MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. Her 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. 1 No. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. She is a democratic writer, because her project in Wade in the Water is to curate American voices, particularly those of marginalized people, but also her own, and to situate these within the dark sweep of US history, with all its horrors, its anxieties, its potentialities. to bear. I imagined my Civil War poem would be a one-time exploration of its time period, but when I came back a few years later to writing poetry, the concerns I found myself wrestling with were rooted in similar questions of history, race, compassion and justice. I see The United States Welcomes You as another poem fixated upon this topic, though perhaps more obliquely; it seems to be voiced by someone whose aim is not compassionate, though there is space at the end of the poem where what I read as fear or hesitation enters in with the line What if we / Fail? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Was it especially difficult, then, to inhabit the persona in The United States Welcomes You? 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. 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. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. 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. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. It wasnt until I found myself preoccupied with questions of love and faith that I figured out how I wanted to work with the source material of the article. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. For the Garden of Eden The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. 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. 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. 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. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. 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. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Onto the darkening dusk. 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. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. 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. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. 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. Teaching is inspiring for me. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. What a profound longing 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? I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. 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. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. 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. 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. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. ravaged our In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. His arms churn the air. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. On Montague Street I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? 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. 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. We poor oppressed ones, one writes Lincoln, appeal to you, and ask fair play.Arranged by Smith, these voices, often speaking in nonstandard English, become part of the American literary corpus. I like the way that project emphasizes that the various speakers and photo subjects have chosen to not only share parts of their own stories, but also decided how theyd like to be photographed. 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. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. 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. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. 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. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. And I remember, I was sitting reading this document, and suddenly I got to the region where all of these complaints against England were being raised, and I felt that they were speaking so clearly to the history of black life in this country, and suddenly everything else that I was working on, that I thought I wanted to gather around the idea of Jefferson, just went away. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. 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. That work is something I can do when I dont have any ideas for poems, and it draws me into conversation with another poetic sensibility. 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. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. While I labored to find 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. 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. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. Mattan Masri- Week 16: Animation is not a Genre, Bella Furst Week 1 | Ranking Chicken and Why Chicken Nuggets are the Best, Bella Furst | Week 20 "The United States Welcomes You" by Tracy K. Smith, Bella Furst Week 4 | "Garden of Eden" by Tracy K. Smith. 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. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. 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. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. It was Brooklyn. 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. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? Copyright 2008 - 2023 . After you read this poem by the former U.S. 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. 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. 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. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. 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. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. Usually only after therapy We took new stock of one another. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). 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. Poetry does not really resonate with me. 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. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. I also agree. I love chicken. From short lyrics to erasures to sectioned, multi-form elegies, all of Smiths work feels radically alivetraversing space and time; rife with cultural and historical references (to, for example, rock music; scientific research; classic movie scenes); and always illuminating with great care the complexities of consciousness and embodiment. 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. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. Its actually the last poem in your book. WebGarden of Eden 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 And let it slam me in the face 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. The shoulders. What made you choose to start (and end?) And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. 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. 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. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. 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? It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. 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. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. Home the paper bags, doing Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. He has 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. 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