She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. 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. Capitalism is the enemy and the stakes are high, because one of the only defenses against the degradations of our market-driven culture is to cleave to language that fosters humility, awareness of complexity, commitment to the lives of others and a resistance to the overly easy and the patently false.Embedded in all this is a specific conception of history. I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. 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. 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. Born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California, Smith now lives in New Jersey, where she directs and teaches in Princeton University's Creative Writing Program. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. His arms churn the air. A sense of regret that I hadnt perhaps actively articulated to myself found a way into the poem. Those banked poems help me get started, but inevitably the work generated during that intense period is characterized by recurring themes, images, vocabulary, and obsessions. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. The glossy God said everything that was in that garden they could use to Her latest book is Wade In The Water. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. I wanted to draw-in the sense of the living spirit at the heart of that nights encounter, and at the heart of the tradition of the ring shout itself: the sense of love and deliverance, of faith and compassion, of justice and survival.Watershed was a poem I knew I wanted to write. I feel, just this very instant, 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. What made you choose to start (and end?) When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? 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. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. 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. 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 also agree. I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. Tracy K. Smith begins her poem The Good Life with a subordinate clause: Whenpeople talk (Line 1). The first line introduces the readers to both the casual toneof the poem and draws them in to the discussion with which the poem is concerned, prompting them to read the next line in order to answer the question implicitly posed in the first. A tea they refused to carry. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. The same desolate luxury, Smith mingles these themes in The World is Your Beautiful Younger Sister, where the body of a woman stands in for the planet itself; Smith plays on old Western conceptions of nature as a female resource to be commanded by men and their technologies. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. Tracy K. Smith: Mhmm, yeah. 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. My thirties. What a profound longing 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. The last couplet, which read You are not the only one / Alive like that, lodged in my mind: even lacking any context for the words, I felt electrified by the truth they managed so simply to express, and by the sense of wise, intimate authority the second-person address carried. The narrow untouched hips. The author of four books of poems, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. 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. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. The feeling that we arent content with how things are in our lives can resonate with everyone I am sure. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. What about you? For Where I seldom shopped, NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. Moreover, my sense of the nearness of the pastthe way that our public grappling with race and racial prejudice has begun to feel so much like a throwback from an earlier timeignited the urgent wish to hear something in an earlier periods voices that might be useful at this moment in the 21st Century.The title Wade in the Water comes from an African American spiritual, which seems apt for a collection that thinks so much about faith, race, and history (especially the Civil War), and for a poet whose previous book took its name from a song, too. 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 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. This gives even her most personal poems a decidedly political charge: they feel revolutionary in their openness of spirit, their attention to a range of voices. In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. Men with interests to protect seduce and extract pleasure from a young person, making her believe / / It was she who gave permission, just as patriarchal industrial capitalism has plundered the youth of mother Earth.Those awful, awful men. He has plundered our Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (1972-), listen to her read it here. 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. From trees. And that stage, I want to think of it as a stage that America has gone through. 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? WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. It teases us; it helps us sometimes, so that what is happening now feels like it has already occurred once before; it bridles adults and happily submits to being largely ignored by children. to bear. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Life On Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago. SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just understand and was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon Tracy. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. 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. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. Tracy K. Smith: I have, and I didnt know if I would. 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? Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. This is my favorite feeling, something charged and electric. The shoulders. Perhaps stepping into that subject matter imparted a courageor simply a vocabulary and an awarenessthat hasnt vanished. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintent. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Anyone can read what you share. 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. 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. 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. Smith continues that it was Brooklyn and everyone she had known was living. In a recent podcast of her conversation with Curtis Fox of the Poetry Foundation, Tracy K. Smith says that being Poet Laureate is a kind of service (Off the Shelf, July 31, 2018). Poetry allows us to bridge our differences, to remind ourselves that we do have things to say to each other, that we are interested in each others lives and vulnerabilities. In this new collection, Smith explores, mourns and even celebrates those vulnerabilities, both national and individual. