WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. 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. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. It was Brooklyn. 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. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. 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. Every small want, every niggling urge. 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. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out 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. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. 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. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth 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. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. 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. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face The known sun setting On the dawning century. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. The fact that indelible images of water lived in both Richs article and several memorable NDEs also suggested that this poem might engage in a useful conversation with the title poem. 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. Capitalism is the enemy and the stakes are high, because one of the only defenses against the degradations of our market-driven culture is to cleave to language that fosters humility, awareness of complexity, commitment to the lives of others and a resistance to the overly easy and the patently false.Embedded in all this is a specific conception of history. 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. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? What made you choose to start (and end?) I think it has to do with the joy of losing oneself in something, which is what happens when a poem is really going somewhere. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. 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. He has Mattan Masri- Week 16: Animation is not a Genre, Bella Furst Week 1 | Ranking Chicken and Why Chicken Nuggets are the Best, Bella Furst | Week 20 "The United States Welcomes You" by Tracy K. Smith, Bella Furst Week 4 | "Garden of Eden" by Tracy K. Smith. / 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? Theyre intimate spaces where we can really stop and say, okay, heres a poem by this American poet whos voice I think is so important, what do you hear within it? One of the closing lines is an eerie warning: its global. The worlds first great carbon empire, the United States, is committing suicide, but at least some people are getting richer.The books center is I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. This long poem, divided into sections based on different voices, consists of material Smith culled from the letters of black Civil War veterans and their wives, children, siblings, and widows, many of whom wrote to President Lincoln asking for financial assistance, in many cases pay that was owed them. 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. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. That process involves weekly meetings where we are looking at and critiquing new poems, but also trying to listen to the themes and questions driving the work. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. In Garden of Eden, the first poem in the collection, Smith remembers shopping at a grocery store in Brooklyn that was actually called the Garden of 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. 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. Home the paper bags, doing Something flickers, not fleeing your face. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). 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. 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. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. 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. Some do a lot, some very little. Anyone can read what you share. 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. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and 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. 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. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? 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? This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau-du-Roi, a fishing village in the Carmargue, on the Mediterranean coast of France. 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. 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. 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. 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). 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. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. Yet everyone lived with a sense of innocence and privacy. People are leading lives where they cannot afford rich and luxurious things and are ashamed of that, yet they also hold onto fear; they are afraid to let people see their actual status. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. I also agree. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? We are not the isolated commodity seekers that capitalism and its armed enforcers demand we become, but rather all of us must be / / Buried deep within each other (Eternity). Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and Im Curtis Fox. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I thought that this conversation about how incapable we as a nation are of having a conversation across political difference or racial difference, that motivated me to think about how poetry might be a kind of bridge. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia 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. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. 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 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. 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. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. 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 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. 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. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 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. 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