Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. 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 Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. 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. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. After you read this poem by the former U.S. 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. 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. 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. 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. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. Dang, you hear those birds? I also agree. I didnt set out to write a found poem, but when I got far enough into that research, I understood that I didnt want to merely metabolize all of these other real voices and then speak something imagined or invented out in my own voice; rather, I wanted to make space for these very compelling voices to speak to a reader the ways they had spoken to me. 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. 1 No. 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. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. 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). 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. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). 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. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. 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. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. This week, Retelling the American Story. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. 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. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. 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. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? Once, a bag of black beluga It was so strange. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. 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 Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. Like a lot. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). Can I get you to read An Old Story? And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. 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. Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. 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. 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? RHINO Poetry is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, Poets &Writers, Inc, The Poetry Foundation, and by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. 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. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. Teaching is inspiring for me. 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. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? The shoulders. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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. Lentils spilt a trail behind me It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: In Ordinary Light you recall your first poem, written in grade school and titled Humor. These days much of your work deals with weighty topics, though youve said in other interviews that writing often feels joyful. 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. Incidentally, the only other poem in the book whose title was chosen well in advance of the poems composition was Eternity. I knew that I wanted to write a poem that invoked a never-ending sense of scale. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? 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. Take it easy. 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. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? Some do a lot, some very little. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? The known sun setting on the high Seas 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. 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. 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 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. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from 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. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. 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). 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. She lives with her husband in Chicago. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. They do a lot to remind us that we do have things to say to each other, that were interested in one anothers lives and vulnerabilities. And then we find a way to have a conversation. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. Whats going on there? On the dawning century. 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. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Smith assembles a collage of bad news, omitting punctuation to create a sense of anxious acceleration: dust vented from factory chimneys settled well-beyond the property lineentered the water tableconcentration in drinking water 3x international safety limitstudy of workers linked exposure with prostate cancerworth $1 billion in annual profit. Our repeated Too late. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including 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. (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.). 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. What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. 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. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 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. 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. He has plundered our [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. A few years ago, actually several years ago now, I wrote a sonnet that I contributed to an anthology called Monticello in Mind, that was edited by Lisa Russ Spaar, and they were poems about Thomas Jefferson. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. Home the paper bags, doing (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) 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. 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. ravaged our 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. Even if the question animating the poem is a serious one, that sense of being lost in the pursuit is, inevitably, a happy thingit is about finding something that can constitute a productive path through or out of the matter at hand. 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. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. K Smith. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. To capacity. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. Race is one of the chief subjects of Wade in the Water, a site wherein my wish to contemplate the elusive nature of compassion gets played out. He has In October, Graywolf Press will Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. 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. 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. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. 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. Where I seldom shopped, The narrow untouched hips. 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. Anyone can read what you share. While I labored to find Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? I feel, just this very instant, Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? You can read some of her poems on our website. 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. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. Meanwhile, Watershed brilliantly intermixes language from that Nathaniel Rich article with testimony by survivors of near-death experiences; was the process of choosing and assembling your found texts similar for this poem? It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. I love chicken. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. 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 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. 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. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. taken Captive But before we get to the analysis, lets briefly summarise the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. 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 of life into Adams nostrils. 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. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. 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. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. But I truly hope its more than that. Men with interests to protect seduce and extract pleasure from a young person, making her believe / / It was she who gave permission, just as patriarchal industrial capitalism has plundered the youth of mother Earth.Those awful, awful men. Every small want, every niggling urge. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Would you read it for us? WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. But those things came out in this poem. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? 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 instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process which... 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