Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? Men with interests to protect seduce and extract pleasure from a young person, making her believe / / It was she who gave permission, just as patriarchal industrial capitalism has plundered the youth of mother Earth.Those awful, awful men. 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. To capacity. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. Too late. The same desolate luxury, If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Similarly, Theatrical Improvisation draws on the voices of immigrants as well as those who targeted them in the months before and after the 2016 Presidential election. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. 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. 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. 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 Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 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. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. 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. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. on the high Seas Onto the darkening dusk. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. 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. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. 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. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. 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. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. 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. 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 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 chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. 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. 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. On the dawning century. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. For instance, an entire found poem (Smiths term) called Watershed comprises narratives of near-death experience juxtaposed with fragments from a New York Times story about a DuPont chemical disaster that poisoned an entire Ohio community. 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. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. I didnt set out to write a found poem, but when I got far enough into that research, I understood that I didnt want to merely metabolize all of these other real voices and then speak something imagined or invented out in my own voice; rather, I wanted to make space for these very compelling voices to speak to a reader the ways they had spoken to me. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. For the Garden of Eden 1 No. and settlement here. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? 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. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. 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!) And for that to be unmitigated. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. 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. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. 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. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. the Declaration of Independence erasure). Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. She lives with her husband in Chicago. 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. Leaving therapy, she feels a profound longing for the grocery store, which becomes a sort of temple where spiritual and aesthetic desire mix (The glossy pastries! This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. 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. While I labored to find And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? And then our singing. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. 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. Bank-balance math and counting days. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. Each one of us is a collaborative condition, The Everlasting Self puts it.Smith isnt a political theorist, psychologist, historian, or polemicist, though her poetry metabolizes elements of those discourses. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. 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. 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. 4 (September 2018). 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. Redress in the most humble terms: She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. Would you read it for us? 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 Eden. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. The United States Welcomes You opens with the line, Why and by whose power were you sent? and closes with the line, How and to whom do we address our appeal? It was landing on that parallel syntax that told me the poem was over. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. 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. 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. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. And let it slam me in the face Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. This week, Retelling the American Story. Tracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). The first line introduces the readers to both the casual toneof the poem and draws them in to the discussion with which the poem is concerned, prompting them to read the next line in order to answer the question implicitly posed in the first. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. 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. 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. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? Like a lot. But those things came out in this poem. 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. 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. Once, a bag of black beluga We were almost certain theywere. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. 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'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! / 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? I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. 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. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? 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? The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Then animals long believed gone crept down. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. 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. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. 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. 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)? 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. 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. taken Captive 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. The glossy Its like having a best live-action award. 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. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. 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. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). In the poem, Declaration , by Tracy K. Smith, the author is able to criticize a powerful document and bring to light the racial injustices in modern-day society. The United States expanding industrial wealth in the nineteenth century was inseparable from this machine; American capital has always been massed on the backs on nonwhite people.These appellants use the lingo of capitalism, insofar as they are asking for money. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. Some do a lot, some very little. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. From a handbasket filled Dang, you hear those birds? His comic jogCarries him nowhere. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? 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. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. Exists in our lives, even though i hadnt read the book poems! That this is an expensive shop, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry on Earth - Review tracy... 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