They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. 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. 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 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. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your work notably embraces questioningboth via interrogatives and through other formulations that reject single, easy truths (e.g., New Road Station names four things history metaphorically isnt, along with at least three that it perhaps might be). My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. the book in a spiritual key? Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . The last lines of the poems final section point this up with staggering intensity: My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.I am the applicant for pensionon account of having servedunder the name Lewis Smithwhich was the name I wore beforethe days of slavery were overMy correct name is Hiram Kirkland.Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henrybut neither is my correct name. 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. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and 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 I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. 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. And then our singing. The final poem, An Old Story, exposes our tendency to destroy our own world by reminding us of the Biblical storm that drowned all life except for Noah, his family, and the pairs of animals he saved on his ark: After the storm, it is song that changes the weather, tempts the animals to come down from the trees where they had shelteredin an ark made of wood but not by us. What made you choose to start (and end?) WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. But the poet respectfully appropriates them, placing each within her linguistic universe, where things like line breaks and image patterns matter, and as such the erasure is partly undone. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. 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. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? 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? We took new stock of one another. We are not the isolated commodity seekers that capitalism and its armed enforcers demand we become, but rather all of us must be / / Buried deep within each other (Eternity). Poetry does not really resonate with me. Would you read it for us? And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? 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. WebAnalyzes tracy k. smith's "life on mars" as an elegy as a whole with many poems pertaining to death and s struggle with the loss of her father. 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. 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. 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. 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. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. 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. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and 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. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. Each ashamed of the same things: The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. Our repeated 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. This would be a democratic project: a writer who takes it on would have to imagine a community where individuals arent just monads bouncing around the economy but are instead subjects whose lives matter regardless of how much or little capital is attached to them. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. 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. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. The gesture of writing an appeal and appending ones name to it parallels her lyric recuperations, because both replace capitalisms terms (where individuals are parts of a vast machine dedicated to profit) with the changeable conditions of authentic selfhood, where every breath matters even if it produces nothing that can be monetized. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. 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. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. SMITH: The older I get, the more I begin to think of Time as not just a force or a law of nature, but as a presence we live alongside, someone rather than something. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. 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. 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. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from 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? Its like having a best live-action award. 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. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. Then animals long believed gone crept down. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. But translating is a different thing altogether. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. For instance, an entire found poem (Smiths term) called Watershed comprises narratives of near-death experience juxtaposed with fragments from a New York Times story about a DuPont chemical disaster that poisoned an entire Ohio community. Heavy lifting, to be sure. 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. Mattan Masri- Week 16: Animation is not a Genre, Bella Furst Week 1 | Ranking Chicken and Why Chicken Nuggets are the Best, Bella Furst | Week 20 "The United States Welcomes You" by Tracy K. Smith, Bella Furst Week 4 | "Garden of Eden" by Tracy K. Smith. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. I also agree. Its exciting and also a bit frightening to be moving through someone elses imagination and vocabulary, trying to render that work into English with what feels, hopefully, like an indigenous sensibility. What happens to our relationships with others under these conditions which have resolved personal worth into exchange value, as Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto? Her writing contests the deeply isolating structures of capitalism by imagining self and nation as a collaborative condition, one that must be endlessly reconstructed and defended in the face of xenophobia, sexual violence, economic ruin, social anomie, and political disintegration. Race is one of the chief subjects of Wade in the Water, a site wherein my wish to contemplate the elusive nature of compassion gets played out. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau-du-Roi, a fishing village in the Carmargue, on the Mediterranean coast of France. All of these fruits hold positive or affectionate connotations to their names, something she likely wished for after therapy (she earlier states she typically shops here almost exclusively after therapy). Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Doing so would mean transforming language in its social, political, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions; it would mean altering how we speak in public, of other people, and in private, to ourselves.Poetry might not seem like the best way to catalyze a revolution. The glossy pastries! Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). In the poem, Declaration , by Tracy K. Smith, the author is able to criticize a powerful document and bring to light the racial injustices in modern-day society. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. I wanted to draw-in the sense of the living spirit at the heart of that nights encounter, and at the heart of the tradition of the ring shout itself: the sense of love and deliverance, of faith and compassion, of justice and survival.Watershed was a poem I knew I wanted to write. 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. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face The known sun setting On the dawning century. Its refreshing to hear from a Poet Laureate who holds all of these diverse concerns in her mind and in her voice, from our national tragedy to a four-year-olds refusal to eat her dinner. WebGarden of Eden What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, Usually only after therapy Elbow I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. The first trip was to Sante Fe, New Mexico, to the Santa Fe Indian School and some neighboring pueblos, and I realized this is joy. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. Whats going on there? Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? 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. 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. American Poet who is born in Massachusetts, you cant half-read it same luxury! 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