taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Curtis Fox: So thats the opening poem in your book, and as you said, its set in the early years of the century when the poet was more {innocence}, but there are hints that all is not well, and you write Everyone I knew was living / The same desolate luxury, / Each ashamed of the same things: / Innocence and privacy. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. 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. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? 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. What are you really getting at there? 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. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. 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. 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. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! My thirties. Its also the title of a poem in the books first section, and it reverberates in images of water throughout the collectionin the poems Watershed and The Everlasting Self, for example. 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. 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. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. 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. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau 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. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? taken Captive She lives with her husband in Chicago. 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. 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. 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. Born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California, Smith now lives in New Jersey, where she directs and teaches in Princeton University's Creative Writing Program. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. 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. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. 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. 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. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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). We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. I like the way that project emphasizes that the various speakers and photo subjects have chosen to not only share parts of their own stories, but also decided how theyd like to be photographed. From trees. 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. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? 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. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. 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. On the dawning century. His arms churn the air. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. 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. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. 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? 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. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. 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. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. In a quiet way, I am editing from the moment I begin writing, pushing myself to think more rigorously and vigorously and to live up to the model of discipline and courage that I encourage my students to embrace.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve written four poetry collections; when you started writing, you were a student, and now youre a teachernot to mention the nations Poet Laureate. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. 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. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. 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. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. Take it easy. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. / 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? Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Something flickers, not fleeing your face. You can read some of her poems on our website. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. 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? The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. 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. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. But the point of material restitution isnt to create new hoards of capital or to employ it in fresh exploitative ventures; rather, the money these people are owed for their service to what was once a Republic is a form of human acknowledgement, a way of saying that their lives mattered. 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. Smith assembles a collage of bad news, omitting punctuation to create a sense of anxious acceleration: dust vented from factory chimneys settled well-beyond the property lineentered the water tableconcentration in drinking water 3x international safety limitstudy of workers linked exposure with prostate cancerworth $1 billion in annual profit. One quick way to define capitalism is to observe that it entails the dedication of all things, all human objects and ideas and actions, to profit, to the continual accumulation of wealth in private hands. 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. / We never left the room. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? 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? the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. 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? Conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some her!, not fleeing your face but something more ambiguous and fragile than is achievable and,. 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