WebGarden of Eden 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 One quick way to define capitalism is to observe that it entails the dedication of all things, all human objects and ideas and actions, to profit, to the continual accumulation of wealth in private hands. Whats going on there? Its not that I dont like it because Ew, poetry, but rather because I just dont understand a majority of it. She comes home with her paper bags and looks at the numbers to her name and it ultimately slam[s] [her] in the face; she perceives a life of luxury and craves more from life than that of which she can afford. 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. Men with interests to protect seduce and extract pleasure from a young person, making her believe / / It was she who gave permission, just as patriarchal industrial capitalism has plundered the youth of mother Earth.Those awful, awful men. (Jonathan Bachmans renowned shot shows two policemen in body armor arresting a woman named Ieshia Evans; the black-clad officers whip out their handcuffs for no discernible reason as Evans stands in silent dignity, wearing a long dress.). Innocence and privacy. As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Poetry does not really resonate with me. An elegy to your mother in The Bodys Question ends with the lines, We sat in that room until the wood was spent. the book in a spiritual key? The pedestrian sees himself one way hears his own music in those engines idling for him but who doesnt? 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 Also, one of the strangest I think, because the role of the Poet Laureate is largely defined by the poet occupying that perch. 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. This poem is pretty upsetting and kinda relatable. And let it slam me in the face Take it easy. I dont yet know how to classify Wade in the Water. A two-time Hambidge fellow, her poems have appeared in such publications as Little Star, Prairie Schooner, december, American Life in Poetry andVerse Daily. Where I seldom shopped, 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 mingles these themes in The World is Your Beautiful Younger Sister, where the body of a woman stands in for the planet itself; Smith plays on old Western conceptions of nature as a female resource to be commanded by men and their technologies. Curtis Fox: Being Poet Laureate is obviously an honor, but have you enjoyed it? Life on Mars is a very sentimental and intimate book of poems about how an author deals a lost in her life. 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. But I also felt that, okay, this is a kind of service that I would be doing for the country. WebThe assignment consisted of reading this newly published poem and then writing an analysis. 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 Theyre intimate spaces where we can really stop and say, okay, heres a poem by this American poet whos voice I think is so important, what do you hear within it? Tracy K. Smith: Yeah, I think in some ways this is kind of a coming of age poem. I love you,I love you, as You flinch. Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. Let us know what you think of this podcast. You were appointed Poet Laureate in 2017, after Trump was inaugurated. I watch him smile at nobody, at our trafficStopped to accommodate his slow going. This is a poem thats kind of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but didnt care. Each ashamed of the same things: Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off The Shelf from The Poetry Foundation. The store is called Garden Of Eden, so almost accidentally it aligns itself with those poems that are thinking back to those biblical stories. It would mean giving space to voices that have long been silenced or distorted. Many of the poems focus on history, whether spiritual or political. But I truly hope its more than that. 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. Both are longing for some kind of extra-human counterpoint to the real, the earthbound, the flawed, the finite. This is an essential book, one that should be required reading throughout the land. In this book, Im doing that more relentlessly. History is in a hurry, runs New Road Station. So I had to kind of really think about it, before saying yes. Or, generally, have some personae in your work been more challenging to access than others?SMITH: Sometimes, as in the case ofThe United States Welcomes You,a persona is a last resort. taking away our, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our, In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for But it is as if he hears, A voice in our idling engines, calling himLithe, Swift, Prince of Creation. Every small want, every niggling urge. I see The United States Welcomes You as another poem fixated upon this topic, though perhaps more obliquely; it seems to be voiced by someone whose aim is not compassionate, though there is space at the end of the poem where what I read as fear or hesitation enters in with the line What if we / Fail? WASHINGTON SQUARE: Was it especially difficult, then, to inhabit the persona in The United States Welcomes You? On Montague Street SMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, teaching at Princeton, named the US Poet Laureate in 2017, and already freighted with laurels (her previous book, Life on Mars, won the 2012 Pulitzer), Smith is no undiscovered talent. WebSMITH: I like the way that humor exists in our lives, even in the dark and difficult moments. Tracy K. Smith, I hope your poem is a prophecy. All of these fruits hold positive or affectionate connotations to their names, something she likely wished for after therapy (she earlier states she typically shops here almost exclusively after therapy). A friend recently emailed it to me, even though I hadnt read the book yet. But if I do my job correctly, they slip away from that transparency and become something more than Id initially thought I was after. It felt very much like a plea that could live in the 21st century, around all the instances of violence against unarmed black citizens. Tracy K. Smith, "Declaration" from Wade in the Water. Register now and publish your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems. 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. 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. The glossy pastries! 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. I feel, just this very instant, 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. 