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. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. 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. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. Where I seldom shopped, Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" The same desolate luxury, She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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 the Garden of Eden 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. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? Tracy K. Smith: Sure. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people Anyone can read what you share. destroyed the lives of our And if Trump has done anything positive for the country, hes inadvertently, by his own racist statements and actions, put the conversation front and center in American life. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. Take it easy. What about you? To capacity. 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. Brought on a different manner of weather. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. the Declaration of Independence erasure). His arms churn the air. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. 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. 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. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. 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. On the dawning century. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. 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 was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. the book in a spiritual key? They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. I love chicken. From trees. 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. Heavy lifting, to be sure. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. So I thought, what could I do? Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. 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. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. Usually only after therapy Like the couplet that led me to her work, Smiths writing seems often to spring from an empathetic impulse, animated by common human experiences and invested in the insight we can gain by watching and listening to each other. Whats going on there? 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. This gives even her most personal poems a decidedly political charge: they feel revolutionary in their openness of spirit, their attention to a range of voices. 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. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. For instance, an entire found poem (Smiths term) called Watershed comprises narratives of near-death experience juxtaposed with fragments from a New York Times story about a DuPont chemical disaster that poisoned an entire Ohio community. 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. 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. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? 1 No. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. 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 Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. 1 No. And for that to be unmitigated. on the high Seas 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. For 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: An erasure poem is almost like a You know you see those government documents that are redacted, so there are these big black lines that delete certain elements of the text, and youre left with a different path through those ideas. 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. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. 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. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. A tea they refused to carry. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. From a handbasket filled Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess I was really thinking about the moment when our desire to be public people became such a ravenous appetite. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. That sometimes comes out in revision, as was the case with Ash. The poem was little more than a list of ideas until I was able to sit down and hear a set of rhythmic parameters begin to assert force. 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. Its like having a best live-action award. SMITH: I think the aim of most poems is to erase some measure of the distance between one person and another, usually between the poems speaker and its reader, or between the poems speaker and its subject. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. 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. L.I. 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). In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. And let it slam me in the face WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. WASHINGTON SQUARE: In Ordinary Light you recall your first poem, written in grade school and titled Humor. These days much of your work deals with weighty topics, though youve said in other interviews that writing often feels joyful. 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 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. Or how you can sometimes see the humor in your own dire or embarrassing situation, and how that can be both frustrating and something you file away under Things that Will Be Funny in the Future. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. 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. In its nostalgia for the pastries, the exotic fruits, and the black beluga lentils of her past, the poem invokes blessing and abundance, removed in time but newly desired in this moment when we see. 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. 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. You pay attention because it wades in deep. 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. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Terrible. 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. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes Men with interests to protect seduce and extract pleasure from a young person, making her believe / / It was she who gave permission, just as patriarchal industrial capitalism has plundered the youth of mother Earth.Those awful, awful men. 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. 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. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. The narrow untouched hips. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. 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. 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. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. 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. 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