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. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. 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. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. I was dreaming that I was reading aloud a mural that had been made of a Carl Phillips poem, when suddenly my waking mind broke in to say: Thats not a Carl Phillips poembut if you write it down it can be yours! I woke up and struggled to remember and reconstruct the lines Id read in the dream. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. 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. 1 No. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). In its nostalgia for the pastries, the exotic fruits, and the black beluga lentils of her past, the poem invokes blessing and abundance, removed in time but newly desired in this moment when we see. From a handbasket filled I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. 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 I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. We took new stock of one another. 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 Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? 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. 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. 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. 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 I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. 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. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? Home the paper bags, doing Innocence and privacy. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. She comes home with her paper bags and looks at the numbers to her name and it ultimately slam[s] [her] in the face; she perceives a life of luxury and craves more from life than that of which she can afford. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. 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. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. He has plundered our Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? Do you enjoy it? Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. This is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps.Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Eden. It is set in the dawning century of the neoliberal universe, where everything is a market; the speaker is a thirtysomething New Yorker scraping out a life in the long tail of the Great Recession, a specter that looms over many poems in the collection. 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 author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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. 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. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. 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. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? 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. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. After you read this poem by the former U.S. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. 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. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . 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. K Smith. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. 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. Due to the insinuation that this is an expensive shop, she reminisces of being in her thirties and seeing the The glossy pastries! and the Pomegranate, persimmon, [and] quince! sold there. 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. You can read some of her poems on our website. 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. Have your process and preoccupations changed? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. All Rights Reserved. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration In a 2016 interview for The Iowa Review, you commented, I never have figured out how to talk about race in my poetry in a way that feels authentic and organic, and Ordinary Light is a book in which Im thinking so much about race. Wade in the Water seems to engage this topic compellingly and with great assurance. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. Though its not like we have much of choice. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! It was Brooklyn. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? 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. We were almost certain theywere. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. In a recent podcast of her conversation with Curtis Fox of the Poetry Foundation, Tracy K. Smith says that being Poet Laureate is a kind of service (Off the Shelf, July 31, 2018). Poetry allows us to bridge our differences, to remind ourselves that we do have things to say to each other, that we are interested in each others lives and vulnerabilities. In this new collection, Smith explores, mourns and even celebrates those vulnerabilities, both national and individual. WASHINGTON SQUARE: In addition to the found poems in Wade in the Water and your previous books, youve also written erasures (including an erasure of the Declaration of Independence) and translated poetry from the Chinese. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. But that isnt enough, and so I am also listening for clues in the sounds of what I have already said that might help me determine what to say next. Redress in the most humble terms: the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. What made you choose to start (and end?) 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. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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, For the Garden of Eden She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. 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. 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. / 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? Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. 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