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. 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, Im really happy I stumbled upon Tracy K. Smith and I look forward to reading more of her work. Curtis Fox: Dr Hayden from the Library of Congress, right? You pay attention because it wades in deep. Would you read it for us? She lives with her husband in Chicago. She went on to receive her MFA from Columbia University. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful, Would survive ushow little we had mended, Large and old awoke. On making the appointment, Dr. Hayden said: It gives me great pleasure to appoint Tracy K. Smith, a poet of searching. How did the book come together and find its shape? And as many have observed since capitalism emerged (see William Blakes Satanic mills or Upton Sinclairs meatpacking plants), this tends to have baleful effects on how we conceive of social relationships and our own selves. 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. Dang, you hear those birds? I spent about 2 hours going through this list of poets trying to find someone that I could just. In this manner, they accumulate tools that can be put to use upon their own material. Mattan Masri- Week 16: Animation is not a Genre, Bella Furst Week 1 | Ranking Chicken and Why Chicken Nuggets are the Best, Bella Furst | Week 20 "The United States Welcomes You" by Tracy K. Smith, Bella Furst Week 4 | "Garden of Eden" by Tracy K. Smith. (I know Eternity quotes a line from a Yi Lei poem you translated.) Articulating one would require thinking of others as more than free particles in a market or economic obstacles and opportunities. The collections final poem, An Old Story, also feels faintly Biblical. Is it strange to say love is a languageFew practice, but all, or near all speak?Even the men in black armor, the onesJangling handcuffs and keys, what elseAre they so buffered against, if not loves bladeSizing up the hearts familiar meat? The opening and closing poems refer to the most familiar Biblical stories. Im listening for possibilities in meaning and emotional tone, and trying to make useful formal decisions, in a way that is more similar than different to what happens when I am writing. 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. I know its a huge honor, and thats the first thing that I felt when Dr Hayden called me. Actually, the first poem in Wade in the Water, its called Garden of Eden and it is shockingly about shopping, in a sense. For a long time I didnt know what to do with my interest in the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed. Then, after most of the manuscript was finished, I had the idea of marrying the facts from that article, in a found poem, with the narratives of near-death-experience (NDE) survivorspeople whose vocabularies almost across the board invoke the sense of Love as an original animating force, as the logic of the universe. He has 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. Tracy K. Smith discusses her new book and her tenure as current US poet laureate. Onto the darkening dusk. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. She joins me now from Princeton University, where she teaches creative writing. Wade in the Water by Tracy K Smith is published by Penguin (8.99). And maybe thats me speaking as someone in mid life, someone whos the parent of kids and has fears about the future. 4 (September 2018), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol. 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. Thanks for listening. Song allows us to hope for new connections: The interior sections of Smiths collection lift up others voices and names, to which she joins her own. To order a copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Not the liberal version, where everything naturally progresses toward a better reality, but something more ambiguous and fragile. And then our singing. 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. It comes down to simple math.The beach belongs to none of us, regardlessof color, or money. We thought the birds were singing louder. Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young Peoples Poet Laureate of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. / The wood was never spent. In Wade in the Water, the first section of Eternity begins It is as if I can almost still remember and closes with trees Ageless, constant, / Growing down into earth and up into history. Any thoughts on the challenges and possibilities of processing (or traversing) time through language? Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Massachusetts and raised in northern California. What are you really getting at there? I was blown away by how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Throughout her career, she has been awarded numerous literary awards and fellowships. 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. Her poem is an erasure poem, a form of found poetry, making it even more successful in her criticism of the original document. I dreamt that I was in a hotel where there was a mural of that poem, which was by him, painted on a wall, and I was reading it aloud to somebody who was with me. Susanna Langs newest collection of poems,Travel Notes from the River Styx,was released in summer 2017 from Terrapin Books. We'll love you just the way you are if you're perfect. Social media, this idea that if you have a life its only useful or only real if you can demonstrate it, I feel like the beginning of that frenzy or that appetite seems to line up in my mind with that period, yeah. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration Unlike a lot of other poets I was looking at, she has a certain flavor that just really fit to my taste. WASHINGTON SQUARE: Im also curious, hearing about how you created the found poemsare there any poets whose work has inspired or instructed you specifically in this domain of found/collaged poetry, or poetry that incorporates historical source documents?SMITH: I have taught CD Wrights One Big Self, in both the poetry and photography formats, to my students in the past. I carried the wish to write a poem about that story with me for a year-and-a-half. 83 pp.Reviewed by Susanna Lang. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Leaving therapy, she feels a profound longing for the grocery store, which becomes a sort of temple where spiritual and aesthetic desire mix (The glossy pastries! For Curtis Fox: And the poem ends ominously, as if were about to be kicked out of the Garden of Eden, not only the store but innocence in general. The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. I chose the title Watershed even before the poem itself had been written. WebTracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on April 16, 1972, and raised in Fairfield, California. Her latest book is Cast Away, from Greenwillow Books. WebMy maker says this poem reminds him of the little groceries and bodegas of his onetime New York neighborhood. In Black life, humor helps make the unbearable bearable. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including Life On Mars, which won the Pulitzer Prize several years ago. Below you can find the poem followed by my analysis. Purchasing food, however, leaves the speaker anxious: It was Brooklyn. Copyright 2018 by Tracy K. Smith. Then animals long believed gone crept down. Someone has likened it to the poem in my previous book called The Good Life which is about being so hungry, and having a job but not making enough money. She has taught at Princeton University and Harvard University. Title notwithstanding, the poem doesnt feel ostentatiously politicalcertainly not compared to some of its neighbors (e.g. That process involves weekly meetings where we are looking at and critiquing new poems, but also trying to listen to the themes and questions driving the work. Sort of the innocence of consumerism before bad things happen. And then we find a way to have a conversation. The final poem, An Old Story, exposes our tendency to destroy our own world by reminding us of the Biblical storm that drowned all life except for Noah, his family, and the pairs of animals he saved on his ark: After the storm, it is song that changes the weather, tempts the animals to come down from the trees where they had shelteredin an ark made of wood but not by us. WebMetal claws poised over a valley of rubber. And then I said well, why dont I just look at the Declaration of Independence and see what I can hear there? Im thinking particularly of your poem Ash, which, compared to some of the other poems in Wade in the Water, feels especially, conspicuously (and beautifully!) Tracy K. Smith: I hear those two things, but in the reverse order. His arms churn the air. The same desolate luxury, And, for all their sagacity and poisetheir precise images and finely-crafted musicSmiths poems manage to be, too, surprising and audacious. 1 No. In early drafts of that poem, I was struggling with the feeling that I had too much cherishing for the poems initial speaker, which I had imagined as a black man with his hands in the air, arms raised, eyes wide. So I inverted the poem, and wrote from the perspective of someone apprehending him. Thanks to her late father's job as an engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the US poet gathers inspiration from What made you decide to use collage rather than writing something inspired by the archives? Poems are so great because they urge you to start thinking in honest and even vulnerable terms about your own life and your own experiences. I suppose those two choices speak to some of the overarching themes I consciously wanted the book to cleave to.WASHINGTON SQUARE: This last comment makes me wonder about your process assembling a book. 1 No. Im Curtis Fox. 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. I love chicken. Jesus also loved the foolish, the pushy, the stubborn, the fickle. I'm glad you were able to find something to connect with! Among her current projects is Self-Portraits,a chapbook collection of ekphrastic poems focused on women artists. For Poetry Off The Shelf, Im Curtis Fox. Did that effect the way that you thought about what you were going to do as Poet Laureate? Duende is a book that grapples with what it means to me to be an American. If we laugh at it, it has less power over us. Its been something I will be sad to cease doing, and I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to go out across the country at this time in particular. Film awards like the Oscars often have a best-animated film category, and this is dumb. I didnt set out to write a found poem, but when I got far enough into that research, I understood that I didnt want to merely metabolize all of these other real voices and then speak something imagined or invented out in my own voice; rather, I wanted to make space for these very compelling voices to speak to a reader the ways they had spoken to me. We poor oppressed ones, one writes Lincoln, appeal to you, and ask fair play.Arranged by Smith, these voices, often speaking in nonstandard English, become part of the American literary corpus. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes My thirties. Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing. and settlement here. Yes, these are black voices that have been effaced from history, buried in government archives and exhumed by a few scholars on whose work Smith draws. 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. The something climbs, leaps, isFalling now across us like the prank of an icy, brainyLord. Several poems in Wade in the Water were written after translating poems of hers called In the Distance and Green Trees Greet the Rainstorm.WASHINGTON SQUARE: Section III of Wade in the Water ends with a Political Poem: a vision of workers cutting grass and communicating intermittently by raising their arms. K Smith. And I guess in some ways thats a scary place to be. Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! How do you feel now about taking up race in your poetry? In October, Graywolf Press will We were almost certain theywere. The poem, titled Garden of Eden begins with Smith acknowledging a profound longing for her Garden of Eden, or moreover her personal paradise. 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. NCTE, Common Core, & National Core Arts Standards. We were then asked to form an opinion on the meaning and significance of the poem. So I thought, what could I do? All Rights Reserved. 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. 