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 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. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. 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. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. 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. I love chicken. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? 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. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. Her We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. 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. 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. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. 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. And then our singing. Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" 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. The glossy pastries! I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. Our repeated Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. 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. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Copyright 2008 - 2023 . Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. 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. 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. In October, Graywolf Press will Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. 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. But the poet respectfully appropriates them, placing each within her linguistic universe, where things like line breaks and image patterns matter, and as such the erasure is partly undone. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. 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 struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. 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 watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. We poor oppressed ones, one writes Lincoln, appeal to you, and ask fair play.Arranged by Smith, these voices, often speaking in nonstandard English, become part of the American literary corpus. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth destroyed the lives of our We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. I had the same problem choosing my poet. 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration K Smith. 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. Each ashamed of the same things: Home the paper bags, doing I think we have reached a moment where we need new myths.WASHINGTON SQUARE: The titles and cover art of your two most recent collections suggest a sort of pairing: Life on Mars, with its image of the Cone Nebula, points to the cosmic, while Wade in the Water presents as more earthbound. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. the book in a spiritual key? 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 Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. 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. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Its like having a best live-action award. For instance, an entire found poem (Smiths term) called Watershed comprises narratives of near-death experience juxtaposed with fragments from a New York Times story about a DuPont chemical disaster that poisoned an entire Ohio community. 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. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? 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. She lives with her husband in Chicago. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. the Declaration of Independence erasure). We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes 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. Let us know what you think of this podcast. Or was it just a sense of being spurred to write by the experience of working intensively with language?SMITH: Yi Lei has big questions. taken Captive And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? Free UK p&p So I did that with this document, and what I found myself doing was deleting the text that was most specific in reference to England, and listening only to the first half, in many cases, of statements. It was so strange. Even a simple poem like The Good Life grew large, for me at least,when the image of a woman journeying for water from a village without a well arrived. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. 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. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. If I read a poem about my father, sometimes if the poem is doing its work, you might begin to think about your relationship with your father, even if it might be different from what my poem says. 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