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). From trees. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. destroyed the lives of our Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. Home the paper bags, doing Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. Every least leaf, Shivers in the sun, while we sit, bothered,Late, captive to this thing commanding. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. Declaration uses erasure to repurpose Thomas Jeffersons litany of complaints against King George, evoking the slaves forced migration to this country and their experience here of unspeakable oppression. 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. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. I think it has to do with the joy of losing oneself in something, which is what happens when a poem is really going somewhere. 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. 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. 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. 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. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. Thanks for listening. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. and settlement here. 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). Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. In the poem, Declaration , by Tracy K. Smith, the author is able to criticize a powerful document and bring to light the racial injustices in modern-day society. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Teaching is inspiring for me. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). All of these fruits hold positive or affectionate connotations to their names, something she likely wished for after therapy (she earlier states she typically shops here almost exclusively after therapy). Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. 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. 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. The same desolate luxury, Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. 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. 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. 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. Its been something I will be sad to cease doing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to go out across the country at this time in particular. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. Leaving therapy, she feels a profound longing for the grocery store, which becomes a sort of temple where spiritual and aesthetic desire mix (The glossy pastries! taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for WebThe story Garden of Eden introduces the first man and woman that God created. Do you enjoy it? She didn'tKnow me, but I believed her,And a terrible new acheRolled over in my chest,Like in a room where the drapesHave been swept back. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. Once, a bag of black beluga 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. 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. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. 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. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. 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 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. 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. 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. 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). / The wood was never spent. In Wade in the Water, the first section of Eternity begins It is as if I can almost still remember and closes with trees Ageless, constant, / Growing down into earth and up into history. Any thoughts on the challenges and possibilities of processing (or traversing) time through language? In October, Graywolf Press will I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. 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. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. Her writing contests the deeply isolating structures of capitalism by imagining self and nation as a collaborative condition, one that must be endlessly reconstructed and defended in the face of xenophobia, sexual violence, economic ruin, social anomie, and political disintegration. 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. 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. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. WebGarden of Eden 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 Whats going on there? Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. 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. Tracy K. 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