Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. I felt like my sonnet was off, I always felt like there was something I needed to fix in the last couple of lines of that poem. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. 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. Innocence and privacy. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. How did the book come together and find its shape? The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Have your process and preoccupations changed? Meanwhile, Watershed brilliantly intermixes language from that Nathaniel Rich article with testimony by survivors of near-death experiences; was the process of choosing and assembling your found texts similar for this poem? Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. 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. destroyed the lives of our Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. 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. Let us know what you think of this podcast. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. 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 love chicken. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. L.I. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. 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). Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. Garden 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, Too late. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. 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. Redress in the most humble terms: I chose the wrong there are ways to hold pain like night follows daynot knowing how tomorrow went down.it hurts like never when the always is now,the now that time won't allow.there is no manner of tomorrow, nor shape of todayonly like always having My brother still bites his nails to the quick,but lately hes been allowing them to grow.So much hurt is forgotten with the horizonas backdrop. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. 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. Or was it just a sense of being spurred to write by the experience of working intensively with language?SMITH: Yi Lei has big questions. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 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. 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. 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. 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. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. I think it is the shift in vocabulary that reads loudest in the books, and that is really a private attempt at finding something newly engaging in my usual conundrums.WASHINGTON SQUARE: You direct the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University; though youre currently taking time off to focus on Laureate duties, youve taught and advised student poets for years. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. Her writing contests the deeply isolating structures of capitalism by imagining self and nation as a collaborative condition, one that must be endlessly reconstructed and defended in the face of xenophobia, sexual violence, economic ruin, social anomie, and political disintegration. A tea they refused to carry. 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. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. 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. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. We are not the isolated commodity seekers that capitalism and its armed enforcers demand we become, but rather all of us must be / / Buried deep within each other (Eternity). Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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. 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? 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. The shoulders. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. Everyone I knew was living Im listening for possibilities in meaning and emotional tone, and trying to make useful formal decisions, in a way that is more similar than different to what happens when I am writing. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. I feel, just this very instant, Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. Dang, you hear those birds? I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. Take it easy. Curtis Fox: The poem ends with an erasure, it ends ambiguously, taken Captive / on the high Seas / to bear as you just read, and its with a dash there at the end. 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. Some do a lot, some very little. 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 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. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. 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. 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. Poetry does not really resonate with me. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! Its like having a best live-action award. Curtis Fox: Its one of the curiosities of your book, that to grapple with this dawning century you go back into history with poems in the voices of the enslaved and powerless, and you also make interesting use of the Declaration of Independence. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. 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. Im Curtis Fox. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and 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. 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. This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. 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. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. What about you? Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. In part, I think its true to say that the selves Im most committed to in that book are the ones our culture continues to make most vulnerable: women, people of color, the lonely and disenfranchised. Curtis Fox: And the poem ends ominously, as if were about to be kicked out of the Garden of Eden, not only the store but innocence in general. I had been powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in January 2016. 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. 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. To capacity. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? 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. Free UK p&p Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. 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. Even a simple poem like The Good Life grew large, for me at least,when the image of a woman journeying for water from a village without a well arrived. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. 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. It is set in the dawning century of the neoliberal universe, where everything is a market; the speaker is a thirtysomething New Yorker scraping out a life in the long tail of the Great Recession, a specter that looms over many poems in the collection. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. Home the paper bags, doing 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. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. 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. While I labored to find Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? And then theres that line in Eternity: as though all of us must be / Buried deep within each other. How does poetry foreground or grapple with distinctions between the self and others? Is it strange to say love is a languageFew practice, but all, or near all speak?Even the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not loves bladeSizing up the hearts familiar meat? I'd lug Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. It was Brooklyn. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. Brought on a different manner of weather. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. Elbow sore at the crook The same desolate luxury, SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. 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). Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. 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. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. K Smith. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Its refreshing to hear from a Poet Laureate who holds all of these diverse concerns in her mind and in her voice, from our national tragedy to a four-year-olds refusal to eat her dinner. Everyone hunkers down alone with their stuff, just as capitalism wants it.Two vicious features of the system, which Im hardly the first to note, are its enforcement of rigid hierarchies (think about the racial pay gap, for example) and its wholesale razing of the biospheric life-support systems that allow civilization to exist in the first place. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) 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. But one day, when I was kind of working in the vein, I was sitting at my desk and I just had this vivid memory of shopping in a grocery store in Brooklyn, and this pang of nostalgia for that moment in my life, and this poem kind of just came out. 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 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. 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. I often think of a wonderful Marie Howe poem called The Star Market which begins: The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday. These are the old, the sick, the people a healthy young person might recoil from. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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