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. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. After you read this poem by the former U.S. My thirties. Usually only after therapy 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. Her But those things came out in this poem. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. I also agree. 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. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). 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. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. Onto the darkening dusk. 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 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. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. 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. 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. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. So, when I was working on other poems in this book that were wrestling with history, I thought, oh, Ill go back to that Jefferson poem and see if I can make it right. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. and settlement here. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? What made you choose to start (and end?) The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. 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 for that to be unmitigated. 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. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. 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. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. Its actually the last poem in your book. 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. 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 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. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. 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 week, Retelling the American Story. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. 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. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. 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 think it is the shift in vocabulary that reads loudest in the books, and that is really a private attempt at finding something newly engaging in my usual conundrums.WASHINGTON SQUARE: You direct the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University; though youre currently taking time off to focus on Laureate duties, youve taught and advised student poets for years. (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.). In October, Graywolf Press will To capacity. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. I claim pension under the general law, argues one appellant; (i shall hav to send this with out a stamp / for I haint money enough to buy a stamp), another says in closing his letter to the President (all italics and spellings original).In an endnote Smith refers to such texts as erasure poems, a somewhat ironic term. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. Though its not like we have much of choice. He has plundered our Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Then animals long believed gone crept down. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. The narrow untouched hips. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. 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. 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. 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. Heavy lifting, to be sure. Curtis Fox: The poem ends with an erasure, it ends ambiguously, taken Captive / on the high Seas / to bear as you just read, and its with a dash there at the end. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. Where I seldom shopped, His arms churn the air. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. 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. 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 Her term will be up in April of 2019. 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. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) Too late. 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! When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. 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. 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? and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. Let us know what you think of this podcast. 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. The glossy Redress in the most humble terms: Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. 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? Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. 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. What you think of this podcast across your books in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on 16! Century, as the last two lines go be doing for the.... 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