 imagined my Civil War poem would be a one-time exploration of its time period, but when I came back a few years later to writing poetry, the concerns I found myself wrestling with were rooted in similar questions of history, race, compassion and justice. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. 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). WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. Free UK p&p His arms churn the air. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. 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. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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? 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. We were almost certain theywere. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. 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. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. The last lines of the poems final section point this up with staggering intensity: My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.I am the applicant for pensionon account of having servedunder the name Lewis Smithwhich was the name I wore beforethe days of slavery were overMy correct name is Hiram Kirkland.Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henrybut neither is my correct name. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. 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. This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. 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? 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 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. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus. It is, implicitly, formed out of lives meshed into communities and societies; in place of capitalisms brutal sorting of human beings, Smith proposes another world. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. 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. What made you choose to start (and end?) Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. I feel, just this very instant, 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. 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. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. 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. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Take it easy. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. For 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. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. 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. 1 No. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. 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. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. And then we find a way to have a conversation. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from Every small want, every niggling urge. Like a lot. 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. 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. On the dawning century. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? Redress in the most humble terms: The glossy pastries! We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. That process involves weekly meetings where we are looking at and critiquing new poems, but also trying to listen to the themes and questions driving the work. Teaching is inspiring for me. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. 1 No. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. The glossy 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. Similarly, Theatrical Improvisation draws on the voices of immigrants as well as those who targeted them in the months before and after the 2016 Presidential election. 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. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau Tracy K. Smith: I think about the incredible systematic and orderly attempts to negate black life throughout the history of this country, and then I think about the voices and the contributions to democracy that Blacks have offered, and those two things speak really powerfully to each other. 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). SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. 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 She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. 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? She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. K Smith. 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. 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. 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. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. Its actually the last poem in your book. All Rights Reserved. In October, Graywolf Press will Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. Poetry does not really resonate with me. 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. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. 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. He has plundered our Where I seldom shopped, 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. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. 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. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. L.I. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! 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. What are you really getting at there? 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. To capacity. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. 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. Its been something I will be sad to cease doing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to go out across the country at this time in particular. 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