Tracy K. Smith:
Where do we find literary guidance? Poetry is a luminous language.
I feel that it's not a symbolic language. There is something back there that knows
more than we do. The poems I read last night from Wade in the Water [2018] have
letters from slave owners and slave soldiers. There are fragments from
Declaration of Independence.
Some years ago, in The New York Times Magazine
[January 6, 2016],
an article appeared on DuPont Company dumping toxic chemicals in the waters, that made me
more aware of environmental issues. I'm interested in learning from people who had
near death experiences (NDE). Why am I doing this?
I erase my voice to use other voices in my poems. As parent of children, can something speak to me
with relevance? I'm pushed to Carl Phillips and his poems [on Afro-American studies].
When we are in the now, the context is gone. Surrender what I'm attempting to do.
There is social division we're experiencing. There's a willed encounter between
me and those in the poem. I like the poems of George Herbert, Joy Harjo, and
Rainer Maria Rilke.
I'm going to read a poem by D.H. Lawrence [1885-1930]—
Song of a Man Who Has Come Through
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course through the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.
Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.
What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.
No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them
I love this poem. There is so much rhythm. The poem persists.
I'm scared. I like that knocking which startles me.
Find courage— Admit them, admit them.
The angel is a wish in the poem I read last night.
Q&A Sesson:
Q (Eavan Boland): Last night you read a lot of "found poems".
What places you look to to find them?
A: My sense of what happens has changed. I understand it's
a lot of choice making. A teacher of mine said (?).
Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind. She's good in synthesis of the word.
I feel now that world-making is finding
something beneath.
In "Fish House", the old man accepts a Lucky Strike cigarette.
It's tentative, beneath the
waters. What the poet is begging to happen.
Q: Tell us something about craft.
A: Part of my teaching students— asking them
"Where is the shift occurs?"
In the "Fish House", rhythm that happens, walls coming down and down. Begin by seeing.
Q: Sitting and listening to you last night, it seems you
control every day the way you write a poem.
Do you use a notepad?
A: Every poem is different. When there's a question, it prompts me.
I was in an airplane,
and felt the body is a house. In Life on Mars,
I ask "What if the afterlife is?"
I'll move into the poem and stop— to mine the poem more. In the poem
read last night, "The United States Welcomes You", there are three impulses—
immigration and race, violence against blacks, why there's so much mistrust?
My own sense of justice. Poem found dramatic unit and rhythm.
In my poem "Ash" [New Yorker, November 23, 2013],
starts around how strange we are built—
Strange house we must keep and fill.
House that eats and pleads and kills.
House on legs. House on fire. House infested
With desire. Haunted house. Lonely house.
House of trick and suck and shrug.
Give-it-to-me house. I-need-you-baby house.
House whose rooms are pooled with blood.
House with hands. House of guilt. House
That other houses built. House of lies
And pride and bone. House afraid to be alone.
House like an engine that churns and stalls.
House with skin and hair for walls.
House the seasons singe and douse.
Couldn't have written this poem
without children ricocheting back and forth.
[Commentary by tiffanymidge
with comparison to poem "House" by C.K. Willams
others suggested "body that houses the soul", and the title
"Ash" conveyed the idea
of mortality, as in "ashes to ashed, dust to dust."]
Q: How do you come up with the title of your poems?
A: "Life on Mars" title was borrowed from a David Bowie's song
[released 1971 on the album Hunky Dory]
"Wade in the Water" comes from sources that are humbling and earth-bound.
[It's the name of a Negro spiritual first published in New Jubilee Songs as Sung by
the Fisk Jubilee Singers (1901) by John Wesley Work II & his brother, Frederick J. Work ]
Sit around the poem and speak to the reader. Love comes out even from slavery.
In the "DuPont" poem on contaminated water, didn't want my own voice in it.
The OBE (out-of-body) poems have water in them symbolic of survival & healing.
Let me ask you "Are there things you're struggling with in your poems?"
Q: How do you separate individuality in poems?
A: I'm in a position [U.S. Poet Laureate] to talk about poetry & language.
Engage in a public conversation about art. What poetry fosters and requires?
Surrender to other voices instead of your own.
When poem ends, that identification lingers.
For duration of poem, people are speaking—
so many multiplication of voices celebrating
the first and second generations of Americans.
Q: You're talking about two sides of political issues.
There are items on display in the penal colony.
A: Two types of impulse— they're built differently.
In the Civil War poems,
I don't have an end gaame. You get lost in your poems.
Private experience is my own language.
Q (Eavan Boland): What's unspeakable in poems? Problem on permission.
The Editor of one of my students who went to Princeton, said
"You don't have to mention that."
A: Conversations with young students— "Who could write that?"
I really don't know. Endeavor takes that risk. In what way you could
productively read it? Create a deep sense of individuality in the
kitchenette where poor black people are eating
to some grandiose view embracing the universe.
I try to stay away from that reader is a probability.
Q (Eavan Boland): There was a critical essay on Edna St. Vincent Millay
where the writer couldn't see her talent ["Renascence";
Selected Poems: Centenary Edition].
When Allen Ginsberg wrote Howl [1955], it was just for a few friends.
[It sold 800,000 copies in 1997 when he died.]
A: There is anxiety in poetry. Here's one funny story. My husband
[Raphael Allison] is a historian.
He sent Ginsberg's Howl to William Carlos Williams [who wrote the Preface to Howl].
Williams sent Howl to Ezra Pound, who had no time to read it. When poem is done,
the encounter is over. The Editor sometimes repairs poems.
Q: Your poem with other voices— How to balance the curated poem?
A: If there are central body of work. Vulnerability.
Large spirit in the book and now look at the little poems about me.
Are there two things happening?
Q: Contrast between fiction and non-fiction.
A: Other genres have a voice. Conversation and dialogue.
There's sense of arc of narrative in prose.
Writing a memoir urged me to think more on a page.
Poems have intuitive leaps. When I was in school,
I pledged allegiance to poetry instead of prose.
Q: Ask about failure. How to tell when a poem is failing?
A: Where am I stop listening? Where am I embarrassed?
I like to imagine organ donation system— kidney, heart,
just a few words on a page that needs fixing.
Tracy K. Smith ended the Colloquium at 11:50 am.
Luncheon Buffet was served on the Terrace Room patio.
|
.jpg)
(11-2-2017)