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Overview
The award-winning second collection by the Poet Laureate of the United States
Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico García Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. Tracy K. Smith's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. Duende gives passionate testament to suppressed cultures, and allows them to sing.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555978648 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 09/05/2017 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
TRACY K. SMITH is the author of The Body's Question. She received a Whiting Writers' Award in 2005 and a 2004 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Princeton University.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
History
Prologue
This is a poem about the itch That stirs a nation at night.
This is a poem about all we'll do Not to scratch —
Where fatigue is great, the mind Will invent entire stories to protect sleep.
Dark stories. Deep fright.
Our prone shape has slept a long time.
This is a story in the poem's own voice.
• * *
Part One: Gods and Monsters
The Eagle dreams light,
Like bark, fir and great mountains Appear under the shadows of great trees.
The Eagle dreams fox, and that amber shape Appears in a glade. Dreams egg,
And the fox is cradling A fragile world between sharp teeth.
All gods do this.
There is Pan Gu. Dog-god.
And when he dies, history happens.
Blood, eye, tendon, teeth Become river, moon, path, ore.
Marrow becomes jade. Sperm, pearl.
Elsewhere and at the same time,
Of being ablaze, rages on,
Sighing rough sighs around the ideas Of man, woman, snake, fruit.
We all know the story Of that god. Written in smoke
And set down atop other stories.
There is the element of Earth to consider:
Driven blind, driven with fatigue, fear,
Driven forward, stalled, dragged back.
Who drive it are not gods themselves.
• * *
Part Two: The New World
There were always these fingers Winding cotton and wool —
Was always that diminishing. Words Whittled and stretched into meaning.
What the fish tugs at. What is crossed.
Was always the language of pigment:
Stark wonder. Hours and hours.
There were houses not meant to stand Forever. But not for the reasons We were told.
• * *
Part Three: Occupation
Every poem is the story of itself.
This poem is Creole. Kreyol.
And this poem is the army left behind when the bato
There are secret police Who don't want the poem to continue,
Marries with the neighbors',
Of course there are victims in this poem:
victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim you are here victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim victim
• * *
Part Four: Grammar
There is a We in this poem To which everyone belongs.
As in: We the People —
And: We were objects of much curiosity To the Indians —
And: The next we present before you Are things very appalling —
And: We find we are living, suffering, loving,
We's a huckster, trickster, has pluck.
Your starched shirt is wet under the arms.
Repentant tongue — toward your bored sex.
Of colored tacks spreads like a wound From the center, and you realize (for the first time?)
The world is mostly water. You are not paid To imagine a time before tanks and submarines,
But for a moment you do. It's a quiet thought,
Rustle overhead. Your toes sink into dark soil.
Or:
You unwrap foil from around last night's rack of lamb.
You have a row of dominoes set up,
very quickly.
Or:
You settle into the plush seat And the darkness swells, the screen No longer silent, white. Outside No longer today, no longer now.
Why do they watch back coolly?
We has swallowed Us and Them.
• * *
Part Five: Twentieth Century
Sometimes, this poem wants to wander
Into a department store and watch itself Transformed in a trinity of mirrors.
Sometimes this poem wants to pop pills.
Sometimes in this poem, the stereo's blaring While the TV's on mute.
Sometimes this poem walks the street And doesn't give a shit.
Sometimes this poem tells itself nothing matters,
(A poem can lie.)
• * *
Part Six: Cosmology
Once there was a great cloud Of primeval matter. Atoms and atoms.
• * *
Epilogue: The Seventh Day
There are ways of naming the wound.
To spill.
Flores Woman
A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago. ... Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one [meter] tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people ... made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.
NATURE, OCTOBER 2004
Light: lifted, I stretch my brief body.
Sound: birds stab greedy beaks Into trunk and seed, spill husk
Onto the heap where my dreaming And my loving live.
Every day I wake to this.
Tracks follow the heavy beasts Back to where they huddle, herd.
Hunt: a dance against hunger.
This island becomes us.
Trees cap our sky. It rustles with delight In a voice green as lust. Reptiles
Drag night from their tails,
Protects the horizon, which we would devour.
Legs and arms wracked with danger.
The Searchers
after the film by John Ford
He wants to kill her for surviving,
Instead he grabs her, puts her On his saddle, rides back Into town where faces She barely remembers
Smile into her fear With questions and the wish,
And why do we grip it, hang on As if it's the ribs of a horse Past commanding? A beast That big could wreck us easily,
Could rise up on two legs,
Like cheap toys. There's always A chimney burning in the mind,
Do we insist our lives are ours?
Watched, not really concerned With whether it belonged To him or to him. Either way The land went on living,
Dying. What else could it choose?
September
This is the only world:
The century's in rubble, so we curl Around pictures of ourselves, like Russian dolls Whose bodies within bodies form a world
Free of argument, a make-shift cure For old-fashioned post-millennial denial.
Knowledge is regret. Regret is pure,
I'm the same. Another hollow girl Whose heart's a ripe balloon, whose demons call.
Our two eyes see in plurals:
Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In
You go to the pain. City after city. Borders Where they peer into your eyes as if to erase you.
