Will it thunder up, the call of time? . Ghazal. On either shore: mountains of men, Oceans of bone, an engine whose teeth shred all that is not our name. Perhaps this question can be brought beyond her own country to the bigger world in this case China a country whose history is bifurcated by extreme antiquity and modernism. 200 cows more than 600 hilly acres, property would have been even largerhad J not sold 66 acres to DuPont for waste from its Washington Works factorywhere J was employed did not want to sell but needed money poor healthmysterious ailments, Not long after the sale cattle began to actderanged footage shot on a camcordergrainy intercut with staticImages jump repeat sound accelerates slows down quality of a horror movie, the rippling shallow water the white ash trees shedding their leaves a large pipedischarging green water a skinny red cowhair missing back humpeda dead black calf in snow its eye a brilliant chemical blue, a calfs bisected head liver heart stomachs kidneys gall bladder some dark some green, cows with stringy tails malformed hooves lesions red receded eyes suffering slobbering staggering like drunks, It dont look like anything Ive been into before. Or lie quiet as bedrock beneathOur feet? Encourage them to consider the time period in which the phrase was written when they consider its meaning. You might begin the lesson by writing the words Freedom means on the dry erase board or a poster. Smiths poem cleverly subverts a document which, by its very nature, erased the lives of many. Smith begins by establishing the cartography of our existence not on earth but at the site of departure, or for some, expulsion the Garden of Eden. Those verbsplundered, ravaged, destroyed, taking away, abolishinghave charges, connotations, that pure sound would not have. You can follow me on Twitter at @MelAlterSmith and please tweet all the awesome things you are doing in your class with the #TeachLivingPoets hashtag! History is a ship forever setting sail. Or lie quiet as bedrock beneathOur feet? Then theres God himself taking time out to survey his creation (Hill Country). Yet, for all of this grim indictment of our sins against the earth, the speakers sense of love is intact, even as she questions its power to redeem (O Lord O Lord O Lord /Is this love the trouble you promised?). It is just that, for me, it was experiencing the luminous warm water that I felt the most connection with the eternal. Wade in the Waters. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith, published by Graywolf Press. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. View location on My PrincetonU. So, to summarize this long digression: the grievance section of the Declaration of Independence, even though it is the least-recognized and most-dated part of the document, is still a powerful piece of rhetoric, perhaps especially when the language is removed from the original context. Tracy K. Smith was the poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. Erasure poetry is by its nature a bit radical and iconoclastic because youre hacking away at an existing document and making something new. Wade in the Waters is Tracy K. Smiths fourth collection of poetry, and it follows her 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning Life on Mars. Part II starts with the erasure poem Declaration and moves on to the voices Smith excavated directly from letters and statements of African Americans enlisted in the Civil War, and those of their wives, widows, parents, and children (Notes). Tracy K. Smith's Poetry of Desire Smith is a storyteller who loves to explore how the body can respond to a lover, to family, and to history. The United Kingdom's (UK) built heritage is iconic, world class (ranked 4th out of 50 nations by potential visitors) and appeals to all ages. Now imagine seeing that sentence while idly scrolling through Twitter. They drag it out and with nails in their feetCoax the night into being. Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist. Every small want, every niggling urge,), but somehow, what weve destroyed might be saved. Yet the ending is beautiful and bare. But with Declaration, one senses that the ideals themselves have been tainted. I could tell the Doctor everything he did upon my arrival down to the minute details of accompanying the nurse to the basement of the hospital to get the plasma for me; everything he did while also being instructed and shown around in Heaven. Written by Timothy Sexton The poem opens with an assertion encased in metaphorical imagery: "The sky is a dry pitiless white." (LogOut/ Tracy K. Smith is the author of two previous collections: Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award and the Essence Literary Award, and The Body's Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize.She is also the recipient of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work. . Yes, these Trump supporters were off-base on the intention of the exercise, but if it were an institution less staid than NPR, I dont think it would be that unreasonable an inference. The first thing to note about Declaration is that the words themselves are not of Tracy K. Smiths creation. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow my blog and receive new posts straight to your inbox! In Annunciation, the speaker pits her shame she feels against her sons lack of it. I suspect that Earth may be a place of education. of marshes and wetlands (permanent and temporary) located mainly in Jonglei, Warrap, Unity, and Northern Bahr el Ghazal states, known as the Sudd wetland. Some might say, of course, that we can separate the admirable aspects of the declaration from the moral failings of the society that produced it, that we can discard the slavery and keep the inalienable rights. Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name. The discordance between genome size and the complexity of eukaryotes can partly be attributed to differences in repeat density. Do the first two lines of the poem (He has / sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people) remind you of any injustices we see in our current world? And thats with context. Any guesses? But they are not the only ones. Graywolf Press, 83 pp., $24.00. The sky is a dry pitiless white. After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. Its author, Thomas Jefferson, wrote some famous and enduring phrases in it such as: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. And thats why I think Smiths choice to make Declaration a found poem is so powerful: it suggests that such a separation is impossible. 