What a profound longing 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. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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. Brought on a different manner of weather. God then planted a garden eastward in Eden (2:8), containing both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (2:9). Adam is tasked with keeping or maintaining the garden. God tells him he can freely eat of every tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for to eat of that tree would be to die. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. 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. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. Do you enjoy it? 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. 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). 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. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I thought that this conversation about how incapable we as a nation are of having a conversation across political difference or racial difference, that motivated me to think about how poetry might be a kind of bridge. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 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. WebGarden of Eden story: summary 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 The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. 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. But translating is a different thing altogether. 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. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. I am always asking poems to show me who we are, what we are connected to, what our actions and choices set into motion, and whether it might somehow be possible to become better at being human. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. It was Brooklyn. 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. 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. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. 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. 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. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just understand and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. 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. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. 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!) 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. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. 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. He has Too late. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. I also agree. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? 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. 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. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out (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.). 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. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. 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. destroyed the lives of our Every small want, every niggling urge. 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 How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? It was so strange. 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. Tracy K. Smith: I think about the incredible systematic and orderly attempts to negate black life throughout the history of this country, and then I think about the voices and the contributions to democracy that Blacks have offered, and those two things speak really powerfully to each other. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. 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. 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. We were almost certain theywere. 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. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. His arms churn the air. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? 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 watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. Terrible. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. 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. 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 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. 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. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. and settlement here. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. Usually only after therapy Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? Our repeated 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. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. 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. 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. / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. Its been great. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. 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. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. More information available at www.susannalang.com. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. 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. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Thanks for listening. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? Her This poem is set in the beginning of the shift in our perspective, this idea that privacy is something that we can live above, in a way. Poetry does not really resonate with me. Free UK p&p I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. 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. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. On Montague Street Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. All Rights Reserved. Whats going on there? 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. 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. 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. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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