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. 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. 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: That's the only dream like that that I've had. 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. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. Too late. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. 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. 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. On the dawning century. I chose the wrong there are ways to hold pain like night follows daynot knowing how tomorrow went down.it hurts like never when the always is now,the now that time won't allow.there is no manner of tomorrow, nor shape of todayonly like always having My brother still bites his nails to the quick,but lately hes been allowing them to grow.So much hurt is forgotten with the horizonas backdrop. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. And sometimes there are things that seem to point in very different directions as a result of whats been eliminated. 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. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. 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. Let us know what you think of this podcast. Selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. 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. 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. Was there a poem or group of poems it coalesced around?SMITH: Thank you. K Smith. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. to bear. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Home the paper bags, doing WASHINGTON SQUARE: In addition to the found poems in Wade in the Water and your previous books, youve also written erasures (including an erasure of the Declaration of Independence) and translated poetry from the Chinese. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. Our repeated In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. She has also written a memoir,Ordinary Light(2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. 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. Its like having a best live-action award. Its been great. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. But in other events, Ive gone into almost curated spaces, like rehab facilities or churches, or we have an upcoming trip that will take us to a retirement community. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. 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. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. 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. 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. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. 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. And whats really exciting is its not a matter of me teaching people about these poems, its really a matter of us listening to each others responses, questions, associations. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. 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). Redress in the most humble terms: And I love how Wright allows the text of her various speakers to become a kind of chorus. Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? Im Curtis Fox. Tracy K. Smith: Hi, thanks for having me. 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. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. We took new stock of one another. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. What happens to our relationships with others under these conditions which have resolved personal worth into exchange value, as Marx and Engels write in The Communist Manifesto? The ones / Whose wealth is a kind of filth. Lest this ecological connection seem like a stretch, know that environmental disaster haunts Wade in the Water. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. 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. For the Garden of Eden Her What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. Curtis Fox: So thats the opening poem in your book, and as you said, its set in the early years of the century when the poet was more {innocence}, but there are hints that all is not well, and you write Everyone I knew was living / The same desolate luxury, / Each ashamed of the same things: / Innocence and privacy. A tea they refused to carry. You know, popular myths that we cleave to as Americans, and there are a lot of poems in this book that have titles that are biblical. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. Its been something I will be sad to cease doing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to go out across the country at this time in particular. 1 No. SMITH: I think the only way students learn how to craft their own poems is by reading and learning to pay close attention to the specific choices that other writers make. 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. 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? MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. ravaged our We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. Not just me, not just people who are fresh out of whatever you do in the first years after graduate school into adulthood, thinking that Ill be happy if I can almost afford the things that I want, if I can somehow find a way to buy what life seems to offer to other people. She lives with her husband in Chicago. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. Elbow sore at the crook 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. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. 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. 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