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. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. 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. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. Her term will be up in April of 2019. The core of the book, because it was the poem I had written earliest in the process, always seemed to me to be the long Civil War poem, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. That poem was commissioned for an exhibition of Civil War photographs at the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery back in 2013. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. 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. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. 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 was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. 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. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Where I seldom shopped, Every small want, every niggling urge. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. 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). 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. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. 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. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. 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. And then we find a way to have a conversation. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. 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. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). It was so strange. 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. 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. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Social media, this idea that if you have a life its only useful or only real if you can demonstrate it, I feel like the beginning of that frenzy or that appetite seems to line up in my mind with that period, yeah. 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. I'd lug And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out 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. 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. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. 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. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. SMITH: The older I get, the more I begin to think of Time as not just a force or a law of nature, but as a presence we live alongside, someone rather than something. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. He has plundered our 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. If I read a poem about my father, sometimes if the poem is doing its work, you might begin to think about your relationship with your father, even if it might be different from what my poem says. Garden 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, From a handbasket filled For In a quiet way, I am editing from the moment I begin writing, pushing myself to think more rigorously and vigorously and to live up to the model of discipline and courage that I encourage my students to embrace.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve written four poetry collections; when you started writing, you were a student, and now youre a teachernot to mention the nations Poet Laureate. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. Tracy K. Smith: Right. The glossy 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. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. 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. The known sun setting WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. I feel, just this very instant, SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). 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. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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? Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. 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. 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. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? 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. Though its not like we have much of choice. 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? Terrible. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. 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. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. Heavy lifting, to be sure. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. 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 the book in a spiritual key? Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. Elbow sore at the crook 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. 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. 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!) I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. 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. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. / We never left the room. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. All Rights Reserved. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Brought on a different manner of weather. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. Some do a lot, some very little. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. 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. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. 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. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. Its refreshing to hear from a Poet Laureate who holds all of these diverse concerns in her mind and in her voice, from our national tragedy to a four-year-olds refusal to eat her dinner. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. taken Captive What a profound longing Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. Free UK p&p She comes home with her paper bags and looks at the numbers to her name and it ultimately slam[s] [her] in the face; she perceives a life of luxury and craves more from life than that of which she can afford. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? So, when I was working on other poems in this book that were wrestling with history, I thought, oh, Ill go back to that Jefferson poem and see if I can make it right. 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. WebPoet, librettist, and translator Tracy K. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States and is the Roger S. Berlind 52 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she also chairs the Lewis Center for the Arts. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. 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. Usually only after therapy 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. Everyone hunkers down alone with their stuff, just as capitalism wants it.Two vicious features of the system, which Im hardly the first to note, are its enforcement of rigid hierarchies (think about the racial pay gap, for example) and its wholesale razing of the biospheric life-support systems that allow civilization to exist in the first place. 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. The fact that indelible images of water lived in both Richs article and several memorable NDEs also suggested that this poem might engage in a useful conversation with the title poem. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. I had the same problem choosing my poet. 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. 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. From trees. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. 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. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? 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. (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.). 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. What happens to our relationships with others under these conditions which have resolved personal worth into exchange value, as Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto? As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. But translating is a different thing altogether. After you read this poem by the former U.S. Like the couplet that led me to her work, Smiths writing seems often to spring from an empathetic impulse, animated by common human experiences and invested in the insight we can gain by watching and listening to each other. Its current occupant is Tracy K. 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