Like a lot. 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. 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. 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. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). 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. The couplet looped in my head for weeks, and when I finally resorted to Google, I learned it was from Smiths first collection, The Bodys Question.I borrowed her books from the library and found them full of lines like the ones that had hooked me. Some do a lot, some very little. 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. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. But I truly hope its more than that. 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. 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. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. 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. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. 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. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. If I read a poem about my father, sometimes if the poem is doing its work, you might begin to think about your relationship with your father, even if it might be different from what my poem says. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. 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. 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. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. 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. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? 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)? 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? 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. It was Brooklyn. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. 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? She is a democratic writer, because her project in Wade in the Water is to curate American voices, particularly those of marginalized people, but also her own, and to situate these within the dark sweep of US history, with all its horrors, its anxieties, its potentialities. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. Brought on a different manner of weather. Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. 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). 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. 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. 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. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. 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. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. 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. Wade in the Water is, wonderfully, a Poet Laureates booka book that speaks for the poet herself and for us all, at a perilous moment in our history. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. 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 narrow untouched hips. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. Every small want, every niggling urge. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. 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 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. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? We took new stock of one another. And for that to be unmitigated. 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. Would you read it for us? 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. 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. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. 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. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. 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. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. 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. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. From a handbasket filled Anyone can read what you share. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. 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: That was An Old Story. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. 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. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. 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. WebGarden of Eden story: summary 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 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. Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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. 4 (September 2018). 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? the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? God said everything that was in that garden they could use to 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. Price and value, Smith reminds us, are not the same thing.In a recent lecture published by the Washington Post, she calls poetry a radically re-humanizing force, one that comes closest to bringing us into visceral proximity with the lives and plights of others. She contrasts it with the market-driven language that divides everything into a brutal war of all against all and debilitates our minds: I also, more and more, recognize its value as a remedy to the various things that have bombarded our lines of sight and our thought space, and that tamper with our ability or even our desire to listen to that deeply rooted part of ourselves. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Lentils spilt a trail behind me For the Garden of Eden 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. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. 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. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. The known sun setting taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. WebGarden of Eden What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, Usually only after therapy Elbow Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. 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 guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. 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. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? SMITH: For I Will Tell You the Truth About This I went in search of information about African American soldiers experience in the Civil War. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your work notably embraces questioningboth via interrogatives and through other formulations that reject single, easy truths (e.g., New Road Station names four things history metaphorically isnt, along with at least three that it perhaps might be). We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. 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. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. 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. 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 maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. 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). 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. The shoulders. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and 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. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like fruits. New York neighborhood the real, the pushy, the stubborn, the.. 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