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. Her work travels the world and takes on its voices; brings history and 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. God then planted a garden eastward in Eden (2:8), containing both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil (2:9). Adam is tasked with keeping or maintaining the garden. God tells him he can freely eat of every tree in the garden, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for to eat of that tree would be to die. Each ashamed of the same things: 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? Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. 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? Dang, you hear those birds? Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. Teaching is inspiring for me. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from 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. 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. She was named Poet Laureate of the United States in June 2017 and reappointed to the post for a second term last spring. Anyone can read what you share. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. 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). Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. WebGarden 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, Usually only after therapy Elbow sore at the crook From a handbasket filled To capacity. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? Or, generally, have some personae in your work been more challenging to access than others?SMITH: Sometimes, as in the case ofThe United States Welcomes You,a persona is a last resort. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? 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. As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. 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. ravaged our This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. And Life on Mars attempts to confront being human. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. Maybe I am asking my new poems to remind me that I am one of those people, that America is one of those people. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. SMITH: I wanted to open the book by invoking a sense of the eternal, to start with a nod to that scale. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. the Declaration of Independence erasure). Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. 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. On the dawning century. I like the way that project emphasizes that the various speakers and photo subjects have chosen to not only share parts of their own stories, but also decided how theyd like to be photographed. Thats the emphasis in each of my workshops, though sometimes we use themes to determine the readings, or we look at a specific type of poemsay long poems or poem cyclesover the course of the term. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. Mattan Masri- Week 16: Animation is not a Genre, Bella Furst Week 1 | Ranking Chicken and Why Chicken Nuggets are the Best, Bella Furst | Week 20 "The United States Welcomes You" by Tracy K. Smith, Bella Furst Week 4 | "Garden of Eden" by Tracy K. Smith. 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. Elbow sore at the crook Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. 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. Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. And then we find a way to have a conversation. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. 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. I see humor as one of the things that keeps us alive. She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. The opening poems of Wade in the Water seem to locate the divine in the worldly, sometimes to humorous effect: God drives around in a jeep, and the Garden of Eden turns out to be a grocery store. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for 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). 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. 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. 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. 1 No. I also agree. 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. I had the same problem choosing my poet. 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. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. While I labored to find 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. 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