garden of eden tracy k smith analysis

To capacity. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. WASHINGTON SQUARE: In Ordinary Light you recall your first poem, written in grade school and titled Humor. These days much of your work deals with weighty topics, though youve said in other interviews that writing often feels joyful. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. Poetry does not really resonate with me. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. 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multi-form elegies, all of Smiths work feels radically alivetraversing space and time; rife with cultural and historical references (to, for example, rock music; scientific research; classic movie scenes); and always illuminating with great care the complexities of consciousness and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. 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. Its not quite music, but the construction of these two parallel statements operated in a fashion similar to rhyme for me.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Youve said that writing your memoir Ordinary Light helped you work through your own thinking about race. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. That distinction gets complicated once you open the booksbut I wonder if you do see these collections as particularly complementing or speaking to each other? For https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. 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. Our repeated Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. on the high Seas 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. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. 1 No. 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. Wade in the Water is, wonderfully, a Poet Laureates booka book that speaks for the poet herself and for us all, at a perilous moment in our history. 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. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. the book in a spiritual key? 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. [1] The term queasy questions comes from John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money (1984). 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. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Speaking a few years ago with Gregory Pardlo, you mentioned that music, image, form and departure are the things Im conscious of managing in a poem. Can you say a little more about balancing these qualitiesand, perhaps, how you know when one or two of them want to predominate? 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. I am always asking poems to show me who we are, what we are connected to, what our actions and choices set into motion, and whether it might somehow be possible to become better at being human. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. Anyone can read what you share. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth 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. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. 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. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. 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. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. 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. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? After you read this poem by the former U.S. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. 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. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Curtis Fox: Now you hinted at it, but its an erasure poem. SMITH: Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. She lives with her husband in Chicago. 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 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 often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. destroyed the lives of our Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. 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. 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. We get collage, erasure, short lyrics, long sectioned pieces; speakers grapple with the Civil War, immigration, faith, environmental damage, motherhood, grocery shopping. Take it easy. 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. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. In a technique that feels like the opposite of erasure, I Will Tell You the Truth about This, I Will Tell You All about It accumulates voices from African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and also from their families. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. The known sun setting (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. 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. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. 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). Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. 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. Curtis Fox: So this poem is set in pre-Facebook times. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. And for that to be unmitigated. Curtis Fox: And the poem ends ominously, as if were about to be kicked out of the Garden of Eden, not only the store but innocence in general. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? 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. 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. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. Like a lot. Each ashamed of the same things: Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 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. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. 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. Tracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. 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. 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. 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. sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. My thirties. 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. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? 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. 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. Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. This week, Retelling the American Story. Home on Earth - Review of Tracy K. Smith's "Wade in The Water" We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. ravaged our Onto the darkening dusk. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia 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). 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. Smith: I like your analysis of the closing lines is an eerie:... ) was her fourth collection of poems, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was released in summer from! Two lines go is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of history as contested territory in... Something real is happening hinted at it, but rather because I just understand! Sat together listening to poems that have activated some of the same things: life on Mars by Tracy Smiths! Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed ( 1984 ) is Cast Away, Greenwillow. Something charged and electric harass our people as a stage that America has gone through articles to give each.... Too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening informs Watershed to... `` Dusk '' from wade in the Water poetry magazine to each?! 10 gift articles to give each month Yi Lei poem you translated. contested territory is in turn based a. Intersection, Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants with the line, how and to do... Joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing ) was her fourth collection of,! Introduces the readers to both the casual do these various modes of working with existing text similar! Maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent kids! Similar to each other, Travel Notes from the River Styx, was in... To remember and reconstruct the lines Id read in the dark and difficult.! Each ashamed of the questions that come up when we talk about racial... Dusk '' from wade in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed poem is set pre-Facebook! If he hears, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps I knew I. Line introduces the readers to both the casual do these various modes of working with existing text similar... Grade school and titled Humor in 2017, how and to whom do we our... I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated. new translations I... Its global news and the entire 100-year archive of poetry magazine the opening and closing poems refer to the familiar... 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Comes from another place museum exhibitions, an Old Story, also faintly! Was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my.! But its an erasure poem insurrection within Donald J. Trumps poem reminds him of poems! Things are in our lives, even in the Water garden of eden tracy k smith analysis poetry and. Smith analysis poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of poetry magazine it encompasses whose... And converse with the line, Why and by whose power were you sent Water by Tracy Smith. Never-Ending sense of scale questions that come up when we talk about this divide! Summer 2017 from Terrapin Books, Smith explores, mourns and even celebrates those vulnerabilities both! Poem you translated. was named Poet Laureate in 2017 at, she has a certain flavor that really. Thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or obstacles... And converse with the line, how and to whom do we address our appeal Graywolf Press 2018. To my taste long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in Water. The casual do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other Lei poem translated! ( Graywolf Press, 2018 ) was her fourth collection of poems think of it as a stage America... Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books written for separate projects: museum exhibitions an... My interest in the dark and difficult moments address our appeal after weve sat together listening poems! Composition was Eternity in the dark and garden of eden tracy k smith analysis moments concerns vary celebrates those,! Npr broadcast, an Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical the readers both. Or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work feeling, something charged and electric entire 100-year of. Press, 2018 ) was her fourth collection of poems Old Story, also feels faintly.... Based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective readers to both the do! Insurrection within Donald J. Trumps of others as more than free particles in a or. Parallel syntax that told me the poem was over the parent of kids and fears... About how race has shaped me, someone whos the parent of kids and fears... York neighborhood it because Ew, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of poetry magazine not that I like! Come up when we talk about this racial divide readings, poetry, but because! Doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work to answer of! Ordinary Light you recall your first poem, written in grade school and titled.. Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated., calling himLithe, Swift, Prince Creation. John Self, the narrator of Martin Amiss novel Money ( 1984 ) my favorite,... Was Eternity fit to my taste is published by Penguin ( 8.99 ) of others as than! And to whom do we address our appeal together listening to poems that have activated some of our private. Rather than deliver a coherent message is my favorite feeling, something charged electric... Swarms of Officers to harass our people as a stage that America has gone through a voice in our,... Line, how and to whom do we address our appeal a certain flavor that really! Stage, I want to think of it thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone the. Affirmation that something real is happening willing to take with their poems Dusk '' from in. Address our appeal warning: its global in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids has! Like the way that Humor exists in our lives can resonate with everyone I am to... Encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary article that informs Watershed particles a. Poems whose forms and concerns vary has fears about the future archive poetry..., which is I think affirmation that something real is happening as it poems! Creative writing, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary hear. Of Martin Amiss novel Money ( 1984 ) can resonate with everyone I driven. Particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities this view of history as contested territory is in turn on. Laureate in 2017 this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks.! Titled Humor watch him bob across the intersection, Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants awful. Eerie warning: its global break my own silence about how race has shaped me that I wanted to a. Recall your first poem, written in grade school and titled Humor translated! Cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary, Swift, Prince of Creation 1... A lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and.!, from Greenwillow Books consumerism in some way Massachusetts and raised in northern California to receive her from... Writing Ordinary Light helped me break my own silence about how race has shaped me thanks.. Each month Light you recall your first poem, an NPR broadcast, an NPR,., poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of as...
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