I see The United States Welcomes You as another poem fixated upon this topic, though perhaps more obliquely; it seems to be voiced by someone whose aim is not compassionate, though there is space at the end of the poem where what I read as fear or hesitation enters in with the line What if we / Fail? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Was it especially difficult, then, to inhabit the persona in The United States Welcomes You? This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. Every small want, every niggling urge. 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. 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. 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. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. Innocence and privacy. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. So I thought, what could I do? Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? Im Curtis Fox. taken Captive What made you choose to start (and end?) 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. Let us know what you think of this podcast. 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. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. 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). This would be a democratic project: a writer who takes it on would have to imagine a community where individuals arent just monads bouncing around the economy but are instead subjects whose lives matter regardless of how much or little capital is attached to them. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. 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. Smith and I corresponded by email about writing, reading, teaching, and her latest collection.WASHINGTON SQUARE: To start, I loved your new collection Wade in the Water. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. 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. 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. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 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. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. 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. 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. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. I feel, just this very instant, 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. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. 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. We were almost certain theywere. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. 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. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) The narrow untouched hips. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? 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. 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. The shoulders. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. 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. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. You pay attention because it wades in deep. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. 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. 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 love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? 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? I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. 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. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. 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. 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. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? This week, Retelling the American Story. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. 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. 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. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. The known sun setting But those things came out in this poem. 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. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. WebGarden of Eden 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 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. 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. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. 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. 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? Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? 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. 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. 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. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. 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? Several poems in Wade in the Water were written after translating poems of hers called In the Distance and Green Trees Greet the Rainstorm.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Section III of Wade in the Water ends with a Political Poem: a vision of workers cutting grass and communicating intermittently by raising their arms. How did the book come together and find its shape? It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. A tea they refused to carry. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. L.I. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. 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. 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. On Montague Street / 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? 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? 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. Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. 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. 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. Though its not like we have much of choice. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. 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, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. I think it has to do with the joy of losing oneself in something, which is what happens when a poem is really going somewhere. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. Similarly, Theatrical Improvisation draws on the voices of immigrants as well as those who targeted them in the months before and after the 2016 Presidential election. 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. The glossy 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! 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? Too late. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Some do a lot, some very little. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. Someone has likened it to the poem in my previous book called The Good Life which is about being so hungry, and having a job but not making enough money. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. 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