Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. 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. Though its not like we have much of choice. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? 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. Are there particular questions you think of as driving Wade in the Water?SMITH: For me, poems, no matter how they behave, are questions. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? A tea they refused to carry. 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. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. 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. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. Her term will be up in April of 2019. 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. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. Tracy K. Smith: Right. 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. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. And let it slam me in the face 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. 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 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. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. 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. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. Yet everyone lived with a sense of innocence and privacy. People are leading lives where they cannot afford rich and luxurious things and are ashamed of that, yet they also hold onto fear; they are afraid to let people see their actual status. And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. But translating is a different thing altogether. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. 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. 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. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. 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. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? 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. Lentils spilt a trail behind me Men with interests to protect seduce and extract pleasure from a young person, making her believe / / It was she who gave permission, just as patriarchal industrial capitalism has plundered the youth of mother Earth.Those awful, awful men. Poet Laureate of the United States; its a high perch for an American poet to land on. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. 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. Innocence and privacy. 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. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes 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. K Smith. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. It was so strange. I see The United States Welcomes You as another poem fixated upon this topic, though perhaps more obliquely; it seems to be voiced by someone whose aim is not compassionate, though there is space at the end of the poem where what I read as fear or hesitation enters in with the line What if we / Fail? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Was it especially difficult, then, to inhabit the persona in The United States Welcomes You? God said everything that was in that garden they could use to I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. 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. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). And then we find a way to have a conversation. 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. But those things came out in this poem. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration According to the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, this mental architecture almost inevitablybarring unusual cultural circumstances or great personal fortitudetakes the form of capitalist realism, which consists in the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it (Fishers italics). An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? Dang, you hear those birds? He has plundered our The glossy pastries! The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. 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. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. 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. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. 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. 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. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. After you read this poem by the former U.S. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. 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