Podcast Summary:

On Being with Krista Tippett
Episode: Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith – "This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful."
Date: February 26, 2026

Overview

In this luminous and nourishing episode, Krista Tippett gathers poets Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith—successive U.S. Poet Laureates—for a conversation that weaves poetry, time, grief, healing, creativity, radical compassion, and the challenge and beauty of living in