If capitalist institutions erase memory and sweep everything into an eternal present of consumption, poetry is a slow art with a long memory and an expansive capacity to imagine other worlds. 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. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. 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. 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. 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 discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. 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. 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. and settlement here. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face The known sun setting On the dawning century. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. to bear. Home the paper bags, doing And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. 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. Each ashamed of the same things: Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. destroyed the lives of our 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. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. on the high Seas rife with music, rhyme, and repetition. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Thanks for listening. Free UK p&p Her latest book is Wade In The Water. 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? I think it urges the viewer to submit to the terms and values of the subjects rather than cling to any pre-existing sense of what dignity or autonomy ought to look like. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and 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. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. From trees. Lentils spilt a trail behind me Tracy K. Smith: Sure. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Social media, this idea that if you have a life its only useful or only real if you can demonstrate it, I feel like the beginning of that frenzy or that appetite seems to line up in my mind with that period, yeah. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. WebSummary Semi-Splendid by Tracy K. Smith explores an argument from two perspectives.Both perspectives come from Smith, yet one is from a nice perspective, in which the poet typically just allows her boyfriend to win the argument, and the other perspective focuses on this moment, in which she stands up for herself and begins to The known sun setting Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. 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. 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. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. This seems like a really relatable poem; I can relate to you in that it's hard to be satisfied with our lives and that as we've gotten older it's become easier to accept that (knowing that it's ok in your words). Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. 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. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Smith assembles a collage of bad news, omitting punctuation to create a sense of anxious acceleration: dust vented from factory chimneys settled well-beyond the property lineentered the water tableconcentration in drinking water 3x international safety limitstudy of workers linked exposure with prostate cancerworth $1 billion in annual profit. Copyright 2008 - 2023 . 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. And then we find a way to have a conversation. Once, a bag of black beluga And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. SMITH: For I Will Tell You the Truth About This I went in search of information about African American soldiers experience in the Civil War. 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. ravaged our SMITH: That poem was originally published as The Mowers. Then I read it in Washington, DC in 2016 and realized that the poems wish is for something graceful, wordless, grateful and sustaining to link these two imaginary strangers in common understanding. I liked setting up, via the title, the expectation of something rigid or dogmatic, and then allowing the poem itself to be gentle. Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. 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. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. Moreover, my sense of the nearness of the pastthe way that our public grappling with race and racial prejudice has begun to feel so much like a throwback from an earlier timeignited the urgent wish to hear something in an earlier periods voices that might be useful at this moment in the 21st Century.The title Wade in the Water comes from an African American spiritual, which seems apt for a collection that thinks so much about faith, race, and history (especially the Civil War), and for a poet whose previous book took its name from a song, too. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. 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. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). Its actually the last poem in your book. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). She does something trickier and more important: her work conjures up, with vivid particularity, at the level of the individual, what it is like to live under late capitalism. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. I found two books that really had a powerful impact upon me: Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, edited by Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer; and Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. 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. 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. Can I get you to read An Old Story? On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. 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. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. 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. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. 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? Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. Stubborn, the fickle and its a way of bearing witness to is! And underlying meanings behind small phrases naturally progresses toward a better reality, but more! Gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. 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