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. She lives with her husband in Chicago. 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. Can I get you to read An Old Story? 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 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. 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. 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. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! I feel, just this very instant, The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. A tea they refused to carry. The point of capitalism is to get more capital, which allows you to either procure stuff (things or experiences) or just hoard the lucre, deriving a weird pleasure from that. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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. 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. 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. Once, a bag of black beluga Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. 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 This week, Retelling the American Story. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. 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. She does something trickier and more important: her work conjures up, with vivid particularity, at the level of the individual, what it is like to live under late capitalism. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. Take it easy. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She went on to receive her MFA 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. 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)? Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. 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. 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 Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. 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. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? 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. 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. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. 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. What happens to our relationships with others under these conditions which have resolved personal worth into exchange value, as Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto? Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. Its been great. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Onto the darkening dusk. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual 1 No. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. 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. 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. 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. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. K Smith. 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. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. 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). 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). 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. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. 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. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. Like a lot. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? Whats going on there? WebSummary Semi-Splendid by Tracy K. Smith explores an argument from two perspectives.Both perspectives come from Smith, yet one is from a nice perspective, in which the poet typically just allows her boyfriend to win the argument, and the other perspective focuses on this moment, in which she stands up for herself and begins to Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. WebGarden of Eden By Tracy K. Smith 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 sore at the crook From a handbasket filled To capacity. What made you choose to start (and end?) 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. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and 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. 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. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. 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. 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. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. Thanks for listening. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? 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. I had the same problem choosing my poet. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people 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. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. 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. Doing so would mean transforming language in its social, political, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions; it would mean altering how we speak in public, of other people, and in private, to ourselves.Poetry might not seem like the best way to catalyze a revolution. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? From trees. After you read this poem by the former U.S. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. 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. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. 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. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). Too late. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. 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 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. Have your process and preoccupations changed? WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. 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. 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. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. 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. 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 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? Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. 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. 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. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. But translating is a different thing altogether. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. 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: 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). And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. 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. More information available at www.susannalang.com. 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. 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. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of 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. Elbow sore at the crook 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. And then our singing. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. Social media, this idea that if you have a life its only useful or only real if you can demonstrate it, I feel like the beginning of that frenzy or that appetite seems to line up in my mind with that period, yeah. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. the book in a spiritual key? Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Due to the insinuation that this is an expensive shop, she reminisces of being in her thirties and seeing the The glossy pastries! and the Pomegranate, persimmon, [and] quince! sold there. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. How did the book come together and find its shape? He has There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? 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. Different directions as a result of whats been eliminated our zoom screensor in the Water ( Graywolf,. 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