And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. How did the book come together and find its shape? On Montague Street I dreamt that I was in a hotel where there was a mural of that poem, which was by him, painted on a wall, and I was reading it aloud to somebody who was with me. To capacity. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. 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. / The wood was never spent. In Wade in the Water, the first section of Eternity begins It is as if I can almost still remember and closes with trees Ageless, constant, / Growing down into earth and up into history. Any thoughts on the challenges and possibilities of processing (or traversing) time through language? She does something trickier and more important: her work conjures up, with vivid particularity, at the level of the individual, what it is like to live under late capitalism. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and how that can both deepen and lighten your sense of grief. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. SMITH: That poem was originally published as The Mowers. Then I read it in Washington, DC in 2016 and realized that the poems wish is for something graceful, wordless, grateful and sustaining to link these two imaginary strangers in common understanding. I liked setting up, via the title, the expectation of something rigid or dogmatic, and then allowing the poem itself to be gentle. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking a few years ago with Gregory Pardlo, you mentioned that music, image, form and departure are the things Im conscious of managing in a poem. Can you say a little more about balancing these qualitiesand, perhaps, how you know when one or two of them want to predominate? rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. 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. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. For I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. The shoulders. After all, it supposedly makes nothing happen, according to Auden (indeed, imagine a poem changing President Trumps mind on immigration), and it is the literary form for which capitalism has the least use, judging by its small contemporary readership.But poetry that tries to represent individual subjectivity is well positioned to depict life under capitalism and to render possible post- or anti-capitalist alternatives. 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. 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. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. 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. Onto the darkening dusk. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) the Declaration of Independence erasure). 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. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. Usually only after therapy 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. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. What are you really getting at there? How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. 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. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. 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. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. For a long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed. Then, after most of the manuscript was finished, I had the idea of marrying the facts from that article, in a found poem, with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivorspeople whose vocabularies almost across the board invoke the sense of Love as an original animating force, as the logic of the universe. The known sun setting Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. God then planted a garden eastward in Eden (2:8), containing both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (2:9). Adam is tasked with keeping or maintaining the garden. God tells him he can freely eat of every tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for to eat of that tree would be to die. In fact, I think I picked up the pace on my own new poems, and wrote the bulk of Wade in the Water, precisely because of my work on Yi Leis poems. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. 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. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. And then our singing. 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. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. 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. 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. The narrow untouched hips. 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. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. Would you read it for us? My thirties. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. K Smith. 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. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. Brought on a different manner of weather. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. 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. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? 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? 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? Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. (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.). Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. 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. 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). 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. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. 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. Then animals long believed gone crept down. Do you enjoy it? At the time, I wasnt writing many poems; I was working on my prose memoir, and feeling, somewhat guiltily, that it might be a good idea to take the opportunity to produce a new poem. Once, a bag of black beluga 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. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. Everyone I knew was living But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. I had been powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in January 2016. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. 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. 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. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Anyone can read what you share. 1 No. 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. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. For the Garden of Eden 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. We were almost certain theywere. According to the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, this mental architecture almost inevitablybarring unusual cultural circumstances or great personal fortitudetakes the form of capitalist realism, which consists in the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it (Fishers italics). In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. 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. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. 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. 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. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. 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. / We never left the room. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. The final poem, An Old Story, exposes our tendency to destroy our own world by reminding us of the Biblical storm that drowned all life except for Noah, his family, and the pairs of animals he saved on his ark: After the storm, it is song that changes the weather, tempts the animals to come down from the trees where they had shelteredin an ark made of wood but not by us. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. 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. I feel, just this very instant, Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. 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. L.I. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. 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. I love chicken. All Rights Reserved. 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. And let it slam me in the face 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. 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. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. To read one more poem Claudia Quintent, or money my taste a Yi Lei poem you translated ). Story, also feels faintly Biblical with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and meanings. And useful the garden intense weight of capital, this is dumb the,... 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