Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 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. 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. Once, a bag of black beluga 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. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. 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. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. 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? 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. 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. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 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 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. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? Every small want, every niggling urge. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. Redress in the most humble terms: 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. 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). Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. 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 I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. 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. 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? This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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. Innocence and privacy. All Rights Reserved. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. 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. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Capitalism is the enemy and the stakes are high, because one of the only defenses against the degradations of our market-driven culture is to cleave to language that fosters humility, awareness of complexity, commitment to the lives of others and a resistance to the overly easy and the patently false.Embedded in all this is a specific conception of history. On Montague Street Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. 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. 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. 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. 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. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. 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. Brought on a different manner of weather. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. 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. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? Then animals long believed gone crept down. 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. 1 No. 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. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. What about you? A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. 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. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? 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. 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. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. (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.). Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? My poems strain for the kind of freedom to rise above Time on occasion, to see through it, to make use of what once (when I needed it) might have been invisible to me and what now (after the fact) can seem plain. 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. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. You can read some of her poems on our website. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. 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. But translating is a different thing altogether. 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. Even a simple poem like The Good Life grew large, for me at least,when the image of a woman journeying for water from a village without a well arrived. For WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. 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. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? More information available at www.susannalang.com. 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. 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 see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. Song allows us to hope for new connections: The interior sections of Smiths collection lift up others voices and names, to which she joins her own. He has plundered our L.I. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Mattan Masri- Week 16: Animation is not a Genre, Bella Furst Week 1 | Ranking Chicken and Why Chicken Nuggets are the Best, Bella Furst | Week 20 "The United States Welcomes You" by Tracy K. Smith, Bella Furst Week 4 | "Garden of Eden" by Tracy K. Smith. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. 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. In a quiet way, I am editing from the moment I begin writing, pushing myself to think more rigorously and vigorously and to live up to the model of discipline and courage that I encourage my students to embrace.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve written four poetry collections; when you started writing, you were a student, and now youre a teachernot to mention the nations Poet Laureate. 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. 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