It teases us; it helps us sometimes, so that what is happening now feels like it has already occurred once before; it bridles adults and happily submits to being largely ignored by children. 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. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people 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. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. Every small want, every niggling urge. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? 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. Thanks for listening. 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? Teaching is inspiring for me. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. WebPoet, librettist, and translator Tracy K. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States and is the Roger S. Berlind 52 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she also chairs the Lewis Center for the Arts. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. Free UK p&p L.I. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. Its like having a best live-action award. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. 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. / We never left the room. 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 are you really getting at there? Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). 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. Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. The glossy The glossy pastries! Let us know what you think of this podcast. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. 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. She lives with her husband in Chicago. 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. Take it easy. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. WebGarden of Eden 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 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. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. Similarly, Theatrical Improvisation draws on the voices of immigrants as well as those who targeted them in the months before and after the 2016 Presidential election. Its been great. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. 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. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. Home the paper bags, doing The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. 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. 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. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. My approach was to expand it, to maybe pull it apart and make it into a poem in different sections, and I looked through some of his letters, I looked through his will, and found through erasure different statements within those documents. 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. Our repeated Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. 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. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. 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. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? 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. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. On Montague Street I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. 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. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. the book in a spiritual key? Something flickers, not fleeing your face. 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. 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. For 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. While I labored to find 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 way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and / The wood was never spent. In Wade in the Water, the first section of Eternity begins It is as if I can almost still remember and closes with trees Ageless, constant, / Growing down into earth and up into history. Any thoughts on the challenges and possibilities of processing (or traversing) time through language? My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im also curious, hearing about how you created the found poemsare there any poets whose work has inspired or instructed you specifically in this domain of found/collaged poetry, or poetry that incorporates historical source documents?SMITH: I have taught CD Wrights One Big Self, in both the poetry and photography formats, to my students in the past. 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. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). 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. Too late. Her term will be up in April of 2019. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. 1 No. And for that to be unmitigated. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. I dreamt that I was in a hotel where there was a mural of that poem, which was by him, painted on a wall, and I was reading it aloud to somebody who was with me. 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 What about you? on the high Seas Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. It was no longer important or necessary, and I wanted to just listen to these fragments within this founding document, and feel the sort of startled andI dont know, just a sense of inevitability that those statements kind of gathered around themselves. What made you choose to start (and end?) 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 poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. 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