garden of eden tracy k smith analysisgarden of eden tracy k smith analysis

(I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) 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. Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. Redress in the most humble terms: 4 (September 2018). / 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 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. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. Some do a lot, some very little. 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)? What about you? Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. taken Captive Dang, you hear those birds? In a recent podcast of her conversation with Curtis Fox of the Poetry Foundation, Tracy K. Smith says that being Poet Laureate is a kind of service (Off the Shelf, July 31, 2018). Poetry allows us to bridge our differences, to remind ourselves that we do have things to say to each other, that we are interested in each others lives and vulnerabilities. In this new collection, Smith explores, mourns and even celebrates those vulnerabilities, both national and individual. 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Thats fascinating! For 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 Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. I felt like my sonnet was off, I always felt like there was something I needed to fix in the last couple of lines of that poem. The narrow untouched hips. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? 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. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. 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. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. I know that her poems inspired some of my own, if even only in tone. 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. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? Each one of us is a collaborative condition, The Everlasting Self puts it.Smith isnt a political theorist, psychologist, historian, or polemicist, though her poetry metabolizes elements of those discourses. The point of capitalism is to get more capital, which allows you to either procure stuff (things or experiences) or just hoard the lucre, deriving a weird pleasure from that. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. 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. 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. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. 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). The dead speak.The poem bores deep into the nations roots, back to the Civil War, which momentarily created opportunities for African Americans to participate in democracy as voters and officeholders, craftsmen and farmers, teachers and doctors; as free agents in America, not chattel. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. Its been great. 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). We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. 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. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. 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. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. destroyed the lives of our It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? Curtis Fox: So I wanted to ask you about your time as Poet Laureate, but before we get there, Id like to get straight to a poem. Innocence and privacy. L.I. Her book,Life on Mars(2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. 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. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. My poems strain for the kind of freedom to rise above Time on occasion, to see through it, to make use of what once (when I needed it) might have been invisible to me and what now (after the fact) can seem plain. So, when I was working on other poems in this book that were wrestling with history, I thought, oh, Ill go back to that Jefferson poem and see if I can make it right. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. We poor oppressed ones, one writes Lincoln, appeal to you, and ask fair play.Arranged by Smith, these voices, often speaking in nonstandard English, become part of the American literary corpus. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. WebTracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). / Pomegranate, persimmon, quince!), even though the ultimate act is to be a good consumer and buy things. the Declaration of Independence erasure). I love chicken. 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. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. The last lines of the poems final section point this up with staggering intensity: My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.I am the applicant for pensionon account of having servedunder the name Lewis Smithwhich was the name I wore beforethe days of slavery were overMy correct name is Hiram Kirkland.Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henrybut neither is my correct name. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. And its a way of bearing witness to what is otherwise unspeakable. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. But the point of material restitution isnt to create new hoards of capital or to employ it in fresh exploitative ventures; rather, the money these people are owed for their service to what was once a Republic is a form of human acknowledgement, a way of saying that their lives mattered. Even a simple poem like The Good Life grew large, for me at least,when the image of a woman journeying for water from a village without a well arrived. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. Attention to the stranger crossing any road in any town or city; patience with the awkward encounter, the unknown intention; respect for the other whom you do not know, but with a slightest stretch of mind, imagine you do. From trees. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. 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? I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. Is it strange to say love is a languageFew practice, but all, or near all speak?Even the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not loves bladeSizing up the hearts familiar meat? And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. The known sun setting 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 poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. What are you really getting at there? And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. 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. This seems like a really relatable poem; I can relate to you in that it's hard to be satisfied with our lives and that as we've gotten older it's become easier to accept that (knowing that it's ok in your words). As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. 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: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. WebTracy K. Smith is a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. I was dreaming that I was reading aloud a mural that had been made of a Carl Phillips poem, when suddenly my waking mind broke in to say: Thats not a Carl Phillips poembut if you write it down it can be yours! I woke up and struggled to remember and reconstruct the lines Id read in the dream. In a 2016 interview for The Iowa Review, you commented, I never have figured out how to talk about race in my poetry in a way that feels authentic and organic, and Ordinary Light is a book in which Im thinking so much about race. Wade in the Water seems to engage this topic compellingly and with great assurance. 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. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Tracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). The first line introduces the readers to both the casual toneof the poem and draws them in to the discussion with which the poem is concerned, prompting them to read the next line in order to answer the question implicitly posed in the first. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. SMITH: For I Will Tell You the Truth About This I went in search of information about African American soldiers experience in the Civil War. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. and settlement here. I imagined my Civil War poem would be a one-time exploration of its time period, but when I came back a few years later to writing poetry, the concerns I found myself wrestling with were rooted in similar questions of history, race, compassion and justice. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. This poem is set in the beginning of the shift in our perspective, this idea that privacy is something that we can live above, in a way. / We never left the room. Onto the darkening dusk. 1 No. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. 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. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. My approach was to expand it, to maybe pull it apart and make it into a poem in different sections, and I looked through some of his letters, I looked through his will, and found through erasure different statements within those documents. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. It wasnt until I found myself preoccupied with questions of love and faith that I figured out how I wanted to work with the source material of the article. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. In my earlier work, persona poems have been a tool by which Ive sought to learn something about some other experience or perspective that is remote from my own. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. 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? I'd lug Everyone I knew was living 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. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and to bear. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. Teaching is inspiring for me. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. 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. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. 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. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. 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 Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? How did the book come together and find its shape? Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. 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. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. 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. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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? Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. 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. We were almost certain theywere. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth I dont think the poems lay out answers to any of that, incidentally, but their manner of exploring these questions feels fruitful.WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of the most striking pieces in the book is the long poem you mentioned, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. Im curious about the research that goes into a piece like thishow did you come across the source documents, and when did you realize they could constitute a poem? The core of the book, because it was the poem I had written earliest in the process, always seemed to me to be the long Civil War poem, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. That poem was commissioned for an exhibition of Civil War photographs at the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery back in 2013. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. 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. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. Free UK p&p That process involves weekly meetings where we are looking at and critiquing new poems, but also trying to listen to the themes and questions driving the work. 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. 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. 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 At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? It was so strange. 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. 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). Jill: That's a really cool origin story. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. 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, If I read a poem about my father, sometimes if the poem is doing its work, you might begin to think about your relationship with your father, even if it might be different from what my poem says. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im intrigued by the extent to which youve referred to this poem as an autonomous entity: it seems to be voiced, what I read as fear or hesitation. Are there some poems that seem more or less transparent to you, more or less within your understanding and control, than others?SMITH: Oh, sure. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. Have your process and preoccupations changed? Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Curtis Fox:So how did that translate into what you have done, or what you are doing as Poet Laureate? Our repeated Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). The United States Welcomes You opens with the line, Why and by whose power were you sent? and closes with the line, How and to whom do we address our appeal? It was landing on that parallel syntax that told me the poem was over. 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