Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. 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. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. 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. 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. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. 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. 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. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? Can I get you to read An Old Story? Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. I had the same problem choosing my poet. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your work notably embraces questioningboth via interrogatives and through other formulations that reject single, easy truths (e.g., New Road Station names four things history metaphorically isnt, along with at least three that it perhaps might be). I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. 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. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. 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. I found two books that really had a powerful impact upon me: Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, edited by Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer; and Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. The author is efficient in pointing out that the men that once wrote and fought for equality, were the same to enforce and bring upon laws that oppressed 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. According to the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, this mental architecture almost inevitablybarring unusual cultural circumstances or great personal fortitudetakes the form of capitalist realism, which consists in the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it (Fishers italics). 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. Once I have a body of realized poems that feels substantialsay, 30 or 40 pagesI start to hunt for the different things the poems seem to be saying to one another in an effort to decipher what is missing. Tracy K. Smith: Right. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. We took new stock of one another. 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! The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. 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. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. K Smith. 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? Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. Let us know what you think of this podcast. 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. Everyone hunkers down alone with their stuff, just as capitalism wants it.Two vicious features of the system, which Im hardly the first to note, are its enforcement of rigid hierarchies (think about the racial pay gap, for example) and its wholesale razing of the biospheric life-support systems that allow civilization to exist in the first place. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? For And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Im Curtis Fox. 1 No. 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. 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. Parenting is such an intimate experience, but we have all been parented and many of us have struggled through these moments when our childrens voices trumpeting their separate identities are both miracle and monumental challenge. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. And then our singing. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. 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. And if Trump has done anything positive for the country, hes inadvertently, by his own racist statements and actions, put the conversation front and center in American life. 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 will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. They do a lot to remind us that we do have things to say to each other, that were interested in one anothers lives and vulnerabilities. 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. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. 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. At the time, I wasnt writing many poems; I was working on my prose memoir, and feeling, somewhat guiltily, that it might be a good idea to take the opportunity to produce a new poem. Her poems pose fundamental questionsabout love, time, mortality, and faith (Is It us, or what contains us? she asks in Life on Mars)and pursue them with imagination, rigor, a bold comfort with uncertainty, and an unswerving commitment to candor and humaneness. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. 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. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). 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. Dang, you hear those birds? My natural process is to try and distribute the weight of the poem across these mechanisms, but I get very excited when the poem has other plans for itself and leans more toward a rhythmic energy, or toward the rigid structure of rhyme or repetition. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. 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. 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. 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. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. 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. Every small want, every niggling urge. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. 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. I also agree. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Home the paper bags, doing And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. 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. 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. 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. And let it slam me in the face Its not quite music, but the construction of these two parallel statements operated in a fashion similar to rhyme for me.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve said that writing your memoir Ordinary Light helped you work through your own thinking about race. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. From a handbasket filled After you read this poem by the former U.S. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 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 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. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. 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. Tracy K. Smith: An erasure poem is almost like a You know you see those government documents that are redacted, so there are these big black lines that delete certain elements of the text, and youre left with a different path through those ideas. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. / 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? 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. Capitalism, Fisher intones, is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.Is there any alternative to the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen (Fisher again)? While I labored to find The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. 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 SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. 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). The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus. It is, implicitly, formed out of lives meshed into communities and societies; in place of capitalisms brutal sorting of human beings, Smith proposes another world. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? 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. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. 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. 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. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. 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? Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). So I thought, what could I do? WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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 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. The narrow untouched hips. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! 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 tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? 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. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. Brought on a different manner of weather. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. 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? When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? 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. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. The shoulders. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? Her term will be up in April of 2019. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. 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. 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. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. 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!) The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. You can read some of her poems on our website. 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. For a long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed. Then, after most of the manuscript was finished, I had the idea of marrying the facts from that article, in a found poem, with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivorspeople whose vocabularies almost across the board invoke the sense of Love as an original animating force, as the logic of the universe. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. 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. I felt like the way that humor exists in our lives can resonate with everyone am. Healthy young person might recoil from my interest in the sun, while we sit bothered... 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