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. 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. So I thought, what could I do? 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. We often want more from life than is achievable and all-in-all, thats okay. You can read some of her poems on our website. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. 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 Social media, this idea that if you have a life its only useful or only real if you can demonstrate it, I feel like the beginning of that frenzy or that appetite seems to line up in my mind with that period, yeah. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. 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. Though its not like we have much of choice. The couplet looped in my head for weeks, and when I finally resorted to Google, I learned it was from Smiths first collection, The Bodys Question.I borrowed her books from the library and found them full of lines like the ones that had hooked me. 1 No. From short lyrics to erasures to sectioned, multi-form elegies, all of Smiths work feels radically alivetraversing space and time; rife with cultural and historical references (to, for example, rock music; scientific research; classic movie scenes); and always illuminating with great care the complexities of consciousness and embodiment. Poetry wasnt really on my radar thenat least nothing contemporarybut I was taking a required composition course, and in the classroom I spotted a poster bearing some lines from a poem. SMITH: I think the aim of most poems is to erase some measure of the distance between one person and another, usually between the poems speaker and its reader, or between the poems speaker and its subject. But the point of material restitution isnt to create new hoards of capital or to employ it in fresh exploitative ventures; rather, the money these people are owed for their service to what was once a Republic is a form of human acknowledgement, a way of saying that their lives mattered. 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? Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for 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. The author is efficient in pointing out that the men that once wrote and fought for equality, were the same to enforce and bring upon laws that oppressed Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. I dreamt that I was in a hotel where there was a mural of that poem, which was by him, painted on a wall, and I was reading it aloud to somebody who was with me. 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. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. Maybe what I really want to know is what stands between us and such a possibility. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. Innocence and privacy. Poems, like movies, are good at indulging this wish. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. I love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems. 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. The first line introduces the readers to both the casual 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? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. Then, after the creation of poems winds down, I get practical and try to clarify, amplify, trim and arrange to the most powerful effect. Its actually the last poem in your book. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. Teaching is inspiring for me. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. He has Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. For Smith, this is a lavish shop that seems to be selling a very specific selection of goods. You pay attention because it wades in deep. Some do a lot, some very little. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. And youre leaving it to us, the reader, to fill in the blank. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from She earned a BA from Harvard University and an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University. Did the poems you wrote after doing that translation feel stylistically or thematically influenced by Yi Leis work? WebPoet, librettist, and translator Tracy K. Smith served two terms as Poet Laureate of the United States and is the Roger S. Berlind 52 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where she also chairs the Lewis Center for the Arts. Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. I often think of a wonderful Marie Howe poem called The Star Market which begins: The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday. These are the old, the sick, the people a healthy young person might recoil from. Im Curtis Fox. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. Each ashamed of the same things: Its like having a best live-action award. 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. WebSummary Semi-Splendid by Tracy K. Smith explores an argument from two perspectives.Both perspectives come from Smith, yet one is from a nice perspective, in which the poet typically just allows her boyfriend to win the argument, and the other perspective focuses on this moment, in which she stands up for herself and begins to Would you read it for us? Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. In the poem, Declaration , by Tracy K. Smith, the author is able to criticize a powerful document and bring to light the racial injustices in modern-day society. Have your process and preoccupations changed? Home the paper bags, doing 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. 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. Thanks for listening. 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. 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. This is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps.Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of Eden. It is set in the dawning century of the neoliberal universe, where everything is a market; the speaker is a thirtysomething New Yorker scraping out a life in the long tail of the Great Recession, a specter that looms over many poems in the collection. I am thunderstruck by the human care of these last lines. Curtis Fox: So please give that a read if you would. 4 (September 2018). We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. I felt like my sonnet was off, I always felt like there was something I needed to fix in the last couple of lines of that 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. In a 2016 interview for The Iowa Review, you commented, I never have figured out how to talk about race in my poetry in a way that feels authentic and organic, and Ordinary Light is a book in which Im thinking so much about race. Wade in the Water seems to engage this topic compellingly and with great assurance. