But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of After all, it supposedly makes nothing happen, according to Auden (indeed, imagine a poem changing President Trumps mind on immigration), and it is the literary form for which capitalism has the least use, judging by its small contemporary readership.But poetry that tries to represent individual subjectivity is well positioned to depict life under capitalism and to render possible post- or anti-capitalist alternatives. Its been great. Terrible. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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. Redress in the most humble terms: WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. Whats going on there? Some of these events have happened in large public spaces, so its been a matter of reading and then having maybe a public Q&A or more of a back and forth afterward. 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. Im Curtis Fox. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. Smith mingles these themes in The World is Your Beautiful Younger Sister, where the body of a woman stands in for the planet itself; Smith plays on old Western conceptions of nature as a female resource to be commanded by men and their technologies. 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. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. 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. For a long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed. Then, after most of the manuscript was finished, I had the idea of marrying the facts from that article, in a found poem, with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivorspeople whose vocabularies almost across the board invoke the sense of Love as an original animating force, as the logic of the universe. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. We were almost certain theywere. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? (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.). Each one of us is a collaborative condition, The Everlasting Self puts it.Smith isnt a political theorist, psychologist, historian, or polemicist, though her poetry metabolizes elements of those discourses. It was Brooklyn. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Everyone I knew was living Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). 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. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. The fact that indelible images of water lived in both Richs article and several memorable NDEs also suggested that this poem might engage in a useful conversation with the title poem. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. One of the closing lines is an eerie warning: its global. The worlds first great carbon empire, the United States, is committing suicide, but at least some people are getting richer.The books center is I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. This long poem, divided into sections based on different voices, consists of material Smith culled from the letters of black Civil War veterans and their wives, children, siblings, and widows, many of whom wrote to President Lincoln asking for financial assistance, in many cases pay that was owed them. Due to the insinuation that this is an expensive shop, she reminisces of being in her thirties and seeing the The glossy pastries! and the Pomegranate, persimmon, [and] quince! sold there. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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. 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). Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Her poems pose fundamental questionsabout love, time, mortality, and faith (Is It us, or what contains us? she asks in Life on Mars)and pursue them with imagination, rigor, a bold comfort with uncertainty, and an unswerving commitment to candor and humaneness. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. 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. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. Curtis Fox: So I wanted to ask you about your time as Poet Laureate, but before we get there, Id like to get straight to a poem. The point of capitalism is to get more capital, which allows you to either procure stuff (things or experiences) or just hoard the lucre, deriving a weird pleasure from that. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. On Montague Street And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. 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. Its actually the last poem in your book. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. / 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? Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? 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. ravaged our Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 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. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. 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? 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. Someone has likened it to the poem in my previous book called The Good Life which is about being so hungry, and having a job but not making enough money. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. From short lyrics to erasures to sectioned, multi-form elegies, all of Smiths work feels radically alivetraversing space and time; rife with cultural and historical references (to, for example, rock music; scientific research; classic movie scenes); and always illuminating with great care the complexities of consciousness and embodiment. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. 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. 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. 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. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? 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. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for. 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. 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). There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Our repeated Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. 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. 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. 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. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. You can read some of her poems on our website. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. Meanwhile, Watershed brilliantly intermixes language from that Nathaniel Rich article with testimony by survivors of near-death experiences; was the process of choosing and assembling your found texts similar for this poem? 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. Take it easy. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. on the high Seas sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Though its not like we have much of choice. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. I had the same problem choosing my poet. the book in a spiritual key? Can I get you to read An Old Story? 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. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out 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. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? SMITH: For I Will Tell You the Truth About This I went in search of information about African American soldiers experience in the Civil War. 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? Bank-balance math and counting days. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. Elbow sore at the crook 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. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. 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. But the poet respectfully appropriates them, placing each within her linguistic universe, where things like line breaks and image patterns matter, and as such the erasure is partly undone. Her I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? 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 Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. 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. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. I often think of a wonderful Marie Howe poem called The Star Market which begins: The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday. These are the old, the sick, the people a healthy young person might recoil from. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. 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. 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. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. destroyed the lives of our 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. Tracy K. Smith: Right. 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. The same desolate luxury, And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. But in other events, Ive gone into almost curated spaces, like rehab facilities or churches, or we have an upcoming trip that will take us to a retirement community. 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. The known sun setting Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? 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. 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. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. I imagined my Civil War poem would be a one-time exploration of its time period, but when I came back a few years later to writing poetry, the concerns I found myself wrestling with were rooted in similar questions of history, race, compassion and justice. 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. 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. 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. Its refreshing to hear from a Poet Laureate who holds all of these diverse concerns in her mind and in her voice, from our national tragedy to a four-year-olds refusal to eat her dinner. 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. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. The narrow untouched hips. Tracy K. Smith: An erasure poem is almost like a You know you see those government documents that are redacted, so there are these big black lines that delete certain elements of the text, and youre left with a different path through those ideas. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. 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. 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. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? I love chicken. Onto the darkening dusk. At the time, I wasnt writing many poems; I was working on my prose memoir, and feeling, somewhat guiltily, that it might be a good idea to take the opportunity to produce a new poem. I think it has to do with the joy of losing oneself in something, which is what happens when a poem is really going somewhere. And then our singing. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. 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