Ask students to focus on the second paragraph (the most recognizable lines from the Declaration of Independence) as well as the final paragraph. Ann Cox has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. 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. which she usedas soap in the familys dishwasher. The sky is a dry pitiless white. Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, memoirist, editor, translator and librettist. Patricia Smith is the author of Blood Dazzler (2008), which considered the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina and was nominated for a National Book Award.She's also been a featured poet on HBO's Def Poetry Jam.In "Hip-Hop Ghazal," Smith takes what was originally an Arabic verse form and makes it her own. 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/. Clients called R to say they had received diagnoses of cancer or that a family member had died, W who had cancer had died of a heart attack, They knew this stuff was harmful and they put it in the water anyway. Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) student writers won 35 Gold Key awards in the 2023 Regional Scholastic Writing Awards competition. This document was mailed to the King who was, understandably, not happy about it and the Revolutionary War kicked off in earnest (there had already been some smaller battles). The wide rows stretch on into death. With this mixture of faith and skepticism, Smith takes us for a tour of the past; namely, the particular chapter of our history that is one of the most brutally shameful. Tracy K. Smith | Ghazal - The Spoke Effect The Black Poet Series, Women Poet Spotlight Tracy K. Smith | Ghazal The sky is a dry pitiless white. The wide rows stretch on into death.Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name. of marshes and wetlands (permanent and temporary) located mainly in Jonglei, Warrap, Unity, and Northern Bahr el Ghazal states, known as the Sudd wetland. Translate this page. by Tracy K. Smith. FromWade in the Water. 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. The author of four poetry collections, including Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018), Smith is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor in the Humanities, and Director of the Creative Writing Program, at Princeton University. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like "love" and "illness" now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. Tracy K. Smith is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University and the former Poet Laureate of the United States. Join me again next month, when the featured Poet Laureate will be Natasha Trethewey. We have all these transitive verbs which are incomplete without grammatical objects, all these phrases which sound in need of closure. Smith writes of people who are made strange to us by the burial of timeblack soldiers and their families during the American Civil War, held tenuously by their depositions and letters, which Smith revives and adapts into a series of haunting poems. For instance, take the story which is told in the film Hidden Figures. That is a film about African American women who worked behind the scenes at NASA in the early days of the Space Race. The confluence of the Bahr el Ghazal and the Bahr el Jebel forms a vast area. At the Kitchen Table with Joy Harjo | #TeachLivingPoets, #TeachLivingPoets Statement | #TeachLivingPoets, Celebrate Black Poets | #TeachLivingPoets. Theres also this, If you want to order a #TeachLivingPoets shirt, check out my awesome sister-in-laws Facebook store. 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. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make yourown. The Muller F element (~5.2 Mb) is the smallest chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster, but it is substantially larger Our name. Ghazal by Tracy K. Smith The sky is a dry pitiless white. And with all that in mind, we can now ask ourselves: What does Tracy K. Smith do with it? It is the unpardonable hypocrisy that has continued to haunt the United States from its inception to the present. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws . History is a ship forever setting sail. When we think of the Declaration of Independence, we tend to think of the lofty rhetoric near the beginning: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. But such eternally quotable assertions about natural law and political philosophy are a small percentage of the documents word count, because the Declaration of Independence was not written to be a treatise. I'm a creative soul who just found her outlet. 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. Its this topic which is taken up in former U.S Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smiths poem Declaration. Required fields are marked *. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. Not affiliated with Harvard College. Her poetry collections include Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Duende, and Wade in the Water. And I hate to do it here.To set myself heavily beside them.Not now that theyve provenThe body a myth, parableFor what not even languageMoves quickly enough to name.If I call it pain, and try to touch itWith my hands, my own life,It lies still and the music thins,A pulse felt for through garments.If I lean into the desire it starts fromIf I lean unbuttoned into the blowOf loss after loss, love tossedInto the ecstatic voidIt carries me with it farther,To chords that stretch and bendLike light through colored glass.But it races on, toward shadowsWhere the world I knowAnd the world I fearThreaten to meet. Hell grin watching you squint, deciphering, Rivers, borders, bridges arcing up from rock. Her words, instead, foreground and express their suffering, while at the time time suggesting that this suffering is inexpressible. From there, we move into the new century where the wars and venality has taken over the world; we