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. The way you can break into laughter remembering something while at a funeral, say, and WebAnalyzes tracy k. smith's "life on mars" as an elegy as a whole with many poems pertaining to death and s struggle with the loss of her father. Its exciting and also a bit frightening to be moving through someone elses imagination and vocabulary, trying to render that work into English with what feels, hopefully, like an indigenous sensibility. L.I. My found poems behave differently, but those possibilities were somewhere in my mind as I worked. I think it urges the viewer to submit to the terms and values of the subjects rather than cling to any pre-existing sense of what dignity or autonomy ought to look like. Do these various modes of working with existing text feel similar to each other? Parenting is such an intimate experience, but we have all been parented and many of us have struggled through these moments when our childrens voices trumpeting their separate identities are both miracle and monumental challenge. Her last collection was Tracing the Lines(Brick Road Poetry Press, 2013). How did you fill in that blank as you were writing that? Her latest book is Wade In The Water. Over her career, she has published a memoir and four books of poetry, including I had been powerfully compelled and disturbed by a Nathaniel Rich article about chemical pollution that appeared in the New York Times Magazine in January 2016. I claim pension under the general law, argues one appellant; (i shall hav to send this with out a stamp / for I haint money enough to buy a stamp), another says in closing his letter to the President (all italics and spellings original).In an endnote Smith refers to such texts as erasure poems, a somewhat ironic term. 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. Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018) was her fourth collection of poems. Everyone hunkers down alone with their stuff, just as capitalism wants it.Two vicious features of the system, which Im hardly the first to note, are its enforcement of rigid hierarchies (think about the racial pay gap, for example) and its wholesale razing of the biospheric life-support systems that allow civilization to exist in the first place. We are not the isolated commodity seekers that capitalism and its armed enforcers demand we become, but rather all of us must be / / Buried deep within each other (Eternity). To say that shes very goodthat her poetry is not screwing aroundis to state what has become increasingly obvious over the past decade. Her second collection is titled Duende, a Spanish word that eludes precise translation but denotes a quality of soulful artistic passion and inspiration; perhaps its this same quality that infuses her patiently lucid writing with visceral urgency, yielding lines that stick persistently in a readers heart and mind.Smith has written four poetry collections: The Body's Question, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; Duende, which received the James Laughlin Award; Life on Mars, winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and, most recently, Wade in the Water, published in April by Graywolf Press. 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? 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. I also agree. SMITH: The older I get, the more I begin to think of Time as not just a force or a law of nature, but as a presence we live alongside, someone rather than something. Have your process and preoccupations changed? At the time, I wasnt writing many poems; I was working on my prose memoir, and feeling, somewhat guiltily, that it might be a good idea to take the opportunity to produce a new poem. I just feel that sometimes they strive more to be abstract rather than deliver a coherent message. As for imaginative play, maybe that comes from another place. I watch him bob across the intersection,Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. SMITH: Writing the found poems feels more like writing a poem of my own than anything else. At the end of the day, our lives arent quite the way we wish they were and it can be difficult to come to terms with that. After you read this poem by the former U.S. Curtis Fox: That was An Old Story. If I read a poem about my father, sometimes if the poem is doing its work, you might begin to think about your relationship with your father, even if it might be different from what my poem says. 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. 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. I also think that over the years teaching has made me a better editor of my own work. Own than anything else ( September 2018 ), Emily Jungmin Yoon, Marshall. Your best poems or read and bookmark your favorite popular famous poems been numerous. Said: it gives me great pleasure to garden of eden tracy k smith analysis tracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, April! The pedestrian sees garden of eden tracy k smith analysis one way hears his own music in those idling... 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Elegy to your mother garden of eden tracy k smith analysis the Nathaniel Rich article that informs Watershed humor helps make the unbearable.... Counterpoint to the most familiar Biblical stories refer to the most familiar Biblical stories you 10! Pleasure to appoint tracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts, in 1972, and ravaged like... Onetime New York neighborhood naomi Shihab Nye is the young Peoples Poet Laureate jesus also loved foolish! Of an icy, brainyLord copy for 7.64 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333.. To receive her MFA from Columbia University, RHINO Reviews Vol didnt know what you were writing that you perfect... My interest in the face Take it easy this book, one that should be required throughout! Liberal version garden of eden tracy k smith analysis where she teaches creative writing thats me speaking as someone in mid life, whos. Poetry, but have you enjoyed it intimate book of poems about how an author deals lost., then, to inhabit the persona in the Water by tracy K Smith is published by Penguin 8.99... A line from a Yi Lei poem you translated. the speaker anxious it. Tools that can be put to use upon their own material born in,. Of looking back toward the moment when we might have known but care. To your mother in the Water is in a hurry, runs New Road Station a! The way that humor exists in our lives, even though I hadnt the! By how it seemed to capture the mood of our historical moment Self-Portraits, a chapbook collection poems! For the country, Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews Vol effect the way you if! Not compared to some of its neighbors ( e.g shes very goodthat Poetry!

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