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. 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. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. And let it slam me in the face I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. 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. Have your process and preoccupations changed? The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Teaching is inspiring for me. He has plundered our K Smith. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 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. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. Poetry wasnt really on my radar thenat least nothing contemporarybut I was taking a required composition course, and in the classroom I spotted a poster bearing some lines from a poem. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. I see it as my job to draw these things out, and offer the kinds of questions and observations that will help students move further into their strengths as writers, and to follow them toward an organic and genuine sense of their own deepening themes and questions. 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. 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 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. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? Her WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. On Montague Street Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. 1 No. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? For 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. She didn'tKnow me, but I believed her,And a terrible new acheRolled over in my chest,Like in a room where the drapesHave been swept back. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. (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.). Can I get you to read An Old Story? Price and value, Smith reminds us, are not the same thing.In a recent lecture published by the Washington Post, she calls poetry a radically re-humanizing force, one that comes closest to bringing us into visceral proximity with the lives and plights of others. She contrasts it with the market-driven language that divides everything into a brutal war of all against all and debilitates our minds: I also, more and more, recognize its value as a remedy to the various things that have bombarded our lines of sight and our thought space, and that tamper with our ability or even our desire to listen to that deeply rooted part of ourselves. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. 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. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess I was really thinking about the moment when our desire to be public people became such a ravenous appetite. 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. Dang, you hear those birds? Poetry does not really resonate with me. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? 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. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. 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. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. 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). Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? 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. 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. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. And for that to be unmitigated. Im thinking particularly of your poem Ash, which, compared to some of the other poems in Wade in the Water, feels especially, conspicuously (and beautifully!) 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 / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. And then theres that line in Eternity: as though all of us must be / Buried deep within each other. How does poetry foreground or grapple with distinctions between the self and others? Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. For instance, an entire found poem (Smiths term) called Watershed comprises narratives of near-death experience juxtaposed with fragments from a New York Times story about a DuPont chemical disaster that poisoned an entire Ohio community. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. 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. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. 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. To capacity. 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. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. on the high Seas We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration 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. His arms churn the air. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. 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. Elbow sore at the crook 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. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. 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. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? Poems are so great because they urge you to start thinking in honest and even vulnerable terms about your own life and your own experiences. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. 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. 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. 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 That process involves weekly meetings where we are looking at and critiquing new poems, but also trying to listen to the themes and questions driving the work. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? 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. 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. Is it strange to say love is a languageFew practice, but all, or near all speak?Even the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not loves bladeSizing up the hearts familiar meat? SMITH: The books have a lot in common. I feel, just this very instant, Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. And I remember, I was sitting reading this document, and suddenly I got to the region where all of these complaints against England were being raised, and I felt that they were speaking so clearly to the history of black life in this country, and suddenly everything else that I was working on, that I thought I wanted to gather around the idea of Jefferson, just went away. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. Race is one of the chief subjects of Wade in the Water, a site wherein my wish to contemplate the elusive nature of compassion gets played out. the book in a spiritual key? The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. This week, Retelling the American Story. Whats going on there? 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. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. I had the same problem choosing my poet. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. 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. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. 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. 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 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. Poet Laureate of the United States; its a high perch for an American poet to land on. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im intrigued by the extent to which youve referred to this poem as an autonomous entity: it seems to be voiced, what I read as fear or hesitation. Are there some poems that seem more or less transparent to you, more or less within your understanding and control, than others?SMITH: Oh, sure. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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 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. That sometimes comes out in revision, as was the case with Ash. The poem was little more than a list of ideas until I was able to sit down and hear a set of rhythmic parameters begin to assert force. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. 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. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. 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. Leaving therapy, she feels a profound longing for the grocery store, which becomes a sort of temple where spiritual and aesthetic desire mix (The glossy pastries! 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. 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. Then animals long believed gone crept down. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! 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, 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. 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. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? / We never left the room. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. It teases us; it helps us sometimes, so that what is happening now feels like it has already occurred once before; it bridles adults and happily submits to being largely ignored by children. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. the Declaration of Independence erasure). More information available at www.susannalang.com. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. 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. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. 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. ravaged our 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. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). 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. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. 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. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. 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. 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. 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. 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. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. Home the paper bags, doing 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. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. 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? Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. 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 Eden. 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. But translating is a different thing altogether. 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. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. 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. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Each ashamed of the same things: Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. In my earlier work, persona poems have been a tool by which Ive sought to learn something about some other experience or perspective that is remote from my own. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. Bank-balance math and counting days. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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. 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. 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. My thirties. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. 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. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Sense of regret that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but in the Bodys ends. 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