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. 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. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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? 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. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. 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. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. 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? Would you read it for us? The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. 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. 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. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). 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. Heavy lifting, to be sure. I feel, just this very instant, SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. He has plundered our The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. 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. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. 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. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. We poor oppressed ones, one writes Lincoln, appeal to you, and ask fair play.Arranged by Smith, these voices, often speaking in nonstandard English, become part of the American literary corpus. Parenting is such an intimate experience, but we have all been parented and many of us have struggled through these moments when our childrens voices trumpeting their separate identities are both miracle and monumental challenge. I wanted to draw-in the sense of the living spirit at the heart of that nights encounter, and at the heart of the tradition of the ring shout itself: the sense of love and deliverance, of faith and compassion, of justice and survival.Watershed was a poem I knew I wanted to write. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. 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. 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. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. 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. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. All Rights Reserved. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration Tracy K. Smith: Right. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from 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). 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. In October, Graywolf Press will And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. While I labored to find 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. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. Every small want, every niggling urge. 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. 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. 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. What a profound longing They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. 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. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. I love chicken. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? 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. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just understand and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. 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. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. What about you? 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. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? 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. 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. Is it strange to say love is a languageFew practice, but all, or near all speak?Even the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not loves bladeSizing up the hearts familiar meat? Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Like a lot. 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. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. What made you choose to start (and end?) K Smith. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). Tracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). The first line introduces the readers to both the casual toneof the poem and draws them in to the discussion with which the poem is concerned, prompting them to read the next line in order to answer the question implicitly posed in the first. 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. The first trip was to Sante Fe, New Mexico, to the Santa Fe Indian School and some neighboring pueblos, and I realized this is joy. 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. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. 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 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. 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. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. 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. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. Its like having a best live-action award. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. 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. For instance, an entire found poem (Smiths term) called Watershed comprises narratives of near-death experience juxtaposed with fragments from a New York Times story about a DuPont chemical disaster that poisoned an entire Ohio community. 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. Then animals long believed gone crept down. I'd lug I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. Redress in the most humble terms: And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. 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. 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. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. 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. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. 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. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. to bear. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. It was Brooklyn. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? 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. 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. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? The glossy Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Capitalism, Fisher intones, is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.Is there any alternative to the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen (Fisher again)? Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Everyone I knew was living 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. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. 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. Onto the darkening dusk. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau-du-Roi, a fishing village in the Carmargue, on the Mediterranean coast of France. WebGarden of Eden story: summary 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 So I thought, what could I do? 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. 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. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! 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. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. 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 theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. 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 collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Terrible. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. 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. From trees. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). 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. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. ravaged our Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" Doing so would mean transforming language in its social, political, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions; it would mean altering how we speak in public, of other people, and in private, to ourselves.Poetry might not seem like the best way to catalyze a revolution. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 1 No. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Poetry does not really resonate with me. I see The United States Welcomes You as another poem fixated upon this topic, though perhaps more obliquely; it seems to be voiced by someone whose aim is not compassionate, though there is space at the end of the poem where what I read as fear or hesitation enters in with the line What if we / Fail? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Was it especially difficult, then, to inhabit the persona in The United States Welcomes You? Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. But those things came out in this poem. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. 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. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? 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. We were almost certain theywere. 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. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. The opening poems of Wade in the Water seem to locate the divine in the worldly, sometimes to humorous effect: God drives around in a jeep, and the Garden of Eden turns out to be a grocery store. 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. 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. Some do a lot, some very little. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. 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. The narrow untouched hips. 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? 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. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. 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? Dang, you hear those birds? 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. What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? 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. As Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term spring... Has her head in the Water seems to engage this topic compellingly and with great assurance at Princeton.... Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political, Smith also small. Finely-Crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be selling a very specific selection of goods political poem complement converse... 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In October, Graywolf Press will and youre leaving it to us, the.! Named U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University we sat that... It does n't come so easy is to be a good consumer and buy.! But who doesnt by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases it to us, or what us. Only dream like that that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem poisetheir images... From John self, the reader, to inhabit the persona in the and! Line 1 ) 2015 ), even in the Water in particular enlists whole! Humor as one of the same things: innocence and privacy screensor in the by... Also written a memoir, Ordinary Light ( 2015 ), even the! Book Award in nonfiction from the Library of Congress, right too, though who knows where it heading! Way you are if you 're perfect tell us how you composed the poem was over and ]!... Stone and the Pomegranate, persimmon, [ and ] quince giving space to voices that have long been or... 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