Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. 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). I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. 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. 1 No. Every small want, every niggling urge. RHINO Poetry is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, Poets &Writers, Inc, The Poetry Foundation, and by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. I think the topic has also just come up much more frequently and relentlessly in the years since Trayvon Martins murder.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Another subject you grapple with in Ordinary Light is belief in God. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Im Curtis Fox. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im also curious, hearing about how you created the found poemsare there any poets whose work has inspired or instructed you specifically in this domain of found/collaged poetry, or poetry that incorporates historical source documents?SMITH: I have taught CD Wrights One Big Self, in both the poetry and photography formats, to my students in the past. 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? Its like having a best live-action award. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes 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. 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. 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. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. 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. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. 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. Anyone can read what you share. 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. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? Do you enjoy it? Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. 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. 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. 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). Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. 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. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. 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? 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. 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. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. Dang, you hear those birds? Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. 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. 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. What about you? Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. How did the book come together and find its shape? The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. Garden of Eden by Tracy K. Smith What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, ravaged our 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. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. 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. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). 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. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. Inspired by a photograph taken during a Black Lives Matter protest after city police killed Alton Sterling, a black man, the poem imagines a confrontation between state power and another African American body. 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. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. 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. 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. More information available at www.susannalang.com. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. 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. 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. 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. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. 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. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. I had the same problem choosing my poet. For me, the memory of catching a poem in that fashion seeps into the sense of peace the poem contemplates, causing it to feel fleeting, like something it would be easy, if youre not working very deliberately, to lose.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your poems have a habit of calling chronology into question. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, teaching at Princeton, named the US Poet Laureate in 2017, and already freighted with laurels (her previous book, Life on Mars, won the 2012 Pulitzer), Smith is no undiscovered talent. Its been great. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. The dead speak.The poem bores deep into the nations roots, back to the Civil War, which momentarily created opportunities for African Americans to participate in democracy as voters and officeholders, craftsmen and farmers, teachers and doctors; as free agents in America, not chattel. and settlement here. Would you read it for us? 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. Its exciting and also a bit frightening to be moving through someone elses imagination and vocabulary, trying to render that work into English with what feels, hopefully, like an indigenous sensibility. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. This gives even her most personal poems a decidedly political charge: they feel revolutionary in their openness of spirit, their attention to a range of voices. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. It was Brooklyn. 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. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. The author is efficient in pointing out that the men that once wrote and fought for equality, were the same to enforce and bring upon laws that oppressed How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. Social media, this idea that if you have a life its only useful or only real if you can demonstrate it, I feel like the beginning of that frenzy or that appetite seems to line up in my mind with that period, yeah. 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. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. 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. 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. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. 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 often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. Teaching is inspiring for me. You can read some of her poems on our website. 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. 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. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. 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? Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. Not just me, not just people who are fresh out of whatever you do in the first years after graduate school into adulthood, thinking that Ill be happy if I can almost afford the things that I want, if I can somehow find a way to buy what life seems to offer to other people. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. 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. A tea they refused to carry. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. 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. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. 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 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. 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. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. The shoulders. 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. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. 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. 4 (September 2018). What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? In October, Graywolf Press will 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. 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. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. 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. 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. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. In fact, I think I picked up the pace on my own new poems, and wrote the bulk of Wade in the Water, precisely because of my work on Yi Leis poems. 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. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). 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. 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. I love chicken. The United States expanding industrial wealth in the nineteenth century was inseparable from this machine; American capital has always been massed on the backs on nonwhite people.These appellants use the lingo of capitalism, insofar as they are asking for money. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. And for that to be unmitigated. All Rights Reserved. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. From trees. on the high Seas Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. 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. 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. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. Or was it just a sense of being spurred to write by the experience of working intensively with language?SMITH: Yi Lei has big questions. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. 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. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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. 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. 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. While I labored to find And then our singing. 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. 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. Moreover, my sense of the nearness of the pastthe way that our public grappling with race and racial prejudice has begun to feel so much like a throwback from an earlier timeignited the urgent wish to hear something in an earlier periods voices that might be useful at this moment in the 21st Century.The title Wade in the Water comes from an African American spiritual, which seems apt for a collection that thinks so much about faith, race, and history (especially the Civil War), and for a poet whose previous book took its name from a song, too. 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