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. 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. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau-du-Roi, a fishing village in the Carmargue, on the Mediterranean coast of France. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. 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. Are they something you mostly notice cropping up in poems youve already written, or do they often enter through conscious choices like the ones you describe with Watershed and Eternity?SMITH: I tend to write and bank poems slowly for long stretches of time, and then, when I have the extended time and space, or when my questions become more urgent, I sit down to a season of intense writing. Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. The United States expanding industrial wealth in the nineteenth century was inseparable from this machine; American capital has always been massed on the backs on nonwhite people.These appellants use the lingo of capitalism, insofar as they are asking for money. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and Due to the insinuation that this is an expensive shop, she reminisces of being in her thirties and seeing the The glossy pastries! and the Pomegranate, persimmon, [and] quince! sold there. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. Born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California, Smith now lives in New Jersey, where she directs and teaches in Princeton University's Creative Writing Program. 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. While I labored to find MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. Heavy lifting, to be sure. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. Consider the everyday poetics of capitalism. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. the Declaration of Independence erasure). And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. I had been powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in January 2016. Free UK p&p She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. Tracy K. Smith: Right. 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 was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. Poems are so great because they urge you to start thinking in honest and even vulnerable terms about your own life and your own experiences. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. 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. You can read some of her poems on our website. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Let us know what you think of this podcast. Im thinking particularly of your poem Ash, which, compared to some of the other poems in Wade in the Water, feels especially, conspicuously (and beautifully!) The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. Once I have a body of realized poems that feels substantialsay, 30 or 40 pagesI start to hunt for the different things the poems seem to be saying to one another in an effort to decipher what is missing. 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. Thanks for listening. But those things came out in this poem. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. He has It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. It was Brooklyn. Do you enjoy it? SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. 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? sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for. Bank-balance math and counting days. 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. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. The gesture of writing an appeal and appending ones name to it parallels her lyric recuperations, because both replace capitalisms terms (where individuals are parts of a vast machine dedicated to profit) with the changeable conditions of authentic selfhood, where every breath matters even if it produces nothing that can be monetized. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. 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. 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. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Once, a bag of black beluga Innocence and privacy. The couplet looped in my head for weeks, and when I finally resorted to Google, I learned it was from Smiths first collection, The Bodys Question.I borrowed her books from the library and found them full of lines like the ones that had hooked me. On the dawning century. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess I was really thinking about the moment when our desire to be public people became such a ravenous appetite. 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. Every small want, every niggling urge. 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. 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. I will say it flat-out: I do not like poetry. 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. 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. The Garden of Eden is a semiautobiographical account based on Hemingways honeymoon with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, in May, 1927, at Le Grau My thirties. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. 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. Her 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. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. To capacity. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. I see it as my job to draw these things out, and offer the kinds of questions and observations that will help students move further into their strengths as writers, and to follow them toward an organic and genuine sense of their own deepening themes and questions. His comic jogCarries him nowhere. 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. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. From short lyrics to erasures to sectioned, multi-form elegies, all of Smiths work feels radically alivetraversing space and time; rife with cultural and historical references (to, for example, rock music; scientific research; classic movie scenes); and always illuminating with great care the complexities of consciousness and embodiment. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. Smith received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third book of poems, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press, 2011). Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. 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