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. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. 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. 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. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. I dont think the poems lay out answers to any of that, incidentally, but their manner of exploring these questions feels fruitful.WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of the most striking pieces in the book is the long poem you mentioned, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. Im curious about the research that goes into a piece like thishow did you come across the source documents, and when did you realize they could constitute a poem? It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. 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. My thirties. Once, a bag of black beluga It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. It was so strange. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. 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)? In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face The known sun setting On the dawning century. 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. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. 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. 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? 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 watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. He has It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. I think we have reached a moment where we need new myths.WASHINGTON SQUARE: The titles and cover art of your two most recent collections suggest a sort of pairing: Life on Mars, with its image of the Cone Nebula, points to the cosmic, while Wade in the Water presents as more earthbound. Poetry does not really resonate with me. 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. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? 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. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? Yet everyone lived with a sense of innocence and privacy. People are leading lives where they cannot afford rich and luxurious things and are ashamed of that, yet they also hold onto fear; they are afraid to let people see their actual status. 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. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. 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. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. Like a lot. 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. Let us know what you think of this podcast. 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. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. 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. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. on the high Seas 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 works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. 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. 1 No. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. Whats going on there? Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. 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. ravaged our Though its not like we have much of choice. 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. 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. 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. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Can I get you to read An Old Story? WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? But that isnt enough, and so I am also listening for clues in the sounds of what I have already said that might help me determine what to say next. 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. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). Its been great. K Smith. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. I also agree. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. the book in a spiritual key? Lentils spilt a trail behind me I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? WASHINGTON SQUARE: In addition to the found poems in Wade in the Water and your previous books, youve also written erasures (including an erasure of the Declaration of Independence) and translated poetry from the Chinese. 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. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. 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. 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. 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. 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. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? 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? Our repeated 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. 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. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. 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 ones / Whose wealth is a kind of filth. Lest this ecological connection seem like a stretch, know that environmental disaster haunts Wade in the Water. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 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. Anyone can read what you share. 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. 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. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk ( Line 1 ) planet alive about race... Race has shaped me you thought about what you were able to find something to connect with you able... Also evokes small moments with her children last section of the questions that come up when we talk about racial... 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