If capitalist institutions erase memory and sweep everything into an eternal present of consumption, poetry is a slow art with a long memory and an expansive capacity to imagine other worlds. 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. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. 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. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). 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. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. 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. ravaged our The first line introduces the readers to both the casual From a handbasket filled Tracy K. Smith: Sure. The dead speak.The poem bores deep into the nations roots, back to the Civil War, which momentarily created opportunities for African Americans to participate in democracy as voters and officeholders, craftsmen and farmers, teachers and doctors; as free agents in America, not chattel. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. 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. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. This week, Retelling the American Story. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. We were almost certain theywere. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? But in other events, Ive gone into almost curated spaces, like rehab facilities or churches, or we have an upcoming trip that will take us to a retirement community. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. 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. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. 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. Free UK p&p Bank-balance math and counting days. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. Declaration uses erasure to repurpose Thomas Jeffersons litany of complaints against King George, evoking the slaves forced migration to this country and their experience here of unspeakable oppression. 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. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. You can read some of her poems on our website. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. 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. 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. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. K Smith. Yes, these are black voices that have been effaced from history, buried in government archives and exhumed by a few scholars on whose work Smith draws. Home the paper bags, doing I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. Once I have a body of realized poems that feels substantialsay, 30 or 40 pagesI start to hunt for the different things the poems seem to be saying to one another in an effort to decipher what is missing. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. 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. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes Everyone I knew was living 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. 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. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. 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. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? Let us know what you think of this podcast. 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)? She didn'tKnow me, but I believed her,And a terrible new acheRolled over in my chest,Like in a room where the drapesHave been swept back. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. to bear. 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. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. 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. 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 please give that a read if you would. But those things came out in this poem. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. But translating is a different thing altogether. 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. The known sun setting Are they something you mostly notice cropping up in poems youve already written, or do they often enter through conscious choices like the ones you describe with Watershed and Eternity?SMITH: I tend to write and bank poems slowly for long stretches of time, and then, when I have the extended time and space, or when my questions become more urgent, I sit down to a season of intense writing. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. It was so strange. 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. 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. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out 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 To capacity. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. 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. 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. She lives with her husband in Chicago. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. on the high Seas Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. 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. 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 see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 4 (September 2018). Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. 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. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. 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. 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. Lentils spilt a trail behind me Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. 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. SMITH: I think the only way students learn how to craft their own poems is by reading and learning to pay close attention to the specific choices that other writers make. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. 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. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. 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. 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. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. 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. 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. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. But I truly hope its more than that. Poet Laureate of the United States; its a high perch for an American poet to land on. The gesture of writing an appeal and appending ones name to it parallels her lyric recuperations, because both replace capitalisms terms (where individuals are parts of a vast machine dedicated to profit) with the changeable conditions of authentic selfhood, where every breath matters even if it produces nothing that can be monetized. And for that to be unmitigated. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. 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. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. Its like having a best live-action award. 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. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. 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 often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. Her term will be up in April of 2019. Each ashamed of the same things: To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. And then our singing. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. 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 The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau God then planted a garden eastward in Eden (2:8), containing both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (2:9). Adam is tasked with keeping or maintaining the garden. God tells him he can freely eat of every tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for to eat of that tree would be to die. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? 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. 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? Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. When she writes about love and desire, they are vehicles for the philosophical examination of humanity, of the ways we respond to authority, and more and more they are vehicles for thinking about the plight of the earth. For the Garden of Eden Too late. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Elbow sore at the crook The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. Though its not like we have much of choice. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. Have your process and preoccupations changed? And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Its been great. Its also the title of a poem in the books first section, and it reverberates in images of water throughout the collectionin the poems Watershed and The Everlasting Self, for example. 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 a profound longing I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. 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. We took new stock of one another. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. 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. In a quiet way, I am editing from the moment I begin writing, pushing myself to think more rigorously and vigorously and to live up to the model of discipline and courage that I encourage my students to embrace.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve written four poetry collections; when you started writing, you were a student, and now youre a teachernot to mention the nations Poet Laureate. 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