I see it as my job to draw these things out, and offer the kinds of questions and observations that will help students move further into their strengths as writers, and to follow them toward an organic and genuine sense of their own deepening themes and questions. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. 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. Thanks for listening. 1 No. 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. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. Lentils spilt a trail behind me The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. SMITH: I think the only way students learn how to craft their own poems is by reading and learning to pay close attention to the specific choices that other writers make. 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. the book in a spiritual key? And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. 1 No. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. Though its not like we have much of choice. 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. Terrible. Then animals long believed gone crept down. 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. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. The glossy pastries! Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. 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. Onto the darkening dusk. WebPoet, librettist, and translator Tracy K. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States and is the Roger S. Berlind 52 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she also chairs the Lewis Center for the Arts. Its actually the last poem in your book. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. How did the book come together and find its shape? Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. (Jonathan Bachmans renowned shot shows two policemen in body armor arresting a woman named Ieshia Evans; the black-clad officers whip out their handcuffs for no discernible reason as Evans stands in silent dignity, wearing a long dress.). WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. 4 (September 2018). Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? / 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? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im also curious, hearing about how you created the found poemsare there any poets whose work has inspired or instructed you specifically in this domain of found/collaged poetry, or poetry that incorporates historical source documents?SMITH: I have taught CD Wrights One Big Self, in both the poetry and photography formats, to my students in the past. 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. Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. 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. 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. And for that to be unmitigated. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? 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. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. I am always asking poems to show me who we are, what we are connected to, what our actions and choices set into motion, and whether it might somehow be possible to become better at being human. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. Not just me, not just people who are fresh out of whatever you do in the first years after graduate school into adulthood, thinking that Ill be happy if I can almost afford the things that I want, if I can somehow find a way to buy what life seems to offer to other people. 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. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. 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. Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. He has Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? 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. 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. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? The same desolate luxury, She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Let us know what you think of this podcast. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? 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. 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? SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. I also agree. K Smith. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including 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. From a handbasket filled 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. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. I wanted to find a way of reminding myself that our 21st Century moment isnt self-contained; somewhere and somehow, it has bearing upon what happens moving forward throughout all of eternity, even after we humans are gone from this planet. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking a few years ago with Gregory Pardlo, you mentioned that music, image, form and departure are the things Im conscious of managing in a poem. Can you say a little more about balancing these qualitiesand, perhaps, how you know when one or two of them want to predominate? Tracy K. Smith: Sure. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? We took new stock of one another. 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. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. Whats going on there? 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. Poet Laureate of the United States; its a high perch for an American poet to land on. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. 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. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. What are you really getting at there? 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. This gives even her most personal poems a decidedly political charge: they feel revolutionary in their openness of spirit, their attention to a range of voices. 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 Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Once, a bag of black beluga Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. All of these fruits hold positive or affectionate connotations to their names, something she likely wished for after therapy (she earlier states she typically shops here almost exclusively after therapy). I'd lug Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. So I did that with this document, and what I found myself doing was deleting the text that was most specific in reference to England, and listening only to the first half, in many cases, of statements. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). The shoulders. 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). 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. You composed the poem was over the books have a lot in common that, and look I! Very artistic that it does n't come so easy a kind of.! 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