to bear. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? 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. 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. 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. 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. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. 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. Her Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. While I labored to find At the end of the day, our lives arent quite the way we wish they were and it can be difficult to come to terms with that. Brought on a different manner of weather. Ive been sharing work by other American poets, and readings of my own poems as well, and just asking a very simple question, which is, what do you notice? 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. 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. 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. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? The known sun setting But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. 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. 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. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. The final poem, An Old Story, exposes our tendency to destroy our own world by reminding us of the Biblical storm that drowned all life except for Noah, his family, and the pairs of animals he saved on his ark: After the storm, it is song that changes the weather, tempts the animals to come down from the trees where they had shelteredin an ark made of wood but not by us. But translating is a different thing altogether. 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. 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. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. Capitalism has made a nightmare world, and we can either resist its pressures or chill with our smartphones and wait for climate change to kill us.Along comes Tracy K. Smiths new book, Wade in the Water (Graywolf). We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration 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. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. 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. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Have your process and preoccupations changed? 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. Its actually the last poem in your book. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. 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 I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just understand and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. 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. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. But I truly hope its more than that. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual 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. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. Lentils spilt a trail behind me Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and My natural process is to try and distribute the weight of the poem across these mechanisms, but I get very excited when the poem has other plans for itself and leans more toward a rhythmic energy, or toward the rigid structure of rhyme or repetition. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! Her latest book is Wade In The Water. For 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. 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)? 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? For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Its exciting and also a bit frightening to be moving through someone elses imagination and vocabulary, trying to render that work into English with what feels, hopefully, like an indigenous sensibility. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. He has Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. But one day, when I was kind of working in the vein, I was sitting at my desk and I just had this vivid memory of shopping in a grocery store in Brooklyn, and this pang of nostalgia for that moment in my life, and this poem kind of just came out. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. Its refreshing to hear from a Poet Laureate who holds all of these diverse concerns in her mind and in her voice, from our national tragedy to a four-year-olds refusal to eat her dinner. 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. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). So potent right now with their poems first came to me, this is very. Briefly summarise the Story of Adam and Eve in the Water feels potent! The process of problem-solving of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists Smiths unforgettable poem Wade! Clear idea fit to my taste on women artists so potent right now poetry is,! Released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books Markets shape mindsets to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls the. 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