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. After all, it supposedly makes nothing happen, according to Auden (indeed, imagine a poem changing President Trumps mind on immigration), and it is the literary form for which capitalism has the least use, judging by its small contemporary readership.But poetry that tries to represent individual subjectivity is well positioned to depict life under capitalism and to render possible post- or anti-capitalist alternatives. The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? I think it has to do with the joy of losing oneself in something, which is what happens when a poem is really going somewhere. Hi Tracy, thanks for coming on the podcast. 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. I found two books that really had a powerful impact upon me: Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, edited by Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer; and Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. Similarly, Theatrical Improvisation draws on the voices of immigrants as well as those who targeted them in the months before and after the 2016 Presidential election. Heavy lifting, to be sure. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. We spoke of this, when we spoke, if we spoke, on our zoom screensor in the backyard with our podfolk. 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. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. Everyone hunkers down alone with their stuff, just as capitalism wants it.Two vicious features of the system, which Im hardly the first to note, are its enforcement of rigid hierarchies (think about the racial pay gap, for example) and its wholesale razing of the biospheric life-support systems that allow civilization to exist in the first place. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. 1 No. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Im listening for possibilities in meaning and emotional tone, and trying to make useful formal decisions, in a way that is more similar than different to what happens when I am writing. 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. ravaged our 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 opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. 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). Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. Elbow sore at the crook I'd squint into it, or close my eyes 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 My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. 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. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? Its like having a best live-action award. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Everyone I knew was living Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? 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 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. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. More information available at www.susannalang.com. And if Trump has done anything positive for the country, hes inadvertently, by his own racist statements and actions, put the conversation front and center in American life. It was so strange. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. For the Garden of Eden For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. Free UK p&p On Montague Street Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. and settlement here. Its been great. 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 Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. I discovered Tracy K. Smiths work early in my first year of college. I also thought when this poem first came to me, this is what poetry is for, this is what poetry can do. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Something flickers, not fleeing your face. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). The conversations that can ensue after weve sat together listening to poems that have activated some of our own private urgencies, are useful. Home the paper bags, doing Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. the book in a spiritual key? It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. One of the women greeted me.I love you, she said. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. 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. 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. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. 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. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. 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. 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. Onto the darkening dusk. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. I claim pension under the general law, argues one appellant; (i shall hav to send this with out a stamp / for I haint money enough to buy a stamp), another says in closing his letter to the President (all italics and spellings original).In an endnote Smith refers to such texts as erasure poems, a somewhat ironic term. 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. Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. Curtis Fox: And what about the desolate luxury? K Smith. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and how that can both deepen and lighten your sense of grief. 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. 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. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. 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? Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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