SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. Yes, these are black voices that have been effaced from history, buried in government archives and exhumed by a few scholars on whose work Smith draws. I had the same problem choosing my poet. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. The narrow untouched hips. And I remember, I was sitting reading this document, and suddenly I got to the region where all of these complaints against England were being raised, and I felt that they were speaking so clearly to the history of black life in this country, and suddenly everything else that I was working on, that I thought I wanted to gather around the idea of Jefferson, just went away. 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 It was Brooklyn. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Declaration uses erasure to repurpose Thomas Jeffersons litany of complaints against King George, evoking the slaves forced migration to this country and their experience here of unspeakable oppression. 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. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. All Rights Reserved. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: In addition to the found poems in Wade in the Water and your previous books, youve also written erasures (including an erasure of the Declaration of Independence) and translated poetry from the Chinese. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking a few years ago with Gregory Pardlo, you mentioned that music, image, form and departure are the things Im conscious of managing in a poem. Can you say a little more about balancing these qualitiesand, perhaps, how you know when one or two of them want to predominate? 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. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau Or how you can sometimes see the humor in your own dire or embarrassing situation, and how that can be both frustrating and something you file away under Things that Will Be Funny in the Future. 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. RHINO Poetry is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, Poets &Writers, Inc, The Poetry Foundation, and by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. 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? The shoulders. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. Though its not like we have much of choice. She lives with her husband in Chicago. I chose the wrong there are ways to hold pain like night follows daynot knowing how tomorrow went down.it hurts like never when the always is now,the now that time won't allow.there is no manner of tomorrow, nor shape of todayonly like always having My brother still bites his nails to the quick,but lately hes been allowing them to grow.So much hurt is forgotten with the horizonas backdrop. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. Terrible. In early drafts of that poem, I was struggling with the feeling that I had too much cherishing for the poems initial speaker, which I had imagined as a black man with his hands in the air, arms raised, eyes wide. So I inverted the poem, and wrote from the perspective of someone apprehending him. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. We were almost certain theywere. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. Like a lot. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Tracy K. Smith: I think about the incredible systematic and orderly attempts to negate black life throughout the history of this country, and then I think about the voices and the contributions to democracy that Blacks have offered, and those two things speak really powerfully to each other. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. It was so strange. While I labored to find Teaching is inspiring for me. Thanks for listening. That work is something I can do when I dont have any ideas for poems, and it draws me into conversation with another poetic sensibility. Anyone can read what you share. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for This week, Retelling the American Story. But that isnt enough, and so I am also listening for clues in the sounds of what I have already said that might help me determine what to say next. After you read this poem by the former U.S. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). Incidentally, the only other poem in the book whose title was chosen well in advance of the poems composition was Eternity. I knew that I wanted to write a poem that invoked a never-ending sense of scale. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration 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. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. 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. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. 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. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. A tea they refused to carry. Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! This poem is set in the beginning of the shift in our perspective, this idea that privacy is something that we can live above, in a way. Heavy lifting, to be sure. Price and value, Smith reminds us, are not the same thing.In a recent lecture published by the Washington Post, she calls poetry a radically re-humanizing force, one that comes closest to bringing us into visceral proximity with the lives and plights of others. She contrasts it with the market-driven language that divides everything into a brutal war of all against all and debilitates our minds: I also, more and more, recognize its value as a remedy to the various things that have bombarded our lines of sight and our thought space, and that tamper with our ability or even our desire to listen to that deeply rooted part of ourselves. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. From a handbasket filled But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. 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? It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. Thats one reason that the poem Eternity, which is set in China and dedicated in part to Yi Lei, felt important to include in the book, because much of my own new work comes directly out of that relationship. 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. 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. In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. 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