Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. Each ashamed of the same things: Would you read it for us? 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. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. So, when I was working on other poems in this book that were wrestling with history, I thought, oh, Ill go back to that Jefferson poem and see if I can make it right. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). 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. 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. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. 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. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? All Rights Reserved. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau-du-Roi, a fishing village in the Carmargue, on the Mediterranean coast of France. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? and settlement here. 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. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? How did the book come together and find its shape? 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. My thirties. Anyone can read what you share. 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. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Poems are so great because they urge you to start thinking in honest and even vulnerable terms about your own life and your own experiences. 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. You can read some of her poems on our website. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. Once, a bag of black beluga Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. 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. But in other events, Ive gone into almost curated spaces, like rehab facilities or churches, or we have an upcoming trip that will take us to a retirement community. Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. In early drafts of that poem, I was struggling with the feeling that I had too much cherishing for the poems initial speaker, which I had imagined as a black man with his hands in the air, arms raised, eyes wide. So I inverted the poem, and wrote from the perspective of someone apprehending him. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? 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. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. Usually only after therapy And then we find a way to have a conversation. Have your process and preoccupations changed? This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. Whats going on there? How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. But I truly hope its more than that. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. the Declaration of Independence erasure). Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. Incidentally, the only other poem in the book whose title was chosen well in advance of the poems composition was Eternity. I knew that I wanted to write a poem that invoked a never-ending sense of scale. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? 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? This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. 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. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! Are they something you mostly notice cropping up in poems youve already written, or do they often enter through conscious choices like the ones you describe with Watershed and Eternity?SMITH: I tend to write and bank poems slowly for long stretches of time, and then, when I have the extended time and space, or when my questions become more urgent, I sit down to a season of intense writing. 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. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. Bank-balance math and counting days. Im Curtis Fox. I felt like my sonnet was off, I always felt like there was something I needed to fix in the last couple of lines of that poem. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. 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. Life on Mars is pointed into the future as a way of reckoning with all of that, while Wade in the Water takes up history in a similar effort. L.I. 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. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Life On Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago. Where I seldom shopped, 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. 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. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. Curtis Fox: So thats the opening poem in your book, and as you said, its set in the early years of the century when the poet was more {innocence}, but there are hints that all is not well, and you write Everyone I knew was living / The same desolate luxury, / Each ashamed of the same things: / Innocence and privacy. 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. 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). Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. K Smith. 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. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. Nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going of really think about it, but its erasure! Course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into.! 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