Tracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. And they start to call to mind a particular piece of context behind the source material, the inescapable contradiction at the heart of American history. Firstly, enslaved people forced to bear (or carry or pick up) tools, but also to bear children, perhaps (sexual violence against enslaved women was pervasive). In this case, the opening line has a meaning that is everything but literal. At least, thats what I used to think, until July 4, 2017. The reader is forced to fill in that awful blank. by Karin Dienst. The poem in question is called Declaration; you can read it on the Poetry Foundation website, where theres also a recording of Smith reading the poem aloud. And let it dangle between you like a locket on a chain. The title is from a. Tracy K. Smith is the author of two previous collections: Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award, and The Body's Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize.She is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. And while it is certain that some of them are doomed to lie quiet as the bedrock that remains unseen beneath the soil, erosion will eventually uncover others. Poem. The Academy of American Poets asked twelve contemporary black poets to choose one poem and explain their selection. Based on the gaps of . Ann Cox has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. Her poetry collections include Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Duende, and Wade in the Water. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. Ho Chi Minh cited it, alongside Frances Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, at the beginning of the Vietnamese Proclamation of Independence, then attacked the Western imperial powers for violating those cherished principles. The Muller F element (~5.2 Mb) is the smallest chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster, but it is substantially larger resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss thenovel. She sees the sorts of grievances the declarations signers lobbed at the crown, and highlights how they were blind to the same faults in themselves. Her offbeat, spiritual poems are her boldest where it seems almost as though she is putting together a DIY Bible. In Hill Country, God drives round in a jeep with the windows down (not a neocolonial, one hopes) and wonders whether there is something larger than himself rearranging/ The air. In Beatific, an arresting (in every sense) poem, a man obliviously crosses the road and there is the tiniest hint this down-and-out pedestrian could be a messiah. which she usedas soap in the familys dishwasher. Her most recent collection of poetry Life on Mars was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. They say youre leaving Monday Why cant you leave on Tuesday? Its centrepiece is a gathering of what are known as erasure poems a strange term as what Smith is doing is the opposite of erasure. What attitude do the speakers seem to have toward the original work? For all I know, the grass has caught our name. . Her memoir is Ordinary Light. (LogOut/ The sky is a dry pitiless white. Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com. When we find ourselves alone with all weve ever sought: our name? This is a poem about historical revisionism. An erasure poem takes a preexisting text and makes a poem by erasing or removing words from it. Our name our name our name our fraught, fraught name. A Gathering of the Tribes is a proud member of the Coalition of Small Arts New York (CoSA). Born in Chicago, Illinois in 1955, Patricia Smith is a well know figure in the literary community. As poetic forms go, a ghazal is fairly simple. Let me know what you thought of the poem. Reset I Don't Miss It by Tracy K. Smith He explained that the planet we call Earth really has a proper name, has its own energy, is a true living being, was very strong but has been weakened considerably. Smith, who characterizes herself as having been "still an adolescent" when she lost her mother, believes "it took losing my father to help me come to better grips with that first loss and think about what I needed to believe my mother's life and her death had imparted." Summary '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 fight back.. Distribute one sticky note to each student and ask them to write down what freedom means to them. Yet its also about erasing things, removing them from sight, which is exactly what the founders did with slavery, which is never mentioned in the Declaration. In these new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. History is a ship forever setting sail is an image that situates the factual events of the past as forever being in a state of flux as it prepares to become the historical record. Take a moment to discuss those ideas, then teach/review the authors, intended audience, and purpose of the document. She received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2014 and the James Laughlin Award in 2006 for her second book, Duende. That, for the record, would be a perfectly fine approach for an erasure poem based on the Declaration of Independence. But since history is always on the verge of leaving the harbor rather than always on the verge of arriving at its destination, there will be plenty of opportunities to revise that record so that the truth is finally told. . racy K Smith is the poet laureate of the United States and a winner of the Pulitzer prize. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Yet it would take a civil war the following century, as well as the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, to officially end it. In these first two lines, the conditional terms,As if, almost, perhaps, suggest an uncertainty of, and a resistance to, the experience of spiritual reincarnation that the speaker somehow cannot dismiss. Any guesses? Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. Join distinguished faculty including President of the University Emerita Shirley Tilghman and Professor Tracy K. Smith for a dinner series that will help you connect your research with specialists and non-specialists alike. Having risen from moan to growl, growl to a hounds low bray. She is currently a Creative Writing professor at Sierra Nevada College. They border on uncontroversial: no one reading this poetry could fail to be on the poets side. Most people recognized the exercise as a simple patriotic observance, but a small number of people, mostly of a right-wing persuasion and likely seeing the tweets outside of their full context, assumed NPR was criticizing Donald Trump and even advocating for revolution. The glossy pastries!/ Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!) becomes a source of shame and longing. Then offer the following questions for discussion: Pair Declaration with other contemporary poems about racial injustice in America, particularly those that focus on the present day. In the process of blacking-out the original text, her artistic vision knows to preserve such phrases as the circumstances of our emigration / and settlement here (13-14) and taken Captive / on the high Seas / to bear (15-17). Declaration is an erasure poem. The collection is a lament for the poet's father, who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope at the National The Universe as a Primal Scream is a poem by Tracy K. Smith which appears in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Life on Mars. Her book, Life on Mars (2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Smith uses epistrophe (the repetition of a word at the end of successive clauses or sentences) throughout the poem. The opening line is not about the sky. And if youre looking for more thoughts on recontextualizing the classics, you may want to check out my piece on Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelleys short film IntheBodyoftheSturgeon, which rearranges Longfellows TheSongofHiawatha into a story about a submarines crew near the end of the Second World War. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. Ghazal The sky is a dry pitiless white. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. In A Political Poem, she imagines that two neighbors mowing their lawns would connect with a simple act of greeting. Ask students to talk about where this phrase originated and what it means. It's a powerful poem and one that reminds me how poetry can change the way that we look at our history and our world. Hell grin watching you squint, deciphering, Rivers, borders, bridges arcing up from rock. Thats how most of these blog posts start, really: something I read makes me think so rapidly that I have no choice but set everything down (and hopefully, set everything in order). An editor Their contributions have always been historical facts and have even occasionally made it into the historical record. But that is one piece of the larger question: What lasts? In the poem Theatrical Improvisation, Smith based the discrete narratives on real-life sources (Notes). document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Book Review: come see about me, marvin by Brian G. Gilmore, On Idleness and Enchantment by Jeanine Hathaway. She also spent several years as a teacher consultant for the Illinois State Writing Project. When we think of the Declaration of Independence, we tend to think of the lofty rhetoric near the beginning: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But such eternally quotable assertions about natural law and political philosophy are a small percentage of the documents word count, because the Declaration of Independence was not written to be a treatise. is, inexplicably, the first of her three collections to be published in the UK. To something, where society depends upon technology, an that the youth of today, only knows of an artificial, manufactured existence. There is a long, excellent and bracingly scandalised poem, Watershed, about the pollution of a river in Ohio by the chemical giant DuPont. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. . Who is the intended audience (the He in the poem)?
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