She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. 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. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. 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. 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. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. 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. And let it slam me in the face The couplet looped in my head for weeks, and when I finally resorted to Google, I learned it was from Smiths first collection, The Bodys Question.I borrowed her books from the library and found them full of lines like the ones that had hooked me. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. The same desolate luxury, and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. I'd lug Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 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 think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. For the Garden of Eden This week, Retelling the American Story. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. It was Brooklyn. Teaching is inspiring for me. 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. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. I didnt set out to write a found poem, but when I got far enough into that research, I understood that I didnt want to merely metabolize all of these other real voices and then speak something imagined or invented out in my own voice; rather, I wanted to make space for these very compelling voices to speak to a reader the ways they had spoken to me. 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. 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? And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! Do you enjoy it? 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. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? Tracy K. Smith: Sure. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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. 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. 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. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. 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. 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. 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. So I thought, what could I do? 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. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. 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. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. 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? I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. 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. 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. Each ashamed of the same things: But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Its been great. 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. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. 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? WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. Poetry does not really resonate with me. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. Its not quite music, but the construction of these two parallel statements operated in a fashion similar to rhyme for me.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve said that writing your memoir Ordinary Light helped you work through your own thinking about race. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth 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. 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. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? I imagined my Civil War poem would be a one-time exploration of its time period, but when I came back a few years later to writing poetry, the concerns I found myself wrestling with were rooted in similar questions of history, race, compassion and justice. 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. 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. Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. The United States Welcomes You opens with the line, Why and by whose power were you sent? and closes with the line, How and to whom do we address our appeal? It was landing on that parallel syntax that told me the poem was over. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). 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. 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 Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. 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. 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. 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!) I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. 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