And then we find a way to have a conversation. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? 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. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. 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. Youve talked a bit about Wade in the Waters genesis, but more broadly, how early on do you typically begin to sense a manuscripts overarching themes? She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. Some of these events have happened in large public spaces, so its been a matter of reading and then having maybe a public Q&A or more of a back and forth afterward. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. 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. 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. 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 am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. The glossy pastries! It was so strange. 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 shoulders. 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. Born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California, Smith now lives in New Jersey, where she directs and teaches in Princeton University's Creative Writing Program. 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. 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. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. Or, generally, have some personae in your work been more challenging to access than others?SMITH: Sometimes, as in the case ofThe United States Welcomes You,a persona is a last resort. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. 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. The narrow untouched hips. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. His arms churn the air. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. Whats going on there? I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. 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. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. In a 2016 interview for The Iowa Review, you commented, I never have figured out how to talk about race in my poetry in a way that feels authentic and organic, and Ordinary Light is a book in which Im thinking so much about race. Wade in the Water seems to engage this topic compellingly and with great assurance. 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 know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) 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. Ive been sharing work by other American poets, and readings of my own poems as well, and just asking a very simple question, which is, what do you notice? Brought on a different manner of weather. 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 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. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. 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. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out 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. 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Redress in the most humble terms: My thirties. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? 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. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. 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 WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. 1 No. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. In the poem, Declaration , by Tracy K. Smith, the author is able to criticize a powerful document and bring to light the racial injustices in modern-day society. 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. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. What are you really getting at there? To capacity. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. 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). Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. Would you read it for us? 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 claim pension under the general law, argues one appellant; (i shall hav to send this with out a stamp / for I haint money enough to buy a stamp), another says in closing his letter to the President (all italics and spellings original).In an endnote Smith refers to such texts as erasure poems, a somewhat ironic term. 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. Heavy lifting, to be sure. 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. 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. 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. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. It wasnt until I found myself preoccupied with questions of love and faith that I figured out how I wanted to work with the source material of the article. 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. K Smith. It was Brooklyn. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. More information available at www.susannalang.com. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. 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. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. You can read some of her poems on our website. You pay attention because it wades in deep. 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. Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. That process involves weekly meetings where we are looking at and critiquing new poems, but also trying to listen to the themes and questions driving the work. Her 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. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? Im thinking particularly of your poem Ash, which, compared to some of the other poems in Wade in the Water, feels especially, conspicuously (and beautifully!) Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to 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. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" Every small want, every niggling urge. / We never left the room. 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. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face The known sun setting On the dawning century. Onto the darkening dusk. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau 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. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. From trees. 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. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. 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: 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. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. 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. Some do a lot, some very little. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. 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 dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. 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. Terrible. This week, Retelling the American Story. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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: 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. 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). I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. ravaged our 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. 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? And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Its not quite music, but the construction of these two parallel statements operated in a fashion similar to rhyme for me.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve said that writing your memoir Ordinary Light helped you work through your own thinking about race. And then our singing. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). RHINO Poetry is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, Poets &Writers, Inc, The Poetry Foundation, and by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. 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? I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. 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. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. 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