I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? And as many have observed since capitalism emerged (see William Blakes Satanic mills or Upton Sinclairs meatpacking plants), this tends to have baleful effects on how we conceive of social relationships and our own selves. In Garden of Eden, the first poem in the collection, Smith remembers shopping at a grocery store in Brooklyn that was actually called the Garden of Eden. I think it urges the viewer to submit to the terms and values of the subjects rather than cling to any pre-existing sense of what dignity or autonomy ought to look like. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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). This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. 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. 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. 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. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. Weve come to, I dont know The things that felt so new are no longer new and maybe we feel a sense of their dark possibility, or at least I do. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Where I seldom shopped, Onto the darkening dusk. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. Would you read it for us? For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. 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. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. This is so brilliant, this is such a clear idea. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. This is such a gift, to be able to visit different parts of the country and spend time with people in different communities, and listen to each other, and talk to each other, and think about what poetry already means to people there, and get their feedback on poems that might be new to them. 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? L.I. 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). How did you arrive at the title, and what do you hope it suggests or encapsulates for readers?While working on the book, I had the experience of attending a ring shout and feeling so deeply moved and shaken by the performance of Wade in the Water. After that evening, I suspected that Wade in the Water was going to be the title of my book. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? 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. 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. Its actually the last poem in your book. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. Tracy K. Smiths unforgettable poem from Wade in the Water feels so potent right now. 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. 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. And then we find a way to have a conversation. Elbow sore at the crook What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. Her And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. Im Curtis Fox. Some of these events have happened in large public spaces, so its been a matter of reading and then having maybe a public Q&A or more of a back and forth afterward. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus. It is, implicitly, formed out of lives meshed into communities and societies; in place of capitalisms brutal sorting of human beings, Smith proposes another world. Garden 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, To capacity. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. 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. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. I also agree. 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! Educated at Harvard and Columbia, teaching at Princeton, named the US Poet Laureate in 2017, and already freighted with laurels (her previous book, Life on Mars, won the 2012 Pulitzer), Smith is no undiscovered talent. destroyed the lives of our Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. 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. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. More information available at www.susannalang.com. Yes, these are black voices that have been effaced from history, buried in government archives and exhumed by a few scholars on whose work Smith draws. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. SMITH: I think my strength is the image. Race is one of the chief subjects of Wade in the Water, a site wherein my wish to contemplate the elusive nature of compassion gets played out. 1 No. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im also curious, hearing about how you created the found poemsare there any poets whose work has inspired or instructed you specifically in this domain of found/collaged poetry, or poetry that incorporates historical source documents?SMITH: I have taught CD Wrights One Big Self, in both the poetry and photography formats, to my students in the past. Have your process and preoccupations changed? Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. 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. Smith has her head in the stars. 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. 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