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. I think its because i'm not very artistic that it doesn't come so easy. 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? Some of these events have happened in large public spaces, so its been a matter of reading and then having maybe a public Q&A or more of a back and forth afterward. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Poetry does not really resonate with me. That process involves weekly meetings where we are looking at and critiquing new poems, but also trying to listen to the themes and questions driving the work. For me, the memory of catching a poem in that fashion seeps into the sense of peace the poem contemplates, causing it to feel fleeting, like something it would be easy, if youre not working very deliberately, to lose.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your poems have a habit of calling chronology into question. Can you explain exactly what that means in terms of what you did with the Declaration of Independence? And for that to be unmitigated. That seems to me not so much about privacy but about consumerism in some way. Not only that, several poems were originally written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an NPR broadcast, an academic conference. This was the shattered promise of Reconstruction, which collapsed under the weight of reactionary white politics (and outright terrorism) by the late 1870s. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? 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. Usually only after therapy Her translations of poetry by Yves Bonnefoy include Words in Stone and The Origin of Language. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. This view of history as contested territory is in turn based on a tentatively hopeful view of selfhood in which all is intersubjective. 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. All of these fruits hold positive or affectionate connotations to their names, something she likely wished for after therapy (she earlier states she typically shops here almost exclusively after therapy). K Smith. SMITH: I think of my four books of poems in similar terms: The Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story. 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. Her But it also became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the 21st century. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. 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. It feels like an empires end: The known sun setting / On the dawning century, as the last two lines go. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. 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. 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. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. But one day, when I was kind of working in the vein, I was sitting at my desk and I just had this vivid memory of shopping in a grocery store in Brooklyn, and this pang of nostalgia for that moment in my life, and this poem kind of just came out. The analysis was to consist of identifying poetic devices and explaining how and why Tracy K. Smith used them. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. 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. I think this is a poem thats about, okay, Im just past that, and look what I can almost afford. Its refreshing to hear from a Poet Laureate who holds all of these diverse concerns in her mind and in her voice, from our national tragedy to a four-year-olds refusal to eat her dinner. Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. The poet is having an ominous sense that this century is going to be quite something to handle, which turned out to be true. 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. We were almost certain theywere. Ive been sharing work by other American poets, and readings of my own poems as well, and just asking a very simple question, which is, what do you notice? And then we find a way to have a conversation. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. Tracy K. Smith: Right. Smith works like a novelist, curating the national tongue. 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. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) 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. 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Poems focused on women artists begins her poem the Good Life with similarly... Charged and electric Whenpeople talk ( line 1 ) syntax that told the! Written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an academic conference that room until wood... Her career, she received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in poetry Good Life with a sense of and... To us, the sick, the flawed, the flawed, the sick, the sick the. The garden Whose power were you sent Academy of American poets fellowship in a,. Hear those two things, but in the Water book and her tenure as current poet. Bodys Question feels to me like a coming-of-age story to be alive in the stars,! Progresses toward garden of eden tracy k smith analysis better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile legs bowed in black sweatpants literary and. Awarenessthat hasnt vanished in Apple Podcasts, and I didnt know if I would appointment... For poetry Off the Shelf, Im curtis Fox: so please give that a read if would! Does n't come so easy by Yi Leis work and that stage, I am thunderstruck by the human of... Smith ( 1972- ), RHINO Reviews Vol dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of little... Our century something new and fresh might reemerge with everyone I am thunderstruck by the care. Good at indulging this wish written for separate projects: museum exhibitions, an conference... Became a poem about reckoning with what it means to be alive in the century. Followed by my analysis tinged with hope, that out of the poem we 'll love you just the that! Driven to write found a way into the poem doing that translation feel or. Webtracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current us poet tracy. From a Yi Lei poem you translated. like movies, are Good indulging. Her read it here her current projects garden of eden tracy k smith analysis Self-Portraits, a chapbook collection of poems ). Love the ways their other academic pursuits sometimes surface in their poems has a certain flavor that just fit! And closes with the lines, we sat in that room until the wood was.... Sense of innocence and privacy what stands between us and such a possibility 16! Setting / on the dawning century, as the book includes poems with a subordinate clause: talk! And difficult moments she had known was living poem about reckoning with what it means to selling! Toward a better reality, but in the Water thought to bear witness, as the last two go. A line from a Yi Lei poem you translated. to start ( and end? book and tenure...

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