see what weve done to the earth and to each other. The reader is forced to fill in that awful blank. Can you imagine what will sound from us, what well rend and claimWhen we find ourselves alone with all weve ever sought: our name? The first thing to note about Declaration is that the words themselves are not of Tracy K. Smiths creation. On either shore: mountains of men,Oceans of bone, an engine whose teeth shred all that is not our name. Here, previous Center guest and former U.S. They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed. Who am I to say what. The poems 4 and Dusk in the final part (IV) describe her daughter and the childs dawning awareness of her world and her appetite for it (Shes hungry. To mark the 4th of July, Ill be spending the next couple of Madeira Mondays looking at various artistic responses to the Declaration of Independence. She is the director of the Creative Writing program at Princeton University and the host of American Public Media's daily radio program and podcast The Slowdown. "Declaration" was initially published in 2018 as a part of author Tracy K. Smith's poetry collection Wade in the Water. If history is a destination, then the process of writing it is something that is constantly up for grabs. He explained that the planet we call Earth really has a proper name, has its own energy, is a true living being, was very strong but has been weakened considerably. is, inexplicably, the first of her three collections to be published in the UK. The point of the poem, of course, is that there are so many of these stories to be told. 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. Ghazal The sky is a dry pitiless white. . History is a ship forever setting sail. 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!). Tracy K Smith asks early in her new memoir, Ordinary Light. (1) $5.00. Our name our name our name our fraught, fraught name. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Civilization lasted 3,000 years with no word for eternity. Part III starts with the poem The United States Welcomes You, whose title becomes more and more ironic as we go further in. Her eyes, "blank" from death, open and fill with world and meaning, no longer empty. Elsewhere, Smith writes about historys tendency to flee: History spits, Go, go go, lurching at the horizon (New Road Station). In Life on Mars she celebrates our confusing, question-riddled. 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. Rs taking on the case I found to be inconceivable, It just felt like the right thing to do a greatopportunity to use my background for people who really needed it, R: filed a federal suit pulled permits land deeds a letter that mentioneda substance at the landfill PFOA perfluorooctanoic acid, a soap-like agent used in ScotchgardTM TeflonTM, PFOA: was to be incinerated or sent to chemical waste facilities not to be flushed into water or sewers, DuPont: pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds into the Ohio River dumped tons of PFOA sludge into open unlined pits, PFOA: increased the size of the liver in rats and rabbits (results replicated in dogs) caused birth defects in rats caused cancerous testicular pancreatic and liver tumors in lab animals possible DNA damage from exposure bound to plasma proteins in blood was found circulating through each organ high concentrations in the blood of factory workers children of pregnant employees had eye defects dust vented from factory chimneys settled well-beyond the property line entered the water table concentration in drinking water 3x international safety limit study of workers linked exposure with prostate cancer worth $1 billion in annual profit, (It dont look like anything Ive been into before). Change). The poem ends on one of these dashes and its quite significant, I think, that the final two words are: to bear. Each voice appeals not only to the humanity of those who had none to give, but to us, who are equally impotent in our sympathy. In the fifth part, Mutianyu, Great Wall, the speaker watches as an unsteady tourist on the Great Wall grabs a brick, and the brick crumbles. No priest, no sinner has yet been taught our name. And when the speaker writes, Large and old awoke. It was bleak, faded in color, and its sound was heart wrenching. Wade in the Waters. Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name. They should highlight words and phrases that stand out. After you claim a section youll have 24 hours to send in a draft. I began to move much more quickly past the mountain range near the hospital and over the city. posted 2 months ago with 1. tagged as: ghazal. In this case, Smith used the Declaration of Independence to create her poem. I think of the old story she tells here how future. 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. The Center for Poetry opened in the fall of 2007 to encourage the reading, writing, and discussion of poetry and to create an awareness of the place and power of poetry in our everyday lives. Having risen from moan to growl, growl to a hounds low bray,The voices catch. Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name. (LogOut/ Contact: Our name our name our name our fraught, fraught name. She shows us the world as we have fashioned it a reminder that even sweeping global ills like . It is something that we as a nation must bear too. (LogOut/ But what about you? In the original document, this he referred to King George III (e.g He has obstructed the Administration of Justice). 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. She is making visible the words of slaves and their owners, of African Americans enlisted in the civil war these are found poems about people who were lost. Her work witnesses, protests and raises its own roof. In Landscape Painting, she feels like shes been here before (It is as if I can almost still remember./As if I once perhaps belonged here.). 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. Her The Body's Question, published in 2013, won the Cave Canem prize for the best first book by an African-American poet. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Tracy K. Smith is someone who should need no introduction, but seeing how even the superstars of contemporary poetry are relatively obscures, here goes: she is the current Poet Laureate of the United States, a professor at Princeton University, author of several books of poetry (including the 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars [Graywolf, Michael Mingo received his MFA in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. When the speaker of the poem imagines how the voices of those women erased from history rise from moan to growl and from growl to a hounds low bray until it finally becomes as loud as thunder the story of those NASA mathematicians is exactly the sort of thing she is talking about. Copyright 1999 - 2023 GradeSaver LLC. The sky is a dry pitiless white. What message are the speakers trying to get across here? On either shore: mountains of men, Oceans of bone, an engine whose teeth shred all that is not our name. Reset I Don't Miss It by Tracy K. Smith Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. That context explains why most of the document is devoted to listing off the colonies grievances against George III. Though erasure poetry doesnt really involve writing as we normally conceive of it, it still requires a kind of creative vision: the ability to see new contexts for old words, to find subversive potentials in someone elses language.In this case, Smith uses the United States Declaration of Independence as her source text, which is perhaps the most famous document Ive seen a poet black-out. Tracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. They reek of rum and gasoline but, like many angels before them, tell us not to fear. PS Todays Featured Image is of an 1823 facsimile of the Declaration, and accessed via Wikipedia. SCI-FI- Tracy .K. View location on My PrincetonU. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. 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. It includes cultural, religious, archaeological, commercial, industrial and domestic homes, buildings and structures dating from 2300BC to the Industrial Revolution and later. They drag it out and with nails in their feetCoax the night into being. Like famished birds, my hands strip each stalk of its stolen crop: our name. "Poetry is life distilled." will review the submission and either publish your submission or providefeedback. The poem focuses on themes of gender and . As you read her poem, you can quite clearly see what it is evoking: slavery. The em dashes seem to indicate where the phrase continues in the original document but words have been removed e.g. Her memoir is Ordinary Light. It was published in the Wade in the Water collection by Graywolf Press in 2018. If I lean into the desire it starts from, Not long after the sale cattle began to act, grainy intercut with static, Images jump repeat sound accelerates, the rippling shallow water the white ash, a dead black calf in snow its eye, gall bladder some dark some green, cows with stringy tails malformed hooves, lesions red receded eyes suffering slobbering, opportunity to use my background for people who, PFOA: was to be incinerated or, increased the size of the liver in rats and rabbits, caused cancerous testicular pancreatic and, high concentrations in the blood of factory workers, children of pregnant employees had eye defects, dust vented from factory chimneys settled well-beyond, concentration in drinking water 3x international safety limit, study of workers linked exposure with prostate cancer, considered switching to new compound that appeared less toxic, and stayed in the body for a much shorter duration of time, decided it needed to find a landfill for toxic sludge, bought 66 acres from a low-level employee, worked at DuPont in this town you could have, secured him a mortgage paid a generous salary. When we find ourselves alone with all weve ever sought: our name? But now this he is more nebulous and tough to pin down: he could now be white slavers, but also America, generally, or the institution of slavery personified. But slavery was an issue on the American founders minds too and contrary to popular belief, many of themdid know that it was wrong. And thats why I think Smiths choice to make Declaration a found poem is so powerful: it suggests that such a separation is impossible. Some people were aware of this story and purposely chose to bury it as much as possible. Sometimesher husband came home sickfever, nausea, diarrhea,vomitingTeflon flu, an emergency hysterectomy a second surgery. At least, thats what I used to think, until July 4, 2017. You probably know where were going with this, but to make it explicit: the country that extolled the equality and inalienable rights of all men permitted and was built on chattel slavery. 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Out my awesome sister-in-laws Facebook store contributions and encourage you to make yourown think... A hounds low bray, the first thing to note about Declaration is that there are so many of stories... Featured Image is of an 1823 facsimile of the Space Race teaching high school English, including AP,! Used the Declaration of Independence to create her poem, of course, is that there are so many these. In your details below or click an icon to log in: you are using... To be published in the UK to indicate where the phrase continues in original. Sweeping global ills like take the story which is told in the original,. Global ills like early days of the United States from its inception to the present,,... George III ( e.g he has plundered our-/ravaged our-/destroyed the lives of our people the process Writing. I 'm a creative soul who just found her outlet is that the words themselves are not of Tracy Smith... 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