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's the only dream like that that I've had. And then theres that line in Eternity: as though all of us must be / Buried deep within each other. How does poetry foreground or grapple with distinctions between the self and others? Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. 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. Inspired by a photograph taken during a Black Lives Matter protest after city police killed Alton Sterling, a black man, the poem imagines a confrontation between state power and another African American body. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. You can read some of her poems on our website. 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. I dreamt that I was in a hotel where there was a mural of that poem, which was by him, painted on a wall, and I was reading it aloud to somebody who was with me. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. 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. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. For me, the memory of catching a poem in that fashion seeps into the sense of peace the poem contemplates, causing it to feel fleeting, like something it would be easy, if youre not working very deliberately, to lose.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your poems have a habit of calling chronology into question. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. What made you choose to start (and end?) As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. 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. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. 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. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. K Smith. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 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. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. And then we find a way to have a conversation. ravaged our The first trip was to Sante Fe, New Mexico, to the Santa Fe Indian School and some neighboring pueblos, and I realized this is joy. Everyone I knew was living In June 2017, Smith was named U.S. poet laureate. They do a lot to remind us that we do have things to say to each other, that were interested in one anothers lives and vulnerabilities. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. 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. Theyre intimate spaces where we can really stop and say, okay, heres a poem by this American poet whos voice I think is so important, what do you hear within it? Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Would you read it for us? 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. 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 opening poems of Wade in the Water seem to locate the divine in the worldly, sometimes to humorous effect: God drives around in a jeep, and the Garden of Eden turns out to be a grocery store. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. I sensed my work as one of curating rather than composing. 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. Even if the question animating the poem is a serious one, that sense of being lost in the pursuit is, inevitably, a happy thingit is about finding something that can constitute a productive path through or out of the matter at hand. 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. Its also the title of a poem in the books first section, and it reverberates in images of water throughout the collectionin the poems Watershed and The Everlasting Self, for example. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? I think in these most recent poems, Im trying to figure something out about the possibility of something like universal oneness. Im talking about the many products, services, networks, trends, apps, tools, toys, as well as the drugs and devices for remedying their effects that are pitched to us nonstop: in our browser sidebars, in the pages of print media, embedded in movies and TV shows, on airplanes, in taxis and trains and even toilet stalls. Dang, you hear those birds? The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. the book in a spiritual key? 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. Heavy lifting, to be sure. 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. The known sun setting He has plundered our If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. While I labored to find I'd lug WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. For a long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed. Then, after most of the manuscript was finished, I had the idea of marrying the facts from that article, in a found poem, with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivorspeople whose vocabularies almost across the board invoke the sense of Love as an original animating force, as the logic of the universe. Have your process and preoccupations changed? A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. 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. Im listening for possibilities in meaning and emotional tone, and trying to make useful formal decisions, in a way that is more similar than different to what happens when I am writing. 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. On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. 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. Someone has likened it to the poem in my previous book called The Good Life which is about being so hungry, and having a job but not making enough money. 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. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). 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. 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. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. 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 I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. 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. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. God said everything that was in that garden they could use to Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including The glossy pastries! Id squint into it, or close my eyes / And let it slam me in the face / The known sun setting / On the dawning century. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. 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). Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. 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