Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). 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? I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. 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. Its like having a best live-action award. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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. 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. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. 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. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? What a profound longing Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" Brought on a different manner of weather. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. Though its not like we have much of choice. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. 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. 1 No. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just understand and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? For the Garden of Eden Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? But those things came out in this poem. She lives with her husband in Chicago. 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. 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? 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. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. Its been great. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. Or was it just a sense of being spurred to write by the experience of working intensively with language?SMITH: Yi Lei has big questions. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. 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. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and how that can both deepen and lighten your sense of grief. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. ravaged our But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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. 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. And for that to be unmitigated. 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. I suppose those two choices speak to some of the overarching themes I consciously wanted the book to cleave to.WASHINGTON SQUARE: This last comment makes me wonder about your process assembling a book. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. / We never left the room. Where I seldom shopped, 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. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your work notably embraces questioningboth via interrogatives and through other formulations that reject single, easy truths (e.g., New Road Station names four things history metaphorically isnt, along with at least three that it perhaps might be). Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including 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. 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. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. Declaration uses erasure to repurpose Thomas Jeffersons litany of complaints against King George, evoking the slaves forced migration to this country and their experience here of unspeakable oppression. 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. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. Take it easy. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. Innocence and privacy. 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. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. The narrow untouched hips. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. 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. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes 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. 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. 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. Redress in the most humble terms: 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess I was really thinking about the moment when our desire to be public people became such a ravenous appetite. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. 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. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? 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 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. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. Anyone can read what you share. Im listening for possibilities in meaning and emotional tone, and trying to make useful formal decisions, in a way that is more similar than different to what happens when I am writing. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. 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. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? 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. In October, Graywolf Press will Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. taken Captive 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 And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. L.I. 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. 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. 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. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. Free UK p&p And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. 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). Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? 1 No. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. WebPoet, librettist, and translator Tracy K. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States and is the Roger S. 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