4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. We are not the isolated commodity seekers that capitalism and its armed enforcers demand we become, but rather all of us must be / / Buried deep within each other (Eternity). Her second collection is titled Duende, a Spanish word that eludes precise translation but denotes a quality of soulful artistic passion and inspiration; perhaps its this same quality that infuses her patiently lucid writing with visceral urgency, yielding lines that stick persistently in a readers heart and mind.Smith has written four poetry collections: The Body's Question, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Duende, which received the James Laughlin Award; Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and, most recently, Wade in the Water, published in April by Graywolf Press. What about you? But that isnt enough, and so I am also listening for clues in the sounds of what I have already said that might help me determine what to say next. 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? She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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. You pay attention because it wades in deep. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. Her term will be up in April of 2019. 1 No. 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. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. I feel, just this very instant, SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. Or was it just a sense of being spurred to write by the experience of working intensively with language?SMITH: Yi Lei has big questions. 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. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. 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. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. In October, Graywolf Press will Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. 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. 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. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. 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. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. 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? 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. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Her poems pose fundamental questionsabout love, time, mortality, and faith (Is It us, or what contains us? she asks in Life on Mars)and pursue them with imagination, rigor, a bold comfort with uncertainty, and an unswerving commitment to candor and humaneness. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. 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. Men with interests to protect seduce and extract pleasure from a young person, making her believe / / It was she who gave permission, just as patriarchal industrial capitalism has plundered the youth of mother Earth.Those awful, awful men. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. Redress in the most humble terms: WebPoet, librettist, and translator Tracy K. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States and is the Roger S. Berlind 52 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she also chairs the Lewis Center for the Arts. 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. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. 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. 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. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. His arms churn the air. 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. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration When she writes about love and desire, they are vehicles for the philosophical examination of humanity, of the ways we respond to authority, and more and more they are vehicles for thinking about the plight of the earth. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess I was really thinking about the moment when our desire to be public people became such a ravenous appetite. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. From a handbasket filled Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). Terrible. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. WebAnalyzes tracy k. smith's "life on mars" as an elegy as a whole with many poems pertaining to death and s struggle with the loss of her father. Did writing your memoir indeed open up new space for that? And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. 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. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Wade in the Water is, wonderfully, a Poet Laureates booka book that speaks for the poet herself and for us all, at a perilous moment in our history. 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. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 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. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Teaching is inspiring for me. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? Each ashamed of the same things: SMITH: The books have a lot in common. 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. On the dawning century. 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. 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. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. I think the title, which came after Id finished the poem, enlarged the initial scope of the poem. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! The last couplet, which read You are not the only one / Alive like that, lodged in my mind: even lacking any context for the words, I felt electrified by the truth they managed so simply to express, and by the sense of wise, intimate authority the second-person address carried. We were almost certain theywere. I often think of a wonderful Marie Howe poem called The Star Market which begins: The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday. These are the old, the sick, the people a healthy young person might recoil from. My thirties. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. I'd lug Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. I love chicken. Would you read it for us? K Smith. 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. More information available at www.susannalang.com. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. Lentils spilt a trail behind me WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. 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. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. The Good life with a sense of Innocence and privacy poems about how an author deals a lost in life! 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