Each ashamed of the same things: I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. WebGarden of Eden story: summary 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 Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. After all, it supposedly makes nothing happen, according to Auden (indeed, imagine a poem changing President Trumps mind on immigration), and it is the literary form for which capitalism has the least use, judging by its small contemporary readership.But poetry that tries to represent individual subjectivity is well positioned to depict life under capitalism and to render possible post- or anti-capitalist alternatives. From trees. 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. Are they something you mostly notice cropping up in poems youve already written, or do they often enter through conscious choices like the ones you describe with Watershed and Eternity?SMITH: I tend to write and bank poems slowly for long stretches of time, and then, when I have the extended time and space, or when my questions become more urgent, I sit down to a season of intense writing. / The wood was never spent. In Wade in the Water, the first section of Eternity begins It is as if I can almost still remember and closes with trees Ageless, constant, / Growing down into earth and up into history. Any thoughts on the challenges and possibilities of processing (or traversing) time through language? Tracy K. Smith: Well, I thought that this conversation about how incapable we as a nation are of having a conversation across political difference or racial difference, that motivated me to think about how poetry might be a kind of bridge. Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. 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. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. Its also the title of a poem in the books first section, and it reverberates in images of water throughout the collectionin the poems Watershed and The Everlasting Self, for example. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out 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 WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! In a quiet way, I am editing from the moment I begin writing, pushing myself to think more rigorously and vigorously and to live up to the model of discipline and courage that I encourage my students to embrace.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve written four poetry collections; when you started writing, you were a student, and now youre a teachernot to mention the nations Poet Laureate. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. I claim pension under the general law, argues one appellant; (i shall hav to send this with out a stamp / for I haint money enough to buy a stamp), another says in closing his letter to the President (all italics and spellings original).In an endnote Smith refers to such texts as erasure poems, a somewhat ironic term. Curtis Fox: So I wanted to ask you about your time as Poet Laureate, but before we get there, Id like to get straight to a poem. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. 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. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? And then our singing. While I labored to find This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. I love chicken. Innocence and privacy. 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. Brought on a different manner of weather. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. Dang, you hear those birds? 4 (September 2018). Im listening for possibilities in meaning and emotional tone, and trying to make useful formal decisions, in a way that is more similar than different to what happens when I am writing. She didn'tKnow me, but I believed her,And a terrible new acheRolled over in my chest,Like in a room where the drapesHave been swept back. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). and settlement here. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. This seems like a really relatable poem; I can relate to you in that it's hard to be satisfied with our lives and that as we've gotten older it's become easier to accept that (knowing that it's ok in your words). Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. One quick way to define capitalism is to observe that it entails the dedication of all things, all human objects and ideas and actions, to profit, to the continual accumulation of wealth in private hands. And then theres that line in Eternity: as though all of us must be / Buried deep within each other. How does poetry foreground or grapple with distinctions between the self and others? She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. 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. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. Poetry does not really resonate with me. The shoulders. I see it as my job to draw these things out, and offer the kinds of questions and observations that will help students move further into their strengths as writers, and to follow them toward an organic and genuine sense of their own deepening themes and questions. 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 am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. / We never left the room. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. From short lyrics to erasures to sectioned, multi-form elegies, all of Smiths work feels radically alivetraversing space and time; rife with cultural and historical references (to, for example, rock music; scientific research; classic movie scenes); and always illuminating with great care the complexities of consciousness and embodiment. Can I get you to read An Old Story? Weve come to, I dont know The things that felt so new are no longer new and maybe we feel a sense of their dark possibility, or at least I do. I feel, just this very instant, The author is efficient in pointing out that the men that once wrote and fought for equality, were the same to enforce and bring upon laws that oppressed Parenting is such an intimate experience, but we have all been parented and many of us have struggled through these moments when our childrens voices trumpeting their separate identities are both miracle and monumental challenge. At the end of the day, our lives arent quite the way we wish they were and it can be difficult to come to terms with that. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. 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 wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. This is such a gift, to be able to visit different parts of the country and spend time with people in different communities, and listen to each other, and talk to each other, and think about what poetry already means to people there, and get their feedback on poems that might be new to them. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? 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. Moreover, my sense of the nearness of the pastthe way that our public grappling with race and racial prejudice has begun to feel so much like a throwback from an earlier timeignited the urgent wish to hear something in an earlier periods voices that might be useful at this moment in the 21st Century.The title Wade in the Water comes from an African American spiritual, which seems apt for a collection that thinks so much about faith, race, and history (especially the Civil War), and for a poet whose previous book took its name from a song, too. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. A few years ago, actually several years ago now, I wrote a sonnet that I contributed to an anthology called Monticello in Mind, that was edited by Lisa Russ Spaar, and they were poems about Thomas Jefferson. I had the same problem choosing my poet. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. Her term will be up in April of 2019. 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. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. 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. Thanks for listening. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? SMITH: I think the only way students learn how to craft their own poems is by reading and learning to pay close attention to the specific choices that other writers make. SMITH: That poem was originally published as The Mowers. Then I read it in Washington, DC in 2016 and realized that the poems wish is for something graceful, wordless, grateful and sustaining to link these two imaginary strangers in common understanding. I liked setting up, via the title, the expectation of something rigid or dogmatic, and then allowing the poem itself to be gentle. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . I also agree. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration Let us know what you think of this podcast. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. 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. 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. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. On the dawning century. destroyed the lives of our 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. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. 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. Im talking about the many products, services, networks, trends, apps, tools, toys, as well as the drugs and devices for remedying their effects that are pitched to us nonstop: in our browser sidebars, in the pages of print media, embedded in movies and TV shows, on airplanes, in taxis and trains and even toilet stalls. Like a lot. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? 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. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. 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. He has Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? Meanwhile, Watershed brilliantly intermixes language from that Nathaniel Rich article with testimony by survivors of near-death experiences; was the process of choosing and assembling your found texts similar for this poem? The dead speak.The poem bores deep into the nations roots, back to the Civil War, which momentarily created opportunities for African Americans to participate in democracy as voters and officeholders, craftsmen and farmers, teachers and doctors; as free agents in America, not chattel. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. We were almost certain theywere. That sometimes comes out in revision, as was the case with Ash. The poem was little more than a list of ideas until I was able to sit down and hear a set of rhythmic parameters begin to assert force. So I thought, what could I do? That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Usually only after therapy 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. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. the Declaration of Independence erasure). 1 No. 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. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. Teaching is inspiring for me. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. And whats really exciting is its not a matter of me teaching people about these poems, its really a matter of us listening to each others responses, questions, associations. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. Some of these events have happened in large public spaces, so its been a matter of reading and then having maybe a public Q&A or more of a back and forth afterward. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. 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. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. Whats going on there? 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. Elbow sore at the crook She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. The narrow untouched hips. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. She does something trickier and more important: her work conjures up, with vivid particularity, at the level of the individual, what it is like to live under late capitalism. If capitalist institutions erase memory and sweep everything into an eternal present of consumption, poetry is a slow art with a long memory and an expansive capacity to imagine other worlds. Our repeated Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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