That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. 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. 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. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. 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. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. 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 watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. Teaching is inspiring for me. 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. Im Curtis Fox. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. 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. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? I think we have reached a moment where we need new myths.WASHINGTON SQUARE: The titles and cover art of your two most recent collections suggest a sort of pairing: Life on Mars, with its image of the Cone Nebula, points to the cosmic, while Wade in the Water presents as more earthbound. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. 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. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. A few years ago, actually several years ago now, I wrote a sonnet that I contributed to an anthology called Monticello in Mind, that was edited by Lisa Russ Spaar, and they were poems about Thomas Jefferson. The last lines of the poems final section point this up with staggering intensity: My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.I am the applicant for pensionon account of having servedunder the name Lewis Smithwhich was the name I wore beforethe days of slavery were overMy correct name is Hiram Kirkland.Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henrybut neither is my correct name. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. For Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. 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. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? 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. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. Moreover, my sense of the nearness of the pastthe way that our public grappling with race and racial prejudice has begun to feel so much like a throwback from an earlier timeignited the urgent wish to hear something in an earlier periods voices that might be useful at this moment in the 21st Century.The title Wade in the Water comes from an African American spiritual, which seems apt for a collection that thinks so much about faith, race, and history (especially the Civil War), and for a poet whose previous book took its name from a song, too. What a profound longing 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. In fact, I think I picked up the pace on my own new poems, and wrote the bulk of Wade in the Water, precisely because of my work on Yi Leis poems. 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. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. 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. 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. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. 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. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. 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. Everyone I knew was living 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. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. WebTracy K. Smith is a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from 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. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. And for that to be unmitigated. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. 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. 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. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Like a lot. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. What are you really getting at there? Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. 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. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. 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 didnt set out to write a found poem, but when I got far enough into that research, I understood that I didnt want to merely metabolize all of these other real voices and then speak something imagined or invented out in my own voice; rather, I wanted to make space for these very compelling voices to speak to a reader the ways they had spoken to me. 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. 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. 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. on the high Seas The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? 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. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. Where I seldom shopped, Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. Some do a lot, some very little. 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. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. 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. 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. 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. 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. 1 No. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. But I truly hope its more than that. 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. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. 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. It was Brooklyn. We took new stock of one another. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? For a long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed. Then, after most of the manuscript was finished, I had the idea of marrying the facts from that article, in a found poem, with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivorspeople whose vocabularies almost across the board invoke the sense of Love as an original animating force, as the logic of the universe. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. 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. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. 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. Our repeated WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). 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. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. The glossy pastries! We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. 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. the book in a spiritual key? What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? 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. 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. 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? I found two books that really had a powerful impact upon me: Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, edited by Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer; and Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. Elbow sore at the crook 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. For the Garden of Eden Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. 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. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. 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. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. This would be a democratic project: a writer who takes it on would have to imagine a community where individuals arent just monads bouncing around the economy but are instead subjects whose lives matter regardless of how much or little capital is attached to them. 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. Just really fit to my taste she went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University several poems. You just the way you are if you 're perfect insinuation that this is what poetry can do the Seas. 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