Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Whats going on there? 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. Elbow sore at the crook Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. 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. 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 feel, just this very instant, Heavy lifting, to be sure. 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. 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). Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Let us know what you think of this podcast. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. 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. I love chicken. It was so strange. 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 I truly hope its more than that. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. 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. 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. Lentils spilt a trail behind me Its like having a best live-action award. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people I had the same problem choosing my poet. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. What about you? WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. 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? 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. All Rights Reserved. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. 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. On the dawning century. 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. 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. 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. / We never left the room. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. The same desolate luxury, Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. 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. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. Her But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. Tracy K. Smith: Right. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. 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? If capitalist institutions erase memory and sweep everything into an eternal present of consumption, poetry is a slow art with a long memory and an expansive capacity to imagine other worlds. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. 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. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. The gesture of writing an appeal and appending ones name to it parallels her lyric recuperations, because both replace capitalisms terms (where individuals are parts of a vast machine dedicated to profit) with the changeable conditions of authentic selfhood, where every breath matters even if it produces nothing that can be monetized. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. To capacity. 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. 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. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. 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. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? 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 Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. Onto the darkening dusk. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. I wanted to draw-in the sense of the living spirit at the heart of that nights encounter, and at the heart of the tradition of the ring shout itself: the sense of love and deliverance, of faith and compassion, of justice and survival.Watershed was a poem I knew I wanted to write. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. 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. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. The last lines of the poems final section point this up with staggering intensity: My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.I am the applicant for pensionon account of having servedunder the name Lewis Smithwhich was the name I wore beforethe days of slavery were overMy correct name is Hiram Kirkland.Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henrybut neither is my correct name. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. RHINO Poetry is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, Poets &Writers, Inc, The Poetry Foundation, and by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Its actually the last poem in your book. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. 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. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. The glossy pastries! Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. This week, Retelling the American Story. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. 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. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. I dont think the poems lay out answers to any of that, incidentally, but their manner of exploring these questions feels fruitful.WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of the most striking pieces in the book is the long poem you mentioned, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. Im curious about the research that goes into a piece like thishow did you come across the source documents, and when did you realize they could constitute a poem? 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. 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. Behind small phrases woke up and struggled to remember and reconstruct the lines, sat. Current projects is Self-Portraits, a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists differently that! 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