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. 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. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. L.I. Its been great. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. 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. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. the Declaration of Independence erasure). 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. 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. SMITH: I think the aim of most poems is to erase some measure of the distance between one person and another, usually between the poems speaker and its reader, or between the poems speaker and its subject. What made you choose to start (and end?) I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. 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? 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 lives with her husband in Chicago. So I did that with this document, and what I found myself doing was deleting the text that was most specific in reference to England, and listening only to the first half, in many cases, of statements. He has plundered our 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). So I thought, what could I do? Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. 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? destroyed the lives of our 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. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Her Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from 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. 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. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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). But translating is a different thing altogether. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. 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. 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 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. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Teaching is inspiring for me. Thanks for listening. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. You can read some of her poems on our website. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking a few years ago with Gregory Pardlo, you mentioned that music, image, form and departure are the things Im conscious of managing in a poem. Can you say a little more about balancing these qualitiesand, perhaps, how you know when one or two of them want to predominate? 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. I had the same problem choosing my poet. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. For the Garden of Eden Like the couplet that led me to her work, Smiths writing seems often to spring from an empathetic impulse, animated by common human experiences and invested in the insight we can gain by watching and listening to each other. 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. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. Or how you can sometimes see the humor in your own dire or embarrassing situation, and how that can be both frustrating and something you file away under Things that Will Be Funny in the Future. Life on Mars is pointed into the future as a way of reckoning with all of that, while Wade in the Water takes up history in a similar effort. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? From a handbasket filled Curtis Fox: Its one of the curiosities of your book, that to grapple with this dawning century you go back into history with poems in the voices of the enslaved and powerless, and you also make interesting use of the Declaration of Independence. 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. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Though its not like we have much of choice. And then we find a way to have a conversation. 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. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. 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. 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. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). Do you enjoy it? 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. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. Anyone can read what you share. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. For At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. / We never left the room. 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 guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Onto the darkening dusk. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. Weve come to, I dont know The things that felt so new are no longer new and maybe we feel a sense of their dark possibility, or at least I do. 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. 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. 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. On the dawning century. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. 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. Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. the book in a spiritual key? Her term will be up in April of 2019. Men with interests to protect seduce and extract pleasure from a young person, making her believe / / It was she who gave permission, just as patriarchal industrial capitalism has plundered the youth of mother Earth.Those awful, awful men. 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 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. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. And then our singing. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. 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. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. Those banked poems help me get started, but inevitably the work generated during that intense period is characterized by recurring themes, images, vocabulary, and obsessions. How did the book come together and find its shape? Like a lot. Redress in the most humble terms: / 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? WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. Whats going on there? 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. WebSummary Semi-Splendid by Tracy K. Smith explores an argument from two perspectives.Both perspectives come from Smith, yet one is from a nice perspective, in which the poet typically just allows her boyfriend to win the argument, and the other perspective focuses on this moment, in which she stands up for herself and begins to And let it slam me in the face 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. The last lines of the poems final section point this up with staggering intensity: My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.I am the applicant for pensionon account of having servedunder the name Lewis Smithwhich was the name I wore beforethe days of slavery were overMy correct name is Hiram Kirkland.Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henrybut neither is my correct name. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. 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. 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. Dang, you hear those birds? So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. 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? While I labored to find WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. In October, Graywolf Press will 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. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. 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. According to the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, this mental architecture almost inevitablybarring unusual cultural circumstances or great personal fortitudetakes the form of capitalist realism, which consists in the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it (Fishers italics). I had been powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in January 2016. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.)