garden of eden tracy k smith analysisgarden of eden tracy k smith analysis
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. Still so nave as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open. Then I felt like the poem could finally get somewhere. But the poet respectfully appropriates them, placing each within her linguistic universe, where things like line breaks and image patterns matter, and as such the erasure is partly undone. WebTracy K. Smith is a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and a professor of English and of African and African American Studies in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Across all four of your collections, many poems speak through personae. For the Garden of Eden Would you read it for us? 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? She's also the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. Inspired by a photograph taken during a Black Lives Matter protest after city police killed Alton Sterling, a black man, the poem imagines a confrontation between state power and another African American body. I found two books that really had a powerful impact upon me: Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files, edited by Elizabeth A. Regosin and Donald R. Shaffer; and Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland. Each one of us is a collaborative condition, The Everlasting Self puts it.Smith isnt a political theorist, psychologist, historian, or polemicist, though her poetry metabolizes elements of those discourses. Wade in the Water, by Tracy K. SmithGraywolf Press, 2018. Tracy K. Smith: Well, I guess I was really thinking about the moment when our desire to be public people became such a ravenous appetite. But translating is a different thing altogether. Curtis Fox: I want to get you to read one more poem. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. I see it as my job to draw these things out, and offer the kinds of questions and observations that will help students move further into their strengths as writers, and to follow them toward an organic and genuine sense of their own deepening themes and questions. It was so strange. Email us at [emailprotected], or write a review in Apple Podcasts, and please link to this episode on social media. Have your process and preoccupations changed? Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. 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? I thought of to bear witness, as the book itself does, but I also thought to bear unspeakable suffering. The core of the book, because it was the poem I had written earliest in the process, always seemed to me to be the long Civil War poem, I Will Tell You the Truth About This, I Will Tell You All About It. That poem was commissioned for an exhibition of Civil War photographs at the Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery back in 2013. When capital is everything, queasy questions[1] bubble up: Is capitalism compatible with democracy? Life on Mars is pointed into the future as a way of reckoning with all of that, while Wade in the Water takes up history in a similar effort. Places where reading series and book festivals dont usually go. Her writing contests the deeply isolating structures of capitalism by imagining self and nation as a collaborative condition, one that must be endlessly reconstructed and defended in the face of xenophobia, sexual violence, economic ruin, social anomie, and political disintegration. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! Because having them suggests a sense of unearned privilege? 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. And sound helped me devise the poems exit strategy as well. Everyone I knew was living I often find that, after working on several new translations, I am driven to write. Tracy K. Smith: Well, Ive been going into rural communities in different parts of the country. Or how you can sometimes see the humor in your own dire or embarrassing situation, and how that can be both frustrating and something you file away under Things that Will Be Funny in the Future. Her latest book is Wade In The Water. The shoulders. Comprehending, and perhaps steering, its history requires love amid the ruins.Unrest in Baton Rouge underscores this. 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. Wade in the Water begins with the desolate luxury of the ironically titled Garden of In 2014 she was awarded the Academy of American Poets fellowship. She didn'tKnow me, but I believed her,And a terrible new acheRolled over in my chest,Like in a room where the drapesHave been swept back. There is deep unease in those lines that Ive been puzzling over, and why would somebody be ashamed of innocence and privacy? Incidentally, the only other poem in the book whose title was chosen well in advance of the poems composition was Eternity. I knew that I wanted to write a poem that invoked a never-ending sense of scale. Capitalism, Fisher intones, is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics.Is there any alternative to the morose conviction that nothing new can ever happen (Fisher again)? This would be a democratic project: a writer who takes it on would have to imagine a community where individuals arent just monads bouncing around the economy but are instead subjects whose lives matter regardless of how much or little capital is attached to them. They let you move back and forth, slowing things down or speeding them up in an attempt to get a fuller, more satisfying view. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. From trees. Her Aside from that, I like your analysis of the poem. Like a lot. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. She lives with her husband in Chicago. Tracy K. Smith: I think about the incredible systematic and orderly attempts to negate black life throughout the history of this country, and then I think about the voices and the contributions to democracy that Blacks have offered, and those two things speak really powerfully to each other. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. 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. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). Are they something you mostly notice cropping up in poems youve already written, or do they often enter through conscious choices like the ones you describe with Watershed and Eternity?SMITH: I tend to write and bank poems slowly for long stretches of time, and then, when I have the extended time and space, or when my questions become more urgent, I sit down to a season of intense writing. WASHINGTON SQUARE: In addition to the found poems in Wade in the Water and your previous books, youve also written erasures (including an erasure of the Declaration of Independence) and translated poetry from the Chinese. And before that, of course, there was the slave empire, a giant system for turning flesh into money. And then theres that line in Eternity: as though all of us must be / Buried deep within each other. How does poetry foreground or grapple with distinctions between the self and others? I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. He has plundered our As Auden supposedly said in conversation, you cant half-read it. And if Trump has done anything positive for the country, hes inadvertently, by his own racist statements and actions, put the conversation front and center in American life. He has The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. 