The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. 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. 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. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. 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. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. SMITH: I think the aim of most poems is to erase some measure of the distance between one person and another, usually between the poems speaker and its reader, or between the poems speaker and its subject. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and 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. For I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. 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. Her 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. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. 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? The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess I was really thinking about the moment when our desire to be public people became such a ravenous appetite. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau 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. to bear. I imagined my Civil War poem would be a one-time exploration of its time period, but when I came back a few years later to writing poetry, the concerns I found myself wrestling with were rooted in similar questions of history, race, compassion and justice. He has If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? 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. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. 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. Innocence and privacy. Every small want, every niggling urge. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Wade in the Water is, wonderfully, a Poet Laureates booka book that speaks for the poet herself and for us all, at a perilous moment in our history. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. the book in a spiritual key? In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? The same desolate luxury, 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. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. It teases us; it helps us sometimes, so that what is happening now feels like it has already occurred once before; it bridles adults and happily submits to being largely ignored by children. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Do you enjoy it? This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. Is it strange to say love is a languageFew practice, but all, or near all speak?Even the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not loves bladeSizing up the hearts familiar meat? Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. I had been powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in January 2016. 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. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Onto the darkening dusk. The point of capitalism is to get more capital, which allows you to either procure stuff (things or experiences) or just hoard the lucre, deriving a weird pleasure from that. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. The United States expanding industrial wealth in the nineteenth century was inseparable from this machine; American capital has always been massed on the backs on nonwhite people.These appellants use the lingo of capitalism, insofar as they are asking for money. But one day, when I was kind of working in the vein, I was sitting at my desk and I just had this vivid memory of shopping in a grocery store in Brooklyn, and this pang of nostalgia for that moment in my life, and this poem kind of just came out. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. Everyone I knew was living Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. But those things came out in this poem. Some do a lot, some very little. 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. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. 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. and settlement here. She lives with her husband in Chicago. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. 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. (Jonathan Bachmans renowned shot shows two policemen in body armor arresting a woman named Ieshia Evans; the black-clad officers whip out their handcuffs for no discernible reason as Evans stands in silent dignity, wearing a long dress.). The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. 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. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? 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