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. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. SMITH: For I Will Tell You the Truth About This I went in search of information about African American soldiers experience in the Civil War. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. Like the couplet that led me to her work, Smiths writing seems often to spring from an empathetic impulse, animated by common human experiences and invested in the insight we can gain by watching and listening to each other. Heavy lifting, to be sure. 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. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. Its exciting and also a bit frightening to be moving through someone elses imagination and vocabulary, trying to render that work into English with what feels, hopefully, like an indigenous sensibility. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? 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. 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. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. 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. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. The narrow untouched hips. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? His comic jogCarries him nowhere. After you read this poem by the former U.S. 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. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. 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. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. 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. 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. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. 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? Every small want, every niggling urge. 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. Im Curtis Fox. Its like having a best live-action award. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to 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. But I truly hope its more than that. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. 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. 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. 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. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. 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. Bank-balance math and counting days. 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. 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. 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 I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. 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. The fact that indelible images of water lived in both Richs article and several memorable NDEs also suggested that this poem might engage in a useful conversation with the title poem. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? 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. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? 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. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from 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. 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. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Life On Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. 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. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. Usually only after therapy And then we find a way to have a conversation. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Have your process and preoccupations changed? Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 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. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. 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? But translating is a different thing altogether. That distinction gets complicated once you open the booksbut I wonder if you do see these collections as particularly complementing or speaking to each other? Theyre intimate spaces where we can really stop and say, okay, heres a poem by this American poet whos voice I think is so important, what do you hear within it? Anyone can read what you share. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. 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. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. Everyone I knew was living Like a lot. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). Terrible. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? (Jonathan Bachmans renowned shot shows two policemen in body armor arresting a woman named Ieshia Evans; the black-clad officers whip out their handcuffs for no discernible reason as Evans stands in silent dignity, wearing a long dress.). Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. What about you? 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. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). 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. The United States expanding industrial wealth in the nineteenth century was inseparable from this machine; American capital has always been massed on the backs on nonwhite people.These appellants use the lingo of capitalism, insofar as they are asking for money. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. He has plundered our I had the same problem choosing my poet. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. Too late. You can read some of her poems on our website. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) Or how you can sometimes see the humor in your own dire or embarrassing situation, and how that can be both frustrating and something you file away under Things that Will Be Funny in the Future. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. 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. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. 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. 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. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? 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. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. 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. taken Captive I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. 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. 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? 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