The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. 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 suppose those two choices speak to some of the overarching themes I consciously wanted the book to cleave to.WASHINGTON SQUARE: This last comment makes me wonder about your process assembling a book. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. Tracy K. Smith: Right. From a handbasket filled Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau 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. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 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. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. 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 glossy Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. Would you read it for us? Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. But I truly hope its more than that. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. taken Captive 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. Free UK p&p 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. And as many have observed since capitalism emerged (see William Blakes Satanic mills or Upton Sinclairs meatpacking plants), this tends to have baleful effects on how we conceive of social relationships and our own selves. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. You can read some of her poems on our website. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. Each ashamed of the same things: 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. 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. 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. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? 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. And let it slam me in the face MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. Or, generally, have some personae in your work been more challenging to access than others?SMITH: Sometimes, as in the case ofThe United States Welcomes You,a persona is a last resort. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Tracy K. Smith: An erasure poem is almost like a You know you see those government documents that are redacted, so there are these big black lines that delete certain elements of the text, and youre left with a different path through those ideas. 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. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. 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. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. Im Curtis Fox. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? Capitalism is the enemy and the stakes are high, because one of the only defenses against the degradations of our market-driven culture is to cleave to language that fosters humility, awareness of complexity, commitment to the lives of others and a resistance to the overly easy and the patently false.Embedded in all this is a specific conception of history. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. I'd lug Home the paper bags, doing Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. Born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California, Smith now lives in New Jersey, where she directs and teaches in Princeton University's Creative Writing Program. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and how that can both deepen and lighten your sense of grief. Poems are so great because they urge you to start thinking in honest and even vulnerable terms about your own life and your own experiences. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people 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. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. So I did that with this document, and what I found myself doing was deleting the text that was most specific in reference to England, and listening only to the first half, in many cases, of statements. I love chicken. 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. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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. 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. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? All Rights Reserved. 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. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. 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. Her Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. Its like having a best live-action award. 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. WebTracy K. Smith is a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Life On Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago. 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. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. 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. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. Its actually the last poem in your book. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Every small want, every niggling urge. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration 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. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? SMITH: The books have a lot in common. I think it has to do with the joy of losing oneself in something, which is what happens when a poem is really going somewhere. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just understand and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. 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. Poetry wasnt really on my radar thenat least nothing contemporarybut I was taking a required composition course, and in the classroom I spotted a poster bearing some lines from a poem. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. Then animals long believed gone crept down. Onto the darkening dusk. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. Smith and I corresponded by email about writing, reading, teaching, and her latest collection.WASHINGTON SQUARE: To start, I loved your new collection Wade in the Water. 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. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. 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. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. In a technique that feels like the opposite of erasure, I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It accumulates voices from African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and also from their families. / We never left the room. Her term will be up in April of 2019. 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? 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. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. Jill: That's a really cool origin story. 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? 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. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. 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