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? Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. 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. But one day, when I was kind of working in the vein, I was sitting at my desk and I just had this vivid memory of shopping in a grocery store in Brooklyn, and this pang of nostalgia for that moment in my life, and this poem kind of just came out. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. But before we get to the analysis, lets briefly summarise the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. 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 of life into Adams nostrils. 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. She lives with her husband in Chicago. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? Heavy lifting, to be sure. 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. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. 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. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. 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? I think it urges the viewer to submit to the terms and values of the subjects rather than cling to any pre-existing sense of what dignity or autonomy ought to look like. 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. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. And then our singing. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. and settlement here. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. 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. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. Do you enjoy it? 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. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. 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. This is such a gift, to be able to visit different parts of the country and spend time with people in different communities, and listen to each other, and talk to each other, and think about what poetry already means to people there, and get their feedback on poems that might be new to them. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. taken Captive But translating is a different thing altogether. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. 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. This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. 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. Onto the darkening dusk. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. 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. 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. 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. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. 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. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. 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. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. 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. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. 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. destroyed the lives of our History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. 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. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? 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 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. Redress in the most humble terms: Im Curtis Fox. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. 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. To capacity. 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. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and SMITH: That poem was originally published as The Mowers. Then I read it in Washington, DC in 2016 and realized that the poems wish is for something graceful, wordless, grateful and sustaining to link these two imaginary strangers in common understanding. I liked setting up, via the title, the expectation of something rigid or dogmatic, and then allowing the poem itself to be gentle. 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. 1 No. 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 Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. 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? So I thought, what could I do? Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. After you read this poem by the former U.S. And let it slam me in the face As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. For me, the memory of catching a poem in that fashion seeps into the sense of peace the poem contemplates, causing it to feel fleeting, like something it would be easy, if youre not working very deliberately, to lose.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your poems have a habit of calling chronology into question. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. But I truly hope its more than that. 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. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. 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. Innocence and privacy. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. 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. The glossy 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. 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 also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. Thanks for listening. 1 No. 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? At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. 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. How did the book come together and find its shape? 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. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). 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? 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. 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. The known sun setting The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. Its actually the last poem in your book. 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. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. 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. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. 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. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out 4 (September 2018). In a technique that feels like the opposite of erasure, I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It accumulates voices from African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and also from their families. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. More information available at www.susannalang.com. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. Then animals long believed gone crept down. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. the book in a spiritual key? Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. We took new stock of one another. 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. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. 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). She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. 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. 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. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. Though its not like we have much of choice. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Her term will be up in April of 2019. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? I didnt set out to write a found poem, but when I got far enough into that research, I understood that I didnt want to merely metabolize all of these other real voices and then speak something imagined or invented out in my own voice; rather, I wanted to make space for these very compelling voices to speak to a reader the ways they had spoken to me. Everyone I knew was living Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. 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. I had the same problem choosing my poet. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. After all, it supposedly makes nothing happen, according to Auden (indeed, imagine a poem changing President Trumps mind on immigration), and it is the literary form for which capitalism has the least use, judging by its small contemporary readership.But poetry that tries to represent individual subjectivity is well positioned to depict life under capitalism and to render possible post- or anti-capitalist alternatives. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. And then we find a way to have a conversation. Can I get you to read An Old Story? His comic jogCarries him nowhere. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. Each ashamed of the same things: 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. SMITH: For I Will Tell You the Truth About This I went in search of information about African American soldiers experience in the Civil War. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. Lentils spilt a trail behind me Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. 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. Its like having a best live-action award. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau 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. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. 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. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" This gives even her most personal poems a decidedly political charge: they feel revolutionary in their openness of spirit, their attention to a range of voices. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. Ive been sharing work by other American poets, and readings of my own poems as well, and just asking a very simple question, which is, what do you notice? 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 current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. 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. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. 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. 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. Where reading series and book festivals dont usually go seemed to capture mood... 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