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? Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. It was Brooklyn. Thats one reason that the poem Eternity, which is set in China and dedicated in part to Yi Lei, felt important to include in the book, because much of my own new work comes directly out of that relationship. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Have your process and preoccupations changed? 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. 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? Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. 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. 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. 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. What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? 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 I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. Bank-balance math and counting days. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. Jill: That's a really cool origin 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. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. This week, Retelling the American Story. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. And then our singing. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. But before we get to the analysis, lets briefly summarise the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. 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 of life into Adams nostrils. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. 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. 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 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. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. But those things came out in this poem. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. For the Garden of Eden How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? How did you arrive at the title, and what do you hope it suggests or encapsulates for readers?While working on the book, I had the experience of attending a ring shout and feeling so deeply moved and shaken by the performance of Wade in the Water. After that evening, I suspected that Wade in the Water was going to be the title of my book. 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. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. 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. All Rights Reserved. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. She comes home with her paper bags and looks at the numbers to her name and it ultimately slam[s] [her] in the face; she perceives a life of luxury and craves more from life than that of which she can afford. rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. 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. Dang, you hear those birds? 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. Some do a lot, some very little. Poet Laureate of the United States; its a high perch for an American poet to land on. 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. Price and value, Smith reminds us, are not the same thing.In a recent lecture published by the Washington Post, she calls poetry a radically re-humanizing force, one that comes closest to bringing us into visceral proximity with the lives and plights of others. She contrasts it with the market-driven language that divides everything into a brutal war of all against all and debilitates our minds: I also, more and more, recognize its value as a remedy to the various things that have bombarded our lines of sight and our thought space, and that tamper with our ability or even our desire to listen to that deeply rooted part of ourselves. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. On the dawning century. 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). Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth It was no longer important or necessary, and I wanted to just listen to these fragments within this founding document, and feel the sort of startled andI dont know, just a sense of inevitability that those statements kind of gathered around themselves. 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. But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. 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? His arms churn the air. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). 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. 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. 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 have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. The dead speak.The poem bores deep into the nations roots, back to the Civil War, which momentarily created opportunities for African Americans to participate in democracy as voters and officeholders, craftsmen and farmers, teachers and doctors; as free agents in America, not chattel. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. Inspired by a photograph taken during a Black Lives Matter protest after city police killed Alton Sterling, a black man, the poem imagines a confrontation between state power and another African American body. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau What about you? Usually only after therapy The known sun setting Her term will be up in April of 2019. 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 They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. 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. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. 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. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. 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. 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. Heavy lifting, to be sure. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. The shoulders. A few years ago, actually several years ago now, I wrote a sonnet that I contributed to an anthology called Monticello in Mind, that was edited by Lisa Russ Spaar, and they were poems about Thomas Jefferson. 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. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. 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. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? She lives with her husband in Chicago. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. I love chicken. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. 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. 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