The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. 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 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 feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. I was dreaming that I was reading aloud a mural that had been made of a Carl Phillips poem, when suddenly my waking mind broke in to say: Thats not a Carl Phillips poembut if you write it down it can be yours! I woke up and struggled to remember and reconstruct the lines Id read in the dream. 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. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. 1 No. And for that to be unmitigated. 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. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. 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. 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. 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. 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. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. 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. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. Smith mingles these themes in The World is Your Beautiful Younger Sister, where the body of a woman stands in for the planet itself; Smith plays on old Western conceptions of nature as a female resource to be commanded by men and their technologies. destroyed the lives of our The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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. Each ashamed of the same things: In October, Graywolf Press will 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. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess I was really thinking about the moment when our desire to be public people became such a ravenous appetite. 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. 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. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. Teaching is inspiring for me. Poet Laureate of the United States; its a high perch for an American poet to land on. Brought on a different manner of weather. 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. 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. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. (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.). And then we find a way to have a conversation. What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? 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. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. Its like having a best live-action award. She didn'tKnow me, but I believed her,And a terrible new acheRolled over in my chest,Like in a room where the drapesHave been swept back. 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. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. 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. 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. Free UK p&p She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. 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: Sure. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, teaching at Princeton, named the US Poet Laureate in 2017, and already freighted with laurels (her previous book, Life on Mars, won the 2012 Pulitzer), Smith is no undiscovered talent. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. We took new stock of one another. Life on Mars is pointed into the future as a way of reckoning with all of that, while Wade in the Water takes up history in a similar effort. 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. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? 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). Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. What made you choose to start (and end?) 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. 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. 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. In early drafts of that poem, I was struggling with the feeling that I had too much cherishing for the poems initial speaker, which I had imagined as a black man with his hands in the air, arms raised, eyes wide. So I inverted the poem, and wrote from the perspective of someone apprehending him. 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 This is such a gift, to be able to visit different parts of the country and spend time with people in different communities, and listen to each other, and talk to each other, and think about what poetry already means to people there, and get their feedback on poems that might be new to them. 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)? 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. 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. Whats going on there? Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. 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. 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. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. 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. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. Tracy K. Smith: Right. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. Anyone can read what you share. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. 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, I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. 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. You pay attention because it wades in deep. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. I feel, just this very instant, 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. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. Every small want, every niggling urge. The glossy pastries! 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? Though its not like we have much of choice. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. How did the book come together and find its shape? Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Its actually the last poem in your book. 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? SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. Innocence and privacy. 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. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. 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 see it as my job to draw these things out, and offer the kinds of questions and observations that will help students move further into their strengths as writers, and to follow them toward an organic and genuine sense of their own deepening themes and questions. One quick way to define capitalism is to observe that it entails the dedication of all things, all human objects and ideas and actions, to profit, to the continual accumulation of wealth in private hands. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? The shoulders. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. The glossy 1 No. 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. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. 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? Dang, you hear those birds? Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 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. 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. 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. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. 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. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. 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. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. 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. 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. WebTracy K. Smith is a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. the book in a spiritual key? To capacity. Can I get you to read An Old Story? 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. All Rights Reserved. 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. 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. Like a lot. 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