The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. 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. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. 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. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and Free UK p&p Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. 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. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. 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. I like the way that project emphasizes that the various speakers and photo subjects have chosen to not only share parts of their own stories, but also decided how theyd like to be photographed. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration 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. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. But I truly hope its more than that. 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? Ive been sharing work by other American poets, and readings of my own poems as well, and just asking a very simple question, which is, what do you notice? God said everything that was in that garden they could use to The United States expanding industrial wealth in the nineteenth century was inseparable from this machine; American capital has always been massed on the backs on nonwhite people.These appellants use the lingo of capitalism, insofar as they are asking for money. 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. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. 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. But those things came out in this poem. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? 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. Her term will be up in April of 2019. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. Like a lot. 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. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. 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. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? 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. 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. 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. The glossy 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). They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. Tracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). The first line introduces the readers to both the casual toneof the poem and draws them in to the discussion with which the poem is concerned, prompting them to read the next line in order to answer the question implicitly posed in the first. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. What a profound longing You pay attention because it wades in deep. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. Its been great. 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. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. 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. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. 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. 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. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. 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. 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. Leaving therapy, she feels a profound longing for the grocery store, which becomes a sort of temple where spiritual and aesthetic desire mix (The glossy pastries! 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. 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. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. 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. WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. 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. 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. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. If I read a poem about my father, sometimes if the poem is doing its work, you might begin to think about your relationship with your father, even if it might be different from what my poem says. 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. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. the Declaration of Independence erasure). Capitalism, Fisher intones, is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.Is there any alternative to the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen (Fisher again)? She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. 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. We took new stock of one another. Youve talked a bit about Wade in the Waters genesis, but more broadly, how early on do you typically begin to sense a manuscripts overarching themes? WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. Thats the emphasis in each of my workshops, though sometimes we use themes to determine the readings, or we look at a specific type of poemsay long poems or poem cyclesover the course of the term. 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. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. 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. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. 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. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. 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. 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 if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. 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. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. 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. 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. 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. Have your process and preoccupations changed? 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. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. 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. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 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. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. More information available at www.susannalang.com. 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. 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? How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? 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. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. Several poems in Wade in the Water were written after translating poems of hers called In the Distance and Green Trees Greet the Rainstorm.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Section III of Wade in the Water ends with a Political Poem: a vision of workers cutting grass and communicating intermittently by raising their arms. 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. He has 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. 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