I love the things my students are willing to learn, and the risks they are willing to take with their poems. Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. 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. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. 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. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. I struggle a lot with interpreting metaphorical words often used by poets and underlying meanings behind small phrases. Though its not like we have much of choice. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. 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. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. 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. 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. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes Teaching is inspiring for me. A few years ago, actually several years ago now, I wrote a sonnet that I contributed to an anthology called Monticello in Mind, that was edited by Lisa Russ Spaar, and they were poems about Thomas Jefferson. 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? It was Brooklyn. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. I think it is the shift in vocabulary that reads loudest in the books, and that is really a private attempt at finding something newly engaging in my usual conundrums.WASHINGTON SQUARE: You direct the undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Princeton University; though youre currently taking time off to focus on Laureate duties, youve taught and advised student poets for years. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. I dont think the poems lay out answers to any of that, incidentally, but their manner of exploring these questions feels fruitful.WASHINGTON SQUARE: One of the most striking pieces in the book is the long poem you mentioned, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. Im curious about the research that goes into a piece like thishow did you come across the source documents, and when did you realize they could constitute a poem? 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!) 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. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. destroyed the lives of our 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. 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. I think we have reached a moment where we need new myths.WASHINGTON SQUARE: The titles and cover art of your two most recent collections suggest a sort of pairing: Life on Mars, with its image of the Cone Nebula, points to the cosmic, while Wade in the Water presents as more earthbound. Let us know what you think of this podcast. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. What is it that I could do in this role that would be different and useful. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. Have your process and preoccupations changed? 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. If capitalist institutions erase memory and sweep everything into an eternal present of consumption, poetry is a slow art with a long memory and an expansive capacity to imagine other worlds. Under the intense weight of capital, this poisoned realism infects all other forms of discourse, connection, economy. 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. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Whatwhat on earthconstitutes a meaningful life in a market society?Markets shape mindsets. Yet everyone lived with a sense of innocence and privacy. People are leading lives where they cannot afford rich and luxurious things and are ashamed of that, yet they also hold onto fear; they are afraid to let people see their actual status. Poetry does not really resonate with me. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. 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. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. Like a lot. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. 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). Wade in the Water in particular enlists a whole chorus of voices, including historical ones resurrected almost verbatim in collages and erasures. 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. RHINO Poetry is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, Poets &Writers, Inc, The Poetry Foundation, and by The MacArthur Funds for Arts and Culture at The Richard H. Driehaus Foundation. Meanwhile, Watershed brilliantly intermixes language from that Nathaniel Rich article with testimony by survivors of near-death experiences; was the process of choosing and assembling your found texts similar for this poem? Once, a bag of black beluga K Smith. I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. 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. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Redress in the most humble terms: Consider, that is, the languages and practices we have developed to exist within Western consumer markets. Smith and I corresponded by email about writing, reading, teaching, and her latest collection.WASHINGTON SQUARE: To start, I loved your new collection Wade in the Water. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. taken Captive On Montague Street Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? What a profound longing on the high Seas 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. That work is something I can do when I dont have any ideas for poems, and it draws me into conversation with another poetic sensibility. Her Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. 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 first line introduces the readers to both the casual My thirties.Everyone I knew was livingThe same desolate luxury,Each ashamed of the same things:Innocence and privacy. He put the two of them in a garden where they did not have to provide for themselves. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. 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). 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