1 No. Tracy K. Smith: Right. He has plundered our The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? And as many have observed since capitalism emerged (see William Blakes Satanic mills or Upton Sinclairs meatpacking plants), this tends to have baleful effects on how we conceive of social relationships and our own selves. 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 book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I found two books that really had a powerful impact upon me: Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, edited by Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer; and Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from / 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? taken Captive 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. Tracy K. Smith: I think about the incredible systematic and orderly attempts to negate black life throughout the history of this country, and then I think about the voices and the contributions to democracy that Blacks have offered, and those two things speak really powerfully to each other. 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 I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. 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. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. 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. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. You can read some of her poems on our website. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. In a 2016 interview for The Iowa Review, you commented, I never have figured out how to talk about race in my poetry in a way that feels authentic and organic, and Ordinary Light is a book in which Im thinking so much about race. Wade in the Water seems to engage this topic compellingly and with great assurance. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. Poetry does not really resonate with me. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. Thanks for listening. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. Like the couplet that led me to her work, Smiths writing seems often to spring from an empathetic impulse, animated by common human experiences and invested in the insight we can gain by watching and listening to each other. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). I also agree. 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. She lives with her husband in Chicago. Like a lot. 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). Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. 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. L.I. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. 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). Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. WebSummary Semi-Splendid by Tracy K. Smith explores an argument from two perspectives.Both perspectives come from Smith, yet one is from a nice perspective, in which the poet typically just allows her boyfriend to win the argument, and the other perspective focuses on this moment, in which she stands up for herself and begins to In a technique that feels like the opposite of erasure, I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It accumulates voices from African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and also from their families. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. 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. 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!) In October, Graywolf Press will (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.). Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Each ashamed of the same things: Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. Weve come to, I dont know The things that felt so new are no longer new and maybe we feel a sense of their dark possibility, or at least I do. 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 How did the book come together and find its shape? on the high Seas The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. 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. Youve talked a bit about Wade in the Waters genesis, but more broadly, how early on do you typically begin to sense a manuscripts overarching themes? Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. 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. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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. And whats really exciting is its not a matter of me teaching people about these poems, its really a matter of us listening to each others responses, questions, associations. For the Garden of Eden Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. 1 No. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). And for that to be unmitigated. The same desolate luxury, 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. 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 same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. We took new stock of one another. 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. He has Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. One quick way to define capitalism is to observe that it entails the dedication of all things, all human objects and ideas and actions, to profit, to the continual accumulation of wealth in private hands. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau-du-Roi, a fishing village in the Carmargue, on the Mediterranean coast of France. 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. Capitalism has made a nightmare world, and we can either resist its pressures or chill with our smartphones and wait for climate change to kill us.Along comes Tracy K. Smiths new book, Wade in the Water (Graywolf). 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. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. For me, the memory of catching a poem in that fashion seeps into the sense of peace the poem contemplates, causing it to feel fleeting, like something it would be easy, if youre not working very deliberately, to lose.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your poems have a habit of calling chronology into question. 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. 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. 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. While I labored to find 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. Garden 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, Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). She comes home with her paper bags and looks at the numbers to her name and it ultimately slam[s] [her] in the face; she perceives a life of luxury and craves more from life than that of which she can afford. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? Her latest book is Wade In The Water. 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. Free UK p&p SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. 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. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. 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)? Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. His arms churn the air. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. Her The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. 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? 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 was no longer important or necessary, and I wanted to just listen to these fragments within this founding document, and feel the sort of startled andI dont know, just a sense of inevitability that those statements kind of gathered around themselves. And let it slam me in the face Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? 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