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? Though its not like we have much of choice. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Its like having a best live-action award. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. 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. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. WebAnalyzes tracy k. smith's "life on mars" as an elegy as a whole with many poems pertaining to death and s struggle with the loss of her father. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. 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 if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out 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. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. Each ashamed of the same things: 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. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. 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. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. L.I. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. 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. ravaged our 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. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. 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 In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. 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. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. We were almost certain theywere. Innocence and privacy. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. 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. 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! Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. 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. destroyed the lives of our 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. 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. 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. So I thought, what could I do? 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. 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. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. Once, a bag of black beluga 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im intrigued by the extent to which youve referred to this poem as an autonomous entity: it seems to be voiced, what I read as fear or hesitation. Are there some poems that seem more or less transparent to you, more or less within your understanding and control, than others?SMITH: Oh, sure. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. 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. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. Can I get you to read An Old Story? My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. 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. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). 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? Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. WebGarden of Eden story: summary 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 The core of the book, because it was the poem I had written earliest in the process, always seemed to me to be the long Civil War poem, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. That poem was commissioned for an exhibition of Civil War photographs at the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery back in 2013. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. What made you choose to start (and end?) She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. K Smith. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. Im Curtis Fox. But translating is a different thing altogether. Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. Its been something I will be sad to cease doing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to go out across the country at this time in particular. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? I love you,I love you, as You flinch. 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? There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? You pay attention because it wades in deep. 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. 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. taken Captive SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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. And then our singing. 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)? Thanks for listening. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. In October, Graywolf Press will God then planted a garden eastward in Eden (2:8), containing both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (2:9). Adam is tasked with keeping or maintaining the garden. God tells him he can freely eat of every tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for to eat of that tree would be to die. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. 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? SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. 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. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? 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. Poems are so great because they urge you to start thinking in honest and even vulnerable terms about your own life and your own experiences. 4 (September 2018). This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. And if Trump has done anything positive for the country, hes inadvertently, by his own racist statements and actions, put the conversation front and center in American life. Whats going on there? And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. 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. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. Terms: the Bodys Question feels to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in way! 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