The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. 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. 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. 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. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. All Rights Reserved. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? 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. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. 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? The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and Though its not like we have much of choice. Attention to the stranger crossing any road in any town or city; patience with the awkward encounter, the unknown intention; respect for the other whom you do not know, but with a slightest stretch of mind, imagine you do. Each ashamed of the same things: In fact, I think I picked up the pace on my own new poems, and wrote the bulk of Wade in the Water, precisely because of my work on Yi Leis poems. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. But I truly hope its more than that. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. Where I seldom shopped, WASHINGTON SQUARE: In Ordinary Light you recall your first poem, written in grade school and titled Humor. These days much of your work deals with weighty topics, though youve said in other interviews that writing often feels joyful. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. 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. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. 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? The same desolate luxury, The ones / Whose wealth is a kind of filth. Lest this ecological connection seem like a stretch, know that environmental disaster haunts Wade in the Water. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. It was Brooklyn. To capacity. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. Like the couplet that led me to her work, Smiths writing seems often to spring from an empathetic impulse, animated by common human experiences and invested in the insight we can gain by watching and listening to each other. I wanted to find a way of reminding myself that our 21st Century moment isnt self-contained; somewhere and somehow, it has bearing upon what happens moving forward throughout all of eternity, even after we humans are gone from this planet. 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. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. Take it easy. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. 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. 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. 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'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. Social media, this idea that if you have a life its only useful or only real if you can demonstrate it, I feel like the beginning of that frenzy or that appetite seems to line up in my mind with that period, yeah. 4 (September 2018). Would you read it for us? This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im intrigued by the extent to which youve referred to this poem as an autonomous entity: it seems to be voiced, what I read as fear or hesitation. Are there some poems that seem more or less transparent to you, more or less within your understanding and control, than others?SMITH: Oh, sure. I'd lug (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.). sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for. The fact that indelible images of water lived in both Richs article and several memorable NDEs also suggested that this poem might engage in a useful conversation with the title poem. Brought on a different manner of weather. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. Thanks for listening. It wasnt until I found myself preoccupied with questions of love and faith that I figured out how I wanted to work with the source material of the article. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. I think we have reached a moment where we need new myths.WASHINGTON SQUARE: The titles and cover art of your two most recent collections suggest a sort of pairing: Life on Mars, with its image of the Cone Nebula, points to the cosmic, while Wade in the Water presents as more earthbound. Im Curtis Fox. My approach was to expand it, to maybe pull it apart and make it into a poem in different sections, and I looked through some of his letters, I looked through his will, and found through erasure different statements within those documents. 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). This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. I felt like my sonnet was off, I always felt like there was something I needed to fix in the last couple of lines of that poem. What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? My natural process is to try and distribute the weight of the poem across these mechanisms, but I get very excited when the poem has other plans for itself and leans more toward a rhythmic energy, or toward the rigid structure of rhyme or repetition. Garden of Eden by Tracy K. Smith What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. At the time, I wasnt writing many poems; I was working on my prose memoir, and feeling, somewhat guiltily, that it might be a good idea to take the opportunity to produce a new poem. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. The narrow untouched hips. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. 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. 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? The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus. It is, implicitly, formed out of lives meshed into communities and societies; in place of capitalisms brutal sorting of human beings, Smith proposes another world. For a long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed. Then, after most of the manuscript was finished, I had the idea of marrying the facts from that article, in a found poem, with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivorspeople whose vocabularies almost across the board invoke the sense of Love as an original animating force, as the logic of the universe. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual 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 destroyed the lives of our Her second collection is titled Duende, a Spanish word that eludes precise translation but denotes a quality of soulful artistic passion and inspiration; perhaps its this same quality that infuses her patiently lucid writing with visceral urgency, yielding lines that stick persistently in a readers heart and mind.Smith has written four poetry collections: The Body's Question, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Duende, which received the James Laughlin Award; Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and, most recently, Wade in the Water, published in April by Graywolf Press. We were almost certain theywere. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? / We never left the room. I think it is the shift in vocabulary that reads loudest in the books, and that is really a private attempt at finding something newly engaging in my usual conundrums.WASHINGTON SQUARE: You direct the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University; though youre currently taking time off to focus on Laureate duties, youve taught and advised student poets for years. K Smith. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. 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. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. 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). Anyone can read what you share. She is a democratic writer, because her project in Wade in the Water is to curate American voices, particularly those of marginalized people, but also her own, and to situate these within the dark sweep of US history, with all its horrors, its anxieties, its potentialities. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. After you read this poem by the former U.S. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. 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 there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. 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. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. 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. 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. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. 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). Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. SMITH: For I Will Tell You the Truth About This I went in search of information about African American soldiers experience in the Civil War. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. 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. Do you enjoy it? 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. 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. For 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. In a 2016 interview for The Iowa Review, you commented, I never have figured out how to talk about race in my poetry in a way that feels authentic and organic, and Ordinary Light is a book in which Im thinking so much about race. Wade in the Water seems to engage this topic compellingly and with great assurance. 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. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. Not just me, not just people who are fresh out of whatever you do in the first years after graduate school into adulthood, thinking that Ill be happy if I can almost afford the things that I want, if I can somehow find a way to buy what life seems to offer to other people. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. What are you really getting at there? taken Captive 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. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. I dreamt that I was in a hotel where there was a mural of that poem, which was by him, painted on a wall, and I was reading it aloud to somebody who was with me. 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. More information available at www.susannalang.com. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. The known sun setting 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? But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. Smith mingles these themes in The World is Your Beautiful Younger Sister, where the body of a woman stands in for the planet itself; Smith plays on old Western conceptions of nature as a female resource to be commanded by men and their technologies. Bank-balance math and counting days. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. WebGarden of Eden By Tracy K. Smith 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 sore at the crook From a handbasket filled To capacity. This is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps.Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Eden. It is set in the dawning century of the neoliberal universe, where everything is a market; the speaker is a thirtysomething New Yorker scraping out a life in the long tail of the Great Recession, a specter that looms over many poems in the collection. 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. Her poems pose fundamental questionsabout love, time, mortality, and faith (Is It us, or what contains us? she asks in Life on Mars)and pursue them with imagination, rigor, a bold comfort with uncertainty, and an unswerving commitment to candor and humaneness. And then our singing. 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. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. Each one of us is a collaborative condition, The Everlasting Self puts it.Smith isnt a political theorist, psychologist, historian, or polemicist, though her poetry metabolizes elements of those discourses. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. 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. He has plundered our Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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. 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. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. But the point of material restitution isnt to create new hoards of capital or to employ it in fresh exploitative ventures; rather, the money these people are owed for their service to what was once a Republic is a form of human acknowledgement, a way of saying that their lives mattered. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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. 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. 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. 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. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. The glossy pastries! Im thinking particularly of your poem Ash, which, compared to some of the other poems in Wade in the Water, feels especially, conspicuously (and beautifully!) What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? 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