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. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. The opening poems of Wade in the Water seem to locate the divine in the worldly, sometimes to humorous effect: God drives around in a jeep, and the Garden of Eden turns out to be a grocery store. 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. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. For Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? Teaching is inspiring for me. Onto the darkening dusk. 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. For me, the memory of catching a poem in that fashion seeps into the sense of peace the poem contemplates, causing it to feel fleeting, like something it would be easy, if youre not working very deliberately, to lose.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your poems have a habit of calling chronology into question. We were almost certain theywere. 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. 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. I had been powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in January 2016. God then planted a garden eastward in Eden (2:8), containing both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (2:9). Adam is tasked with keeping or maintaining the garden. God tells him he can freely eat of every tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for to eat of that tree would be to die. And then we find a way to have a conversation. / We never left the room. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Let us know what you think of this podcast. 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 served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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)? Due to the insinuation that this is an expensive shop, she reminisces of being in her thirties and seeing the The glossy pastries! and the Pomegranate, persimmon, [and] quince! sold there. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. 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!) This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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 I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. 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. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. 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. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? I think the topic has also just come up much more frequently and relentlessly in the years since Trayvon Martins murder.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Another subject you grapple with in Ordinary Light is belief in God. A tea they refused to carry. 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. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? Even a simple poem like The Good Life grew large, for me at least,when the image of a woman journeying for water from a village without a well arrived. 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. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. 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. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? 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. Though its not like we have much of choice. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. Once, a bag of black beluga The ones / Whose wealth is a kind of filth. Lest this ecological connection seem like a stretch, know that environmental disaster haunts Wade in the Water. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. Home the paper bags, doing 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. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. Doing so would mean transforming language in its social, political, psychological, and aesthetic dimensions; it would mean altering how we speak in public, of other people, and in private, to ourselves.Poetry might not seem like the best way to catalyze a revolution. 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. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? 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. Would you read it for us? 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. Song allows us to hope for new connections: The interior sections of Smiths collection lift up others voices and names, to which she joins her own. 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. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. How did the book come together and find its shape? One quick way to define capitalism is to observe that it entails the dedication of all things, all human objects and ideas and actions, to profit, to the continual accumulation of wealth in private hands. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. 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). WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking a few years ago with Gregory Pardlo, you mentioned that music, image, form and departure are the things Im conscious of managing in a poem. Can you say a little more about balancing these qualitiesand, perhaps, how you know when one or two of them want to predominate? Every small want, every niggling urge. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. In part, I think its true to say that the selves Im most committed to in that book are the ones our culture continues to make most vulnerable: women, people of color, the lonely and disenfranchised. Her WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. 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. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. The gesture of writing an appeal and appending ones name to it parallels her lyric recuperations, because both replace capitalisms terms (where individuals are parts of a vast machine dedicated to profit) with the changeable conditions of authentic selfhood, where every breath matters even if it produces nothing that can be monetized. 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. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. 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