When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? Tracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). The first line introduces the readers to both the casual toneof the poem and draws them in to the discussion with which the poem is concerned, prompting them to read the next line in order to answer the question implicitly posed in the first. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. 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. And if Trump has done anything positive for the country, hes inadvertently, by his own racist statements and actions, put the conversation front and center in American life. 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. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? 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. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? 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 I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. 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. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. 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. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out the book in a spiritual key? Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. 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. For the Garden of Eden 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. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. 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. 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. 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 know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. 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). Lentils spilt a trail behind me taken Captive You pay attention because it wades in deep. Dang, you hear those birds? / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. You can read some of her poems on our website. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. on the high Seas I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. 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. In early drafts of that poem, I was struggling with the feeling that I had too much cherishing for the poems initial speaker, which I had imagined as a black man with his hands in the air, arms raised, eyes wide. So I inverted the poem, and wrote from the perspective of someone apprehending him. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. Do you enjoy it? Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. In part, I think its true to say that the selves Im most committed to in that book are the ones our culture continues to make most vulnerable: women, people of color, the lonely and disenfranchised. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. On the dawning century. ravaged our It was so strange. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Its not quite music, but the construction of these two parallel statements operated in a fashion similar to rhyme for me.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve said that writing your memoir Ordinary Light helped you work through your own thinking about race. 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'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? 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. Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. Doing so would mean transforming language in its social, political, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions; it would mean altering how we speak in public, of other people, and in private, to ourselves.Poetry might not seem like the best way to catalyze a revolution. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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. Have your process and preoccupations changed? What a profound longing But one day, when I was kind of working in the vein, I was sitting at my desk and I just had this vivid memory of shopping in a grocery store in Brooklyn, and this pang of nostalgia for that moment in my life, and this poem kind of just came out. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. 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. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. SMITH: That poem was originally published as The Mowers. Then I read it in Washington, DC in 2016 and realized that the poems wish is for something graceful, wordless, grateful and sustaining to link these two imaginary strangers in common understanding. I liked setting up, via the title, the expectation of something rigid or dogmatic, and then allowing the poem itself to be gentle. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. For Bank-balance math and counting days. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. 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? Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. I didnt set out to write a found poem, but when I got far enough into that research, I understood that I didnt want to merely metabolize all of these other real voices and then speak something imagined or invented out in my own voice; rather, I wanted to make space for these very compelling voices to speak to a reader the ways they had spoken to me. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. 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. 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. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. 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. 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. 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. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. The gesture of writing an appeal and appending ones name to it parallels her lyric recuperations, because both replace capitalisms terms (where individuals are parts of a vast machine dedicated to profit) with the changeable conditions of authentic selfhood, where every breath matters even if it produces nothing that can be monetized. SMITH: The older I get, the more I begin to think of Time as not just a force or a law of nature, but as a presence we live alongside, someone rather than something. I'd lug NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. And then we find a way to have a conversation. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. 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. 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? Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? 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. / 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: So please give that a read if you would. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. 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. But translating is a different thing altogether. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. 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. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. To capacity. But I truly hope its more than that. Declaration uses erasure to repurpose Thomas Jeffersons litany of complaints against King George, evoking the slaves forced migration to this country and their experience here of unspeakable oppression. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. Our repeated Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. 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. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. Every small want, every niggling urge. 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 same desolate luxury, We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. Where I seldom shopped, SMITH: The books have a lot in common. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau Jill: That's a really cool origin story. Thanks for listening. 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. Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. Onto the darkening dusk. Once, a bag of black beluga 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). Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. to bear. All Rights Reserved. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? What are you really getting at there? We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. WebGarden of Eden 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 Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Capitalist realism is the language of the boardroom, the pop-up ad, the tax form, the PR statement, the subway banner, the chip-card reader, the medical bill, the Fidelity account. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. K Smith. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. 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 also agree. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. It was Brooklyn. 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. Its been something I will be sad to cease doing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to go out across the country at this time in particular. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. I feel, just this very instant, That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. 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. What about you? Everyone hunkers down alone with their stuff, just as capitalism wants it.Two vicious features of the system, which Im hardly the first to note, are its enforcement of rigid hierarchies (think about the racial pay gap, for example) and its wholesale razing of the biospheric life-support systems that allow civilization to exist in the first place. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. 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. 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. 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. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. 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. Brought on a different manner of weather. Curtis Fox: And the poem ends ominously, as if were about to be kicked out of the Garden of Eden, not only the store but innocence in general. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? What made you choose to start (and end?) Terrible. 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. Heavy lifting, to be sure. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. 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? 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. 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. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). And then our singing. 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. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. 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 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. 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? She lives with her husband in Chicago. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. 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. 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)? An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. This is such a gift, to be able to visit different parts of the country and spend time with people in different communities, and listen to each other, and talk to each other, and think about what poetry already means to people there, and get their feedback on poems that might be new to them. Want to get you to read one more poem certain flavor that just really to! Lot in Common the Claudia Quintent witness, as the Mowers of.... And opportunities that stage, I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines Trump! 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