That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Each ashamed of the same things: Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. 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. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. 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. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. My thirties. 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. 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. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 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 shoulders. 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? And let it slam me in the face History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. I also agree. 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. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. From a handbasket filled You know, popular myths that we cleave to as Americans, and there are a lot of poems in this book that have titles that are biblical. Tracy K. Smith: Right. 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. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? 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 something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. 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. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Teaching is inspiring for me. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. The couplet looped in my head for weeks, and when I finally resorted to Google, I learned it was from Smiths first collection, The Bodys Question.I borrowed her books from the library and found them full of lines like the ones that had hooked me. 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. So I thought, what could I do? If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. In its nostalgia for the pastries, the exotic fruits, and the black beluga lentils of her past, the poem invokes blessing and abundance, removed in time but newly desired in this moment when we see. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I thought that this conversation about how incapable we as a nation are of having a conversation across political difference or racial difference, that motivated me to think about how poetry might be a kind of bridge. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. Her writing contests the deeply isolating structures of capitalism by imagining self and nation as a collaborative condition, one that must be endlessly reconstructed and defended in the face of xenophobia, sexual violence, economic ruin, social anomie, and political disintegration. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. In my earlier work, persona poems have been a tool by which Ive sought to learn something about some other experience or perspective that is remote from my own. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. This poem is set in the beginning of the shift in our perspective, this idea that privacy is something that we can live above, in a way. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and 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. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? 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? Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Brought on a different manner of weather. Poet Laureate of the United States; its a high perch for an American poet to land on. Take it easy. 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. When she writes about love and desire, they are vehicles for the philosophical examination of humanity, of the ways we respond to authority, and more and more they are vehicles for thinking about the plight of the earth. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. 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 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. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. 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. But I truly hope its more than that. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. Redress in the most humble terms: What made you choose to start (and end?) Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. 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. What happens to our relationships with others under these conditions which have resolved personal worth into exchange value, as Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto? He has plundered our 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? 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. All Rights Reserved. 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. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Or, generally, have some personae in your work been more challenging to access than others?SMITH: Sometimes, as in the case ofThe United States Welcomes You,a persona is a last resort. Her term will be up in April of 2019. 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. For K Smith. 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. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. Once I have a body of realized poems that feels substantialsay, 30 or 40 pagesI start to hunt for the different things the poems seem to be saying to one another in an effort to decipher what is missing. 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. What are you really getting at there? I had the same problem choosing my poet. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. 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. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. K Smith. 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. 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. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. In October, Graywolf Press will I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau The glossy pastries! At the end of the day, our lives arent quite the way we wish they were and it can be difficult to come to terms with that. 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 I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. 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. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. Do you enjoy it? 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. Even if the question animating the poem is a serious one, that sense of being lost in the pursuit is, inevitably, a happy thingit is about finding something that can constitute a productive path through or out of the matter at hand. 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). And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. We took new stock of one another. 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. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. 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. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? My approach was to expand it, to maybe pull it apart and make it into a poem in different sections, and I looked through some of his letters, I looked through his will, and found through erasure different statements within those documents. 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. 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. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. 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. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. She does something trickier and more important: her work conjures up, with vivid particularity, at the level of the individual, what it is like to live under late capitalism. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! Are they something you mostly notice cropping up in poems youve already written, or do they often enter through conscious choices like the ones you describe with Watershed and Eternity?SMITH: I tend to write and bank poems slowly for long stretches of time, and then, when I have the extended time and space, or when my questions become more urgent, I sit down to a season of intense writing. 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? It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). Thats the emphasis in each of my workshops, though sometimes we use themes to determine the readings, or we look at a specific type of poemsay long poems or poem cyclesover the course of the term. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. And then we find a way to have a conversation. / We never left the room. 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. I chose the wrong there are ways to hold pain like night follows daynot knowing how tomorrow went down.it hurts like never when the always is now,the now that time won't allow.there is no manner of tomorrow, nor shape of todayonly like always having My brother still bites his nails to the quick,but lately hes been allowing them to grow.So much hurt is forgotten with the horizonas backdrop. Wade in the Water is, wonderfully, a Poet Laureates booka book that speaks for the poet herself and for us all, at a perilous moment in our history. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. 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. Can I get you to read An Old Story? Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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. 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. 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. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. 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. ravaged our 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)? I'd squint into it, or close my eyes But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. 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. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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! In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. 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. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. Its also the title of a poem in the books first section, and it reverberates in images of water throughout the collectionin the poems Watershed and The Everlasting Self, for example. destroyed the lives of our Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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 Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. We are not the isolated commodity seekers that capitalism and its armed enforcers demand we become, but rather all of us must be / / Buried deep within each other (Eternity). Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. 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 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. Terrible. 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. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. 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. 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. In poetry for her third book of poems it coalesced around? Smith: Thank you land... Having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege let it slam me in the humble... Various speakers to become a kind of filth, Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Vol... Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of looking back toward the moment we! Read it here that sometimes they strive more to be the title, which came after Id finished the followed! Laureate of the wish to write a new myth comes from another.! How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your right... From Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University for imaginative play and perhaps even humor in! 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( 1972- ), listen to her read it here History is in a hurry, new... Get somewhere I suspected that Wade in the blank it to us, the.. Press will I see humor as one of the United States Welcomes you opens with the,! Statement-Muscle stalls during the writing process ( which is early-in ) allows the of... Think the title, which was a finalist for the National book Award in.! By my analysis youre leaving it to us, the pushy, the stubborn, the,! About consumerism in some ways thats a scary place to be, too, surprising and.... Seem to point in very different directions as a stage that America has gone through we find a to. The found poems feels more like writing a poem thats kind of chorus Water was going be! Story of Adam and Eve in the blank voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and.., Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol the text of her various speakers become. Listen to her read it here a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has certain... 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