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. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. 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. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. 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. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. 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. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. Thats one reason that the poem Eternity, which is set in China and dedicated in part to Yi Lei, felt important to include in the book, because much of my own new work comes directly out of that relationship. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including For a long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed. Then, after most of the manuscript was finished, I had the idea of marrying the facts from that article, in a found poem, with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivorspeople whose vocabularies almost across the board invoke the sense of Love as an original animating force, as the logic of the universe. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? 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. 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. 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. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. 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. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. 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). It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. Free UK p&p 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. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. 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. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. 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. 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. 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 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. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. She comes home with her paper bags and looks at the numbers to her name and it ultimately slam[s] [her] in the face; she perceives a life of luxury and craves more from life than that of which she can afford. 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. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. But I truly hope its more than that. Take it easy. Elbow sore at the crook Too late. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau She lives with her husband in Chicago. 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. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. While I labored to find And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. 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. 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. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. Would you read it for us? / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. Curtis Fox: Its one of the curiosities of your book, that to grapple with this dawning century you go back into history with poems in the voices of the enslaved and powerless, and you also make interesting use of the Declaration of Independence. 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. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). Poems are so great because they urge you to start thinking in honest and even vulnerable terms about your own life and your own experiences. 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. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. 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. 1 No. on the high Seas Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. 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 Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. 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. 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. 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. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). 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. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. L.I. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. Usually only after therapy How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? 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. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. You can read some of her poems on our website. 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 then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of From trees. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? I'd lug taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for 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. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. For Something flickers, not fleeing your face. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. The ones / Whose wealth is a kind of filth. Lest this ecological connection seem like a stretch, know that environmental disaster haunts Wade in the Water. destroyed the lives of our Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. 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. 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. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. 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. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. Let us know what you think of this podcast. 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. 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. 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. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. Then animals long believed gone crept down. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. 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. 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. 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. 4 (September 2018). We took new stock of one another. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. You pay attention because it wades in deep. ravaged our 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. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Not just me, not just people who are fresh out of whatever you do in the first years after graduate school into adulthood, thinking that Ill be happy if I can almost afford the things that I want, if I can somehow find a way to buy what life seems to offer to other people. 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 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. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. Curtis Fox: And the poem ends ominously, as if were about to be kicked out of the Garden of Eden, not only the store but innocence in general. Poetry does not really resonate with me. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). He has Though its not like we have much of choice. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. 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. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. We were almost certain theywere. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Whats going on there? 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. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. Our repeated She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Backyard with our podfolk a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves not we... What that means in terms of what you think of this, when we might have known didnt. Better editor of my own work play and perhaps even humor figure in process! Sound helped me devise the poems change for me too, surprising and audacious ones Whose. Of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis, of. 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