A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Thanks for listening. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. In my earlier work, persona poems have been a tool by which Ive sought to learn something about some other experience or perspective that is remote from my own. 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. 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. 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. From short lyrics to erasures to sectioned, multi-form elegies, all of Smiths work feels radically alivetraversing space and time; rife with cultural and historical references (to, for example, rock music; scientific research; classic movie scenes); and always illuminating with great care the complexities of consciousness and embodiment. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? 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 Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. I suppose those two choices speak to some of the overarching themes I consciously wanted the book to cleave to.WASHINGTON SQUARE: This last comment makes me wonder about your process assembling a book. She lives with her husband in Chicago. After you read this poem by the former U.S. 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. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). 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. Poems are so great because they urge you to start thinking in honest and even vulnerable terms about your own life and your own experiences. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. 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. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! Bank-balance math and counting days. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. destroyed the lives of our Elbow sore at the crook I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. 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. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. Im thinking particularly of your poem Ash, which, compared to some of the other poems in Wade in the Water, feels especially, conspicuously (and beautifully!) Innocence and privacy. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. 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? What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your work notably embraces questioningboth via interrogatives and through other formulations that reject single, easy truths (e.g., New Road Station names four things history metaphorically isnt, along with at least three that it perhaps might be). From a handbasket filled She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. 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 What made you choose to start (and end?) 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. 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. While I labored to find 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. 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. 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. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and 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? Can I get you to read An Old Story? 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. Im listening for possibilities in meaning and emotional tone, and trying to make useful formal decisions, in a way that is more similar than different to what happens when I am writing. 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. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. 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. (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.). WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. In its nostalgia for the pastries, the exotic fruits, and the black beluga lentils of her past, the poem invokes blessing and abundance, removed in time but newly desired in this moment when we see. Her writing contests the deeply isolating structures of capitalism by imagining self and nation as a collaborative condition, one that must be endlessly reconstructed and defended in the face of xenophobia, sexual violence, economic ruin, social anomie, and political disintegration. I 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? 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? I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. 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. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. 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. 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. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. And then we find a way to have a conversation. 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. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. 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. For the Garden of Eden How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. 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. The ones / Whose wealth is a kind of filth. Lest this ecological connection seem like a stretch, know that environmental disaster haunts Wade in the Water. 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. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. He has plundered our 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. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. Heavy lifting, to be sure. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). I found two books that really had a powerful impact upon me: Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, edited by Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer; and Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes 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? In the poem, Declaration , by Tracy K. Smith, the author is able to criticize a powerful document and bring to light the racial injustices in modern-day society. Attention to the stranger crossing any road in any town or city; patience with the awkward encounter, the unknown intention; respect for the other whom you do not know, but with a slightest stretch of mind, imagine you do. 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. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. Take it easy. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Like a lot. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. 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. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. 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