You go by bus or truck, days at a time, just taking it When they throw you in a room or kick at your gut,
Taking it when a strong fist hammers person after person A little deeper into the ground. Your camera blinks:
Soldiers smoking between rounds. Bodies Blown open like curtains. In the neighborhoods,
Boys brandish plastic guns with TV bravado. Men Ask you to look them in the face and say who's right.
At night you sleep, playing it all back in reverse:
The dance of wind in a valley of dirt. Rugs and tools,
Into newly formed windows and walls. People Close their mouths and run backwards out of frame.
Up late, your voice fits my ear like a secret.
Errant stars flare, shatter. A whistle, then the indescribable thud Of an era spilling its matter into the night. Who can say the word love
When everything — everything — pushes back with the promise To grind itself to dust?
And what if there's no dignity to what we do,
But a way to kid ourselves into thinking we might last? If trust is just Another human trick that'll lick its lips and laugh as it backs away?
Sometimes I think you're right, wanting to lose everything and wander Like a blind king. Wanting to squeeze a lifetime between your hands
And press it into a single flimsy frame. Will you take it to your lips Like the body of a woman, something to love in passing,
Or set it down, free finally, empty as the camera,
Sometimes I want my heart to beat like yours: from the outside in,
To land at my feet like a grenade.
CHAPTER 2
El Mar
There was a sea in my marriage.
In a tiny house afloat On night-colored waves.
The current rolled in From I don't know where.
We'd bob atop, drift Gently out.
I liked best When there was nothing
That I could Or could not see.
But I know There was more.
A map drawn on a mirror.
Marriage is a rare game,
And are. I aged.
We sailed past bottles,
A toy rig. A halo of tears.
Why didn't we stop?
In voices that begged with promise And pity?
Astral
My husband is far off and thinks of me In the past tense. I wept. I was. You Lean into the curve your wife makes sleeping.
In the mountains of Wyoming A trout looks up through the roof Water makes. Feathers, fur, a fine Thread of invisible chord skirt The surface, and the trout's mind Makes the sign for fly. Who knows How this is done? Whether the trout Sees the flit, the flicker on water And recalls the brief satisfaction Of air, the knot of legs,
When my husband sleeps,
Sirens wail and blare in Buenos Aires Where your wife has caused a man's Heart to sputter and choke, her fingers Are that delicate. Is it her you feel Now, when I touch the lids of your Sleeping eyes? Your face is empty,
Maybe desire is nothing but memory,
Your wife falls in love with a dark man Who leads her from ballroom to ballroom.
Minister of Saudade
The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.
A.F.G. BELL, IN PORTUGAL
1.
The water is full of blue paint From all the little fishing boats Corralled for Sunday, abob in the breeze.
Lap and drag. Crag and gleam.
Our lives are small. And mine Is small and sharp. I try to toss it Off into the distance, forget it For good. Then my foot steps down
Onto an edge and it's mine again,
Just awake to spring, belly slack,
The sky here is clear of cloud and bird,
Like nothing, until it lets me go.
2.
An old woman and a boy sit in a doorway At the top of the hill in Pelourinho. Her mouth Chews the corner of a towel like an engine,
That's one way of describing how she moves From table to table with just her eyes, looking From what she wants to you and back again While the boy sleeps. His shirt asks, Quem
Tenh Jesus no [??] And you remember those old Drawings of Christ with his hand raised to knock Against a shut door, that look of transcendent patience Bathing his face. This woman wants your beer,
And she rises to her feet to prove it. The boy's head Rolls back against the wall and his mouth Hangs wide, like the hinges have sprung. Life rises And falls under his shirt. Maybe his heart is so full
It will keep him from waking before the woman's Good and drunk. Maybe the beer goes straight in Like a spirit, luring her mind elsewhere, free as the voices That float above the top of Pelourinho and out to the sea.
Some of them beg without cease. Some are singing.
3.
Igor, I wake in my hotel And hear your steps Disappearing down the corridor.
You, rushing away again Into some small kitchen On the far side of the city.
There's the fan, slicing the air And sending it back, like a letter Long with impossible promises.
But I'm happy alone, I say to the woman Beside me at the bar. We drink long into the evening, taking hours
To clarify the simplest ideas.
Deliver us from memory.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Duende"
by .
Copyright © 2007 Tracy K. Smith.
Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
I.
History
Flores Woman
The Searchers
September
Letter to a Photojournalist Going-In
II.
El Mar
Astral
Minister of Saudade
I Don't Miss It
Igor at Gunpoint
Diego,
Western Fragment
After Persephone
To Burn with a Low Blue Flame
One Man at a Time
Poem in Which Nobody Says, "I Told You So"
Now That the Weather Has Turned
Duende
III.
Slow Burn
Interrogative
When Zappa Crashes My Family Reunion
Theft
"I Killed You Because You Didn't Go to School and Had No Future"
"Into the Moonless Light"
The Opposite of War
Costa Chica
In Brazil
Vaya, Camarón
Nocture, Andalusian Dog
The Nobodies
Notes