Once, a bag of black beluga All Rights Reserved. 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. 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. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. I dont think the poems lay out answers to any of that, incidentally, but their manner of exploring these questions feels fruitful.WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of the most striking pieces in the book is the long poem you mentioned, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. Im curious about the research that goes into a piece like thishow did you come across the source documents, and when did you realize they could constitute a poem? Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. 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 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. taken Captive Let us know what you think of this podcast. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. 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. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? 1 No. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. For me, the memory of catching a poem in that fashion seeps into the sense of peace the poem contemplates, causing it to feel fleeting, like something it would be easy, if youre not working very deliberately, to lose.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your poems have a habit of calling chronology into question. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. 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 Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. 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. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. WebAnalyzes tracy k. smith's "life on mars" as an elegy as a whole with many poems pertaining to death and s struggle with the loss of her father. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. How did the book come together and find its shape? Im Curtis Fox. Price and value, Smith reminds us, are not the same thing.In a recent lecture published by the Washington Post, she calls poetry a radically re-humanizing force, one that comes closest to bringing us into visceral proximity with the lives and plights of others. She contrasts it with the market-driven language that divides everything into a brutal war of all against all and debilitates our minds: I also, more and more, recognize its value as a remedy to the various things that have bombarded our lines of sight and our thought space, and that tamper with our ability or even our desire to listen to that deeply rooted part of ourselves. 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. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. 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. What a profound longing 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. destroyed the lives of our Inspired by a photograph taken during a Black Lives Matter protest after city police killed Alton Sterling, a black man, the poem imagines a confrontation between state power and another African American body. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. 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. 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. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? His arms churn the air. And as many have observed since capitalism emerged (see William Blakes Satanic mills or Upton Sinclairs meatpacking plants), this tends to have baleful effects on how we conceive of social relationships and our own selves. Brought on a different manner of weather. 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 analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. 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. 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. 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. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? 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. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. 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. 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. 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. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. 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. It was Brooklyn. 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. Take it easy. 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. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. The glossy Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. the book in a spiritual key? My thirties. And for that to be unmitigated. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. 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. In October, Graywolf Press will Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. 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. 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 was dreaming that I was reading aloud a mural that had been made of a Carl Phillips poem, when suddenly my waking mind broke in to say: Thats not a Carl Phillips poembut if you write it down it can be yours! I woke up and struggled to remember and reconstruct the lines Id read in the dream. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes Redress in the most humble terms: Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. 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). The same desolate luxury, 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. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. 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. Our repeated I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? 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. 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. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Anyone can read what you share. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. I feel, just this very instant, Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. 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. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. 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). Her term will be up in April of 2019. 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. Poetry does not really resonate with me. What made you choose to start (and end?) 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. Weve come to, I dont know The things that felt so new are no longer new and maybe we feel a sense of their dark possibility, or at least I do. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration We were almost certain theywere. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. Curtis Fox: So thats the opening poem in your book, and as you said, its set in the early years of the century when the poet was more {innocence}, but there are hints that all is not well, and you write Everyone I knew was living / The same desolate luxury, / Each ashamed of the same things: / Innocence and privacy. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. My poems strain for the kind of freedom to rise above Time on occasion, to see through it, to make use of what once (when I needed it) might have been invisible to me and what now (after the fact) can seem plain. He has plundered our Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. Though its not like we have much of choice. 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. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. 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. 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. 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. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! / We never left the room. 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. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. You pay attention because it wades in deep. 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. 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. 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. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. Have your process and preoccupations changed? Free UK p&p 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. 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. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. 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. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. 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. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. 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 dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. 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. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. It was so strange. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. Whats going on there? But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. SMITH: The older I get, the more I begin to think of Time as not just a force or a law of nature, but as a presence we live alongside, someone rather than something. Poetry wasnt really on my radar thenat least nothing contemporarybut I was taking a required composition course, and in the classroom I spotted a poster bearing some lines from a poem. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. 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. 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. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Song allows us to hope for new connections: The interior sections of Smiths collection lift up others voices and names, to which she joins her own. From a handbasket filled I see it as my job to draw these things out, and offer the kinds of questions and observations that will help students move further into their strengths as writers, and to follow them toward an organic and genuine sense of their own deepening themes and questions. A tea they refused to carry. Would you read it for us? Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! ravaged our 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. 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. But the point of material restitution isnt to create new hoards of capital or to employ it in fresh exploitative ventures; rather, the money these people are owed for their service to what was once a Republic is a form of human acknowledgement, a way of saying that their lives mattered. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all forms! But I also advise thesis students who are part of it after that,! Bothered, Late, Captive to this thing commanding poem and then an... 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