4.0. Madeira Mondays: An analysis of Tracy K. Smiths Declaration. History is a ship forever setting sail. She received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 2014 and the James Laughlin Award in 2006 for her second book, Duende. He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people. from the original becomes he has plundered our-/ravaged our-/destroyed the lives of our- in Smiths poem. To something, where society depends upon technology, an that the youth of today, only knows of an artificial, manufactured existence. It's a powerful poem and one that reminds me how poetry can change the way that we look at our history and our world. And they feature some familiar sounds and images from the last year, like. "Declaration" is told from the perspective of an African American taken captive aboard a pirate ship on the high seas. But what about you? Shes ashamed Of our magnificent paved roads,/ Our bridges slung with steel, but her son is elsewhere, eyes set/ At an indeterminate distance,/ Ears locked, tuned inward, caught/In some music only he has ever heard. So perhaps the future rests on our optimism and our capacity for compassion. Who am I to say what,In that marriage, is lost? Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. The letter from Nashville in 1865 (below) is typical: brittle, misspelt and piercingly sad. Some people were aware of this story and purposely chose to bury it as much as possible. The collection is a lament for the poet's father, who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope at the National The Universe as a Primal Scream is a poem by Tracy K. Smith which appears in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Life on Mars. Every individual thing glowed with life. In the poem Theatrical Improvisation, Smith based the discrete narratives on real-life sources (Notes). Follow the blog for a new post every Monday and thanks for reading! Can you imagine what will sound from us, what well rend and claim. Hell grin watching you squint, deciphering, Rivers, borders, bridges arcing up from rock. Introduction to Data Analysis with Stata. All shirts are $20, PayPal accepted. Smiths poem inverts this original erasure, turning Jeffersons words against themselves so that the poem now focuses on slavery and the original intent of the document (about the white male colonists grievances with the King) has been erased. called slavery a moral depravity and a hideous blot, Jefferson claimed, at the insistence of other southern colonies, The Declaration of Independence transcript, Madeira Mondays: National Treasure (Film Review), Madeira Mondays: 2020 Recap Carly Brown, Madeira Mondays: The best songs from 1776 Carly Brown, If youre interested in learning more about erasure poetry (and how to write it), check out. On either shore: mountains of men, Oceans of bone, an engine whose teeth shred all that is not our name. Check out 12 Poems to Read for Black History Month. Smiths Declaration preserves that formal element, and if anything amplifies it by also using epistrophe (repeating words at the end of consecutive phrases). No priest, no sinner has yet been taught our name. Its centrepiece is a gathering of what are known as erasure poems a strange term as what Smith is doing is the opposite of erasure. The collection includes attractive, smaller-scale poems (especially Dusk, in which her daughter asserts her wobbly independence, seeming likely to become as much of a truthful spectator as her mother). That context explains why most of the document is devoted to listing off the colonies grievances against George III. The wide rows stretch on into death. Text ID: The sky is a dry pitiless white. GradeSaver, 16 October 2022 Web. Who am I to say what. Translate this page. But Smiths poem feels even more scathing than those instances. Tracy K. Smith knows many readers are . Alternatively, you might write the phrase All men are created equal on the dry erase board. http://www.poetry.rcah.msu.edu In a profile by The New York Times, Smith states her belief that Poetry is a shortcut to honest conversation, a way of getting past small talk to probe the spots where our culture is most sore. Ive chosen her poem Declaration to help teachers explore one of those sore spots with their students. Her contemporary protests take newer risks. Ask students to focus on the second paragraph (the most recognizable lines from the Declaration of Independence) as well as the final paragraph. Their power to move is obvious, the injustices suffered undiminished by time. After all, the passage quoted above is not free of content. Ghazal -Tracy K. Smith. In the poem, the Garden is an upscale supermarket but it is also an obvious stand-in for the biblical/archetypal place where all our troubles started. The collection won the 2019 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was nominated for the 2018 Forward Prizes for "Sci-Fi" is a poem by American poet Tracy K. Smith. Now, if youre like me, your first impulse is some good old cathartic laughter: Haha, the Make America Great Again people dont recognize the Declaration of Independence! These randos on Twitter saw a news organization commemorating Independence Day, and assumed it was an attack on their fearless leader. Some incredibly powerful and serious artworks, some quite lighthearted and silly. Design a site like this with WordPress.com, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Yusef Komunyakaa | My Fathers Love Letters, Warsan Shire | Excuses For Why We Failed At Love, https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photo-of-a-bride-looking-outside-a-window-14926592/. Perhaps it would reveal the emptiness behind the lofty ideals and philosophy which the document advocates for: all so much pleasant-sounding air. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. Yet it would take a civil war the following century, as well as the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment, to officially end it. History is a ship forever setting sail. It includes cultural, religious, archaeological, commercial, industrial and domestic homes, buildings and structures dating from 2300BC to the Industrial Revolution and later. For a poem that appears so halting on the page, thats one hell of a strong theme. Try ShaCondria Sibleys Black Woman Steps Up to Mic, Rudy Franciscos Adrenaline Rush, Clint Smiths Counterfactual, or Jason Reynolds This Has Always Been Our Active Shooter Drill.. But since history is always on the verge of leaving the harbor rather than always on the verge of arriving at its destination, there will be plenty of opportunities to revise that record so that the truth is finally told. Take a moment to discuss those ideas, then teach/review the authors, intended audience, and purpose of the document. Contact: So what lasts? The poem opens with an assertion encased in metaphorical imagery: The sky is a dry pitiless white. One could insert this line into any of a million other poems and it would not be much beyond a literal description. From 1997 to 1999 she held a Stegner fellowship at Stanford University. Italso explains why they are declaring their independence, listing out the colonists grievances with King George III (they list his abuses and usurpations in a basically bullet point list format: He has done THIS wrong and also THIS and, oh wait, THIS too!). If you want to order a #TeachLivingPoets shirt, check out my awesome sister-in-laws Facebook store Megans Makesand support a small business owner! Our humanity? From 2017 to 2019, Smith served as Poet Laureate of the United States. What might be the repeated injury the speakers have suffered? Not justThe ramshackle family, the tios,Primitos, not just the bailaorWhose heels have notchedAnd hammered timeSo the hours flow in placeLike a tin river, markingOnly what once was.Not just the voices scrapingAgainst the river, nor the handsnudging them farther, fingerslike blind birds, palms empty,echoing. Change). her husband came home sickfever, nausea, diarrhea, Clients called R to say they had received diagnoses of cancer, in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean. Or perhaps what we seek lives outside of speech, like a tribe of goatsOn a mountain above a lake, whose hooves nick away at rock. What might be the different stage[s] of these Oppressions that the speakers mention? Swinging it, Gently back and forth, hell swear hes never shown it, Academy of American Poets, 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038. In Refuge and Charity, she offers her love and empathy to the exiled, to the tired; she confers holiness to a disabled man. that has gone from Washington Works. Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name. Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted from it during his I Have a Dream speech, only to then call it a promissory note that has gone unfilled. Yet, it seems that the poet cannot completely let go of the overall hope or maybe the wishful vision that reconciliation might be possible. For all I know, the grass has caught our name. The result is something which condenses the grievance section down the sensation of listening to it: Yet while Smith preserves the source materials form, she seems to have eliminated, erased, its content. Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name. It was also a time when Africans women, men and children were forcibly being kidnapped and sold into bondage to labor on the American continent. Sometimesher husband came home sickfever, nausea, diarrhea,vomitingTeflon flu, an emergency hysterectomy a second surgery. Tracy K Smith asks early in her new memoir, Ordinary Light. I think of the old story she tells here how future. However, if you havent read the original document (and didnt see Smiths title), I wouldnt blame you if you didnt realize what Smith was doing here. I think it may be helpful, then, to talk about the declaration for a bit. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spillway, The McNeese Review, Tar River Poetry, and Valparaiso Poetry Review, among others. Its a powerful poem and one that reminds me how poetry can change the way that we look at our history and our world. One might be tempted to say that what Smith has done is transform the Declaration of Independence into something close to theoretically pure rhetoric. Photo I took in December 2017 at Magnolia Plantation, South Carolina, of a slave cabin on the site. (LogOut/ Poet Biography Tracy K. Smith was born on April 16, 1972, in Falmouth, Massachusetts, and grew up in Fairfield, California. You might select one specific text for the entire class to draw from (perhaps an excerpt from a novel they are studying), or you can give students the option of choosing their own texts. Pingback: At the Kitchen Table with Joy Harjo | #TeachLivingPoets, Pingback: #TeachLivingPoets Statement | #TeachLivingPoets, Pingback: Celebrate Black Poets | #TeachLivingPoets. SCI-FI- Tracy .K. Her book, Life on Mars (2011), won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. They were basically, legally, their husbands property (they obviously couldnt do things like vote but they also had no control over their finances, their bodies, their children etc.). i know this is not the one i should practice but i read it and decided to record. Ghazal The sky is a dry pitiless white. For Smith, poetry is hospitable: accommodating whatever she is moved to write. Ghazal Analysis These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community. And if youre looking for more thoughts on recontextualizing the classics, you may want to check out my piece on Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelleys short film IntheBodyoftheSturgeon, which rearranges Longfellows TheSongofHiawatha into a story about a submarines crew near the end of the Second World War. The result is a mix of classic and contemporary poems you will definitely want to share with your students. For all I know, the grass has caught our name. Felt the most connection with the eternal how future, borders, bridges up! Feels against her sons lack of it pure rhetoric feetCoax the night into.! Now imagine seeing that sentence while idly scrolling through Twitter shame she feels against her lack. To consider the time period in which the document is devoted to listing off the colonies grievances against George.... 1865 ( below ) is typical: brittle, misspelt and piercingly sad the result is a dry pitiless.... 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