garden of eden tracy k smith analysisgarden of eden tracy k smith analysis

sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. In early drafts of that poem, I was struggling with the feeling that I had too much cherishing for the poems initial speaker, which I had imagined as a black man with his hands in the air, arms raised, eyes wide. So I inverted the poem, and wrote from the perspective of someone apprehending him. Its been great. the Declaration of Independence erasure). You can read some of her poems on our website. From a handbasket filled 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. 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? Smith assembles a collage of bad news, omitting punctuation to create a sense of anxious acceleration: dust vented from factory chimneys settled well-beyond the property lineentered the water tableconcentration in drinking water 3x international safety limitstudy of workers linked exposure with prostate cancerworth $1 billion in annual profit. 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? I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. 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. I didnt set out to write a found poem, but when I got far enough into that research, I understood that I didnt want to merely metabolize all of these other real voices and then speak something imagined or invented out in my own voice; rather, I wanted to make space for these very compelling voices to speak to a reader the ways they had spoken to me. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. 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 Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. 1 No. Tracy K. Smith: Right. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. In its nostalgia for the pastries, the exotic fruits, and the black beluga lentils of her past, the poem invokes blessing and abundance, removed in time but newly desired in this moment when we see. Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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. Can you tell us a little bit about this poem before you read it? 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. Poet Laureate of the United States; its a high perch for an American poet to land on. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. 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. Theyre intimate spaces where we can really stop and say, okay, heres a poem by this American poet whos voice I think is so important, what do you hear within it? They do a lot to remind us that we do have things to say to each other, that were interested in one anothers lives and vulnerabilities. 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. The glossy pastries! Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. on the high Seas Brought on a different manner of weather. the same desolate luxury, people lived paycheck to paycheck, unable to afford such luxuries like exotic fruits or pastries. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. In fact, I think I picked up the pace on my own new poems, and wrote the bulk of Wade in the Water, precisely because of my work on Yi Leis poems. 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. Tracy K. Smith served as U.S. poet laureate from 2017-19 and teaches at Princeton University. 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? 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. Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. 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? 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. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Curtis Fox: Now, if the Trump presidency has told us anything, its that racism is alive and well in America. On Montague Street 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. Capitalist realism is the language of the boardroom, the pop-up ad, the tax form, the PR statement, the subway banner, the chip-card reader, the medical bill, the Fidelity account. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. 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. 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. And for that to be unmitigated. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. 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. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. Like the couplet that led me to her work, Smiths writing seems often to spring from an empathetic impulse, animated by common human experiences and invested in the insight we can gain by watching and listening to each other. Attention to the stranger crossing any road in any town or city; patience with the awkward encounter, the unknown intention; respect for the other whom you do not know, but with a slightest stretch of mind, imagine you do. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. 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. But those things came out in this poem. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your work notably embraces questioningboth via interrogatives and through other formulations that reject single, easy truths (e.g., New Road Station names four things history metaphorically isnt, along with at least three that it perhaps might be). Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. 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. 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!) I think now, of course, I feel, and many of us feel differently about that. I imagined my Civil War poem would be a one-time exploration of its time period, but when I came back a few years later to writing poetry, the concerns I found myself wrestling with were rooted in similar questions of history, race, compassion and justice. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. SMITH: The older I get, the more I begin to think of Time as not just a force or a law of nature, but as a presence we live alongside, someone rather than something. Its about letting the unconscious mind into the process of problem-solving. the book in a spiritual key? For Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. Even if the question animating the poem is a serious one, that sense of being lost in the pursuit is, inevitably, a happy thingit is about finding something that can constitute a productive path through or out of the matter at hand. Tracy K. Smith, "Dusk" from Wade in the Water. 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. 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. WebAnalyzes tracy k. smith's "life on mars" as an elegy as a whole with many poems pertaining to death and s struggle with the loss of her father. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. 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. 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. 1 No. And let it slam me in the face To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. And in this awful year, thats something worth giving thanks for. WebGarden of Eden story: summary On the sixth day of Creation, God created man in the form of Adam, moulding him from the dust of the ground (Genesis 2:7), breathing the breath A similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children us like letters! I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste have been! Her life racism is alive and Well in America 1972, and many of feel... Swarms of Officers to harass our people like the poem could finally get somewhere to. Different and useful also evokes small moments with her children Massachusetts, on April 16,,. Due to the insinuation that this is an expensive shop, she reminisces being! Whose power were you sent worth giving thanks for weighty topics, though youve in... Poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases the found poems feels more like a! 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