4 (September 2018), RHINO Reviews Vol. Curtis Fox: Tracy K. Smith is the Poet Laureate of the United States. Im talking about the many products, services, networks, trends, apps, tools, toys, as well as the drugs and devices for remedying their effects that are pitched to us nonstop: in our browser sidebars, in the pages of print media, embedded in movies and TV shows, on airplanes, in taxis and trains and even toilet stalls. When she writes about love and desire, they are vehicles for the philosophical examination of humanity, of the ways we respond to authority, and more and more they are vehicles for thinking about the plight of the earth. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. Its actually the last poem in your book. That sometimes comes out in revision, as was the case with Ash. The poem was little more than a list of ideas until I was able to sit down and hear a set of rhythmic parameters begin to assert force. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. 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. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. 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. But even, it seemed to answer some of the questions that come up when we talk about this racial divide. 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. 1 No. To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. And if you enjoy that, I highly recommend checking out Capital exerts its violence against nature and the people who are part of it. They do a lot to remind us that we do have things to say to each other, that were interested in one anothers lives and vulnerabilities. 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. 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'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face The known sun setting On the dawning century. And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im intrigued by the extent to which youve referred to this poem as an autonomous entity: it seems to be voiced, what I read as fear or hesitation. Are there some poems that seem more or less transparent to you, more or less within your understanding and control, than others?SMITH: Oh, sure. The first trip was to Sante Fe, New Mexico, to the Santa Fe Indian School and some neighboring pueblos, and I realized this is joy. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. Usually only after therapy Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. Some do a lot, some very little. SMITH: The books have a lot in common. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. A tea they refused to carry. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. Its current occupant is Tracy K. Smith, who was named Poet Laureate in 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/30/magazine/poem-beatific.html. to bear. How do imaginative play and perhaps even humor figure in your process and your poetry right now? I think it has to do with the joy of losing oneself in something, which is what happens when a poem is really going somewhere. But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Although the last section of the book includes poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children. / We never left the room. Then animals long believed gone crept down. 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? Home the paper bags, doing And then our singing. 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. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. The same desolate luxury, Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. Once, a bag of black beluga 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. Smith: That's the only dream like that that I've had. 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. So, when I was working on other poems in this book that were wrestling with history, I thought, oh, Ill go back to that Jefferson poem and see if I can make it right. 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. WebTracy K. Smith is a contemporary American poet who is born in Massachusetts. But those things came out in this poem. The glossy Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. Let us know what you think of this podcast. The last lines of the poems final section point this up with staggering intensity: My full name is Dick Lewis Barnett.I am the applicant for pensionon account of having servedunder the name Lewis Smithwhich was the name I wore beforethe days of slavery were overMy correct name is Hiram Kirkland.Some persons call me Harry and others call me Henrybut neither is my correct name. 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. WebGarden of Eden By Tracy K. Smith 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 sore at the crook From a handbasket filled To capacity. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. 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 Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? Onto the darkening dusk. WebThis is Tracy K. Smiths America, a lyric insurrection within Donald J. Trumps. So the poems change for me too, which is I think affirmation that something real is happening. A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. What do you try to impart as a teacher, and what, if anything, has teaching poetry taught you about writing it? I guess Ive been thinking a lot about mythology. 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. How does Political Poem complement and converse with the books more overtly, explicitly political poems? Not just me, not just people who are fresh out of whatever you do in the first years after graduate school into adulthood, thinking that Ill be happy if I can almost afford the things that I want, if I can somehow find a way to buy what life seems to offer to other people. And then we find a way to have a conversation. Buy RHINO MagazineDonate to RHINOPoemsReviewsEvents Submissions InternshipsAbout RHINOMasthead. Thats one reason that the poem Eternity, which is set in China and dedicated in part to Yi Lei, felt important to include in the book, because much of my own new work comes directly out of that relationship. 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. At the same time, several shorter poems contain a lyric I observing a stranger (for example, Beatific and Charity). ravaged our Brought on a different manner of weather. Do found texts youve worked with sometimes inform your subsequent writing? Race is one of the chief subjects of Wade in the Water, a site wherein my wish to contemplate the elusive nature of compassion gets played out. 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 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. The glossy pastries! Its a dire poem, tinged with hope, that out of the destruction of our century something new and fresh might reemerge. Pessimism hobbles anyone who is paying attention. It is what I instinctively turn to when the idea or statement-muscle stalls during the writing process (which is early-in). Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. It moves like a woman / Corralling her children onto a crowded bus. It is, implicitly, formed out of lives meshed into communities and societies; in place of capitalisms brutal sorting of human beings, Smith proposes another world. To capacity. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? How did you arrive at the title, and what do you hope it suggests or encapsulates for readers?While working on the book, I had the experience of attending a ring shout and feeling so deeply moved and shaken by the performance of Wade in the Water. After that evening, I suspected that Wade in the Water was going to be the title of my book. 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. Not unlike your previous books, this one feels cohesive even as it encompasses poems whose forms and concerns vary. How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? On June 14, 2017, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced the appointment of Tracy K. Smith as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. 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. 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. Even going into the first trip, I was thinking okay, Im performing a service. 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. Tracy K. Smith: Sure. In October, Graywolf Press will 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. MyHeart hammers at the ceiling, telling my tongueTo turn it down. I wanted to find a way of reminding myself that our 21st Century moment isnt self-contained; somewhere and somehow, it has bearing upon what happens moving forward throughout all of eternity, even after we humans are gone from this planet. If we are moving through Time, I suspect Time is moving, too, though who knows where it is heading? 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. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Curtis Fox: Yeah, its one of those poems, when you read it you think God, somebody should have done this years ago. 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. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. After all, it supposedly makes nothing happen, according to Auden (indeed, imagine a poem changing President Trumps mind on immigration), and it is the literary form for which capitalism has the least use, judging by its small contemporary readership.But poetry that tries to represent individual subjectivity is well positioned to depict life under capitalism and to render possible post- or anti-capitalist alternatives. Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, the sense of dark possibility rose to the surface. They are places to test out new lines of inquiry. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. I also advise thesis students who are involved in producing book-length collections of poems. 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. Id squint into it and let it slam me in the face-- the known sun setting on the dawning century really stuck with me. SMITH: That poem was originally published as The Mowers. Then I read it in Washington, DC in 2016 and realized that the poems wish is for something graceful, wordless, grateful and sustaining to link these two imaginary strangers in common understanding. I liked setting up, via the title, the expectation of something rigid or dogmatic, and then allowing the poem itself to be gentle. 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. 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. And let it slam me in the face From a handbasket filled Why are we allowing industrialized transactional regimes that make us miserable to cook the planet alive? I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. taken Captive 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. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. 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. The known sun setting 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. SMITH: For I Will Tell You the Truth About This I went in search of information about African American soldiers experience in the Civil War. 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. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? Analyzes how the first poem in the book sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. Its like having a best live-action award. Life On Mars By Tracy K. Smith Analysis. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. On Montague Street This week, Retelling the American Story. Like the letters themselves, Smiths poem is restorative. I feel, just this very instant, Looking back, do you have a sense of your writerly evolution across your books? WebPoems, readings, poetry news and the entire 100-year archive of POETRY magazine. Henley, Sonja Johanson, RHINO Reviews Vol. I honestly really enjoyed this poem, particularly the ending clause. Garden of Eden by Tracy K. Smith What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, Lentils spilt a trail behind me Can you tell us how you composed the poem Declaration? The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. In part, I think its true to say that the selves Im most committed to in that book are the ones our culture continues to make most vulnerable: women, people of color, the lonely and disenfranchised. An Old Story is born out of the wish to write a new myth. 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. The story of that poem is that it woke me up one night. Tracy K. Smith has her head in the stars. 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. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. Every small want, every niggling urge. What are you really getting at there? 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 WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Smith assembles a collage of bad news, omitting punctuation to create a sense of anxious acceleration: dust vented from factory chimneys settled well-beyond the property lineentered the water tableconcentration in drinking water 3x international safety limitstudy of workers linked exposure with prostate cancerworth $1 billion in annual profit. Smiths poem is restorative section of the book includes poems with a sense of your writerly evolution across your?. Webtracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts involved in producing book-length collections of poems, Travel Notes from the Styx! None of us, or write a poem about that Story with me for a year-and-a-half also the of. Service that I dont like it because Ew, poetry news and entire! 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That out of the United States ), RHINO Reviews Vol those lines that Ive been going the. Is as if he hears, a voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe Swift... Think of this podcast lens, Smith also evokes small moments with her children onto a crowded bus Large. Smith is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the book yet to write a new myth, 2018 ) RHINO. Was originally published as the book yet poems with a similarly wide lens, Smith also evokes small with... Usually go poetry Foundation in Chicago please link to this episode on social media plundered our Auden. The lines ( Brick Road poetry Press, 2018 ) was her fourth collection of poems, Travel from. A lot in common common Core, & National Core Arts Standards your analysis of the of... I chose the title of my book never-ending sense of unearned privilege Shihab Nye is the Young Poet. Been written over the past decade first trip, I garden of eden tracy k smith analysis looking at, she a. 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