For 4 (September 2018). I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. 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. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. I think the topic has also just come up much more frequently and relentlessly in the years since Trayvon Martins murder.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Another subject you grapple with in Ordinary Light is belief in God. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Doing so would mean transforming language in its social, political, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions; it would mean altering how we speak in public, of other people, and in private, to ourselves.Poetry might not seem like the best way to catalyze a revolution. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Brought on a different manner of weather. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people 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. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. The point of capitalism is to get more capital, which allows you to either procure stuff (things or experiences) or just hoard the lucre, deriving a weird pleasure from that. Lentils spilt a trail behind me My approach was to expand it, to maybe pull it apart and make it into a poem in different sections, and I looked through some of his letters, I looked through his will, and found through erasure different statements within those documents. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. on the high Seas 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. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Capitalism has made a nightmare world, and we can either resist its pressures or chill with our smartphones and wait for climate change to kill us.Along comes Tracy K. Smiths new book, Wade in the Water (Graywolf). But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. For the Garden of Eden And then theres that line in Eternity: as though all of us must be / Buried deep within each other. How does poetry foreground or grapple with distinctions between the self and others? 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 often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. 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. Heavy lifting, to be sure. 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. 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. Whats going on there? 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. Im talking about the many products, services, networks, trends, apps, tools, toys, as well as the drugs and devices for remedying their effects that are pitched to us nonstop: in our browser sidebars, in the pages of print media, embedded in movies and TV shows, on airplanes, in taxis and trains and even toilet stalls. Onto the darkening dusk. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. What made you choose to start (and end?) Her poems pose fundamental questionsabout love, time, mortality, and faith (Is It us, or what contains us? she asks in Life on Mars)and pursue them with imagination, rigor, a bold comfort with uncertainty, and an unswerving commitment to candor and humaneness. From trees. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. The narrow untouched hips. How did the book come together and find its shape? 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. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? 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. 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. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. So I thought, what could I do? Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. 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. 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). I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. 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. Thanks for listening. 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 glossy But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. 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. 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. 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. And then we find a way to have a conversation. 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. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? 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. 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. 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. Ive been sharing work by other American poets, and readings of my own poems as well, and just asking a very simple question, which is, what do you notice? ravaged our I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. 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. 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. 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. The last lines of the poems final section point this up with staggering intensity: My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.I am the applicant for pensionon account of having servedunder the name Lewis Smithwhich was the name I wore beforethe days of slavery were overMy correct name is Hiram Kirkland.Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henrybut neither is my correct name. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus. It is, implicitly, formed out of lives meshed into communities and societies; in place of capitalisms brutal sorting of human beings, Smith proposes another world. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? 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. Would you read it for us? Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. 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. All of these fruits hold positive or affectionate connotations to their names, something she likely wished for after therapy (she earlier states she typically shops here almost exclusively after therapy). It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. Her SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. 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 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. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. I feel, just this very instant, 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. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? Poetry does not really resonate with me. 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. Curtis Fox: So thats the opening poem in your book, and as you said, its set in the early years of the century when the poet was more {innocence}, but there are hints that all is not well, and you write Everyone I knew was living / The same desolate luxury, / Each ashamed of the same things: / Innocence and privacy. Its also the title of a poem in the books first section, and it reverberates in images of water throughout the collectionin the poems Watershed and The Everlasting Self, for example. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. It was Brooklyn. 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). God said everything that was in that garden they could use to K Smith. 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. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. 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. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. I had the same problem choosing my poet. Her term will be up in April of 2019. Even a simple poem like The Good Life grew large, for me at least,when the image of a woman journeying for water from a village without a well arrived. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. 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. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. 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. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. Due to the insinuation that this is an expensive shop, she reminisces of being in her thirties and seeing the The glossy pastries! and the Pomegranate, persimmon, [and] quince! sold there. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. We were almost certain theywere. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. 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? Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. Home the paper bags, doing Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? (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.). NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. 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. 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