Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. Every small want, every niggling urge. Everyone I knew was living This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. I think the topic has also just come up much more frequently and relentlessly in the years since Trayvon Martins murder.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Another subject you grapple with in Ordinary Light is belief in God. 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. It was Brooklyn. 1 No. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. 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. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. You can read some of her poems on our website. The narrow untouched hips. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. 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. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. Poetry wasnt really on my radar thenat least nothing contemporarybut I was taking a required composition course, and in the classroom I spotted a poster bearing some lines from a poem. 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. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) the Declaration of Independence erasure). Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? I had the same problem choosing my poet. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus. It is, implicitly, formed out of lives meshed into communities and societies; in place of capitalisms brutal sorting of human beings, Smith proposes another world. In a technique that feels like the opposite of erasure, I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It accumulates voices from African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and also from their families. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? 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, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. Where I seldom shopped, Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. And then our singing. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. But in other events, Ive gone into almost curated spaces, like rehab facilities or churches, or we have an upcoming trip that will take us to a retirement community. The known sun setting 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. 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 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. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. 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. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of destroyed the lives of our on the high Seas 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. 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? A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. 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. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. 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. 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. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. For the Garden of Eden Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im also curious, hearing about how you created the found poemsare there any poets whose work has inspired or instructed you specifically in this domain of found/collaged poetry, or poetry that incorporates historical source documents?SMITH: I have taught CD Wrights One Big Self, in both the poetry and photography formats, to my students in the past. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. Once I have a body of realized poems that feels substantialsay, 30 or 40 pagesI start to hunt for the different things the poems seem to be saying to one another in an effort to decipher what is missing. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. 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. The last couplet, which read You are not the only one / Alive like that, lodged in my mind: even lacking any context for the words, I felt electrified by the truth they managed so simply to express, and by the sense of wise, intimate authority the second-person address carried. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. 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. to bear. But I truly hope its more than that. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. Its been something I will be sad to cease doing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to go out across the country at this time in particular. What made you choose to start (and end?) 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 translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. The glossy pastries! And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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. I think it urges the viewer to submit to the terms and values of the subjects rather than cling to any pre-existing sense of what dignity or autonomy ought to look like. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. WebTracy K. Smith is a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. How did the book come together and find its shape? 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. and settlement here. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. 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. ravaged our Thats the emphasis in each of my workshops, though sometimes we use themes to determine the readings, or we look at a specific type of poemsay long poems or poem cyclesover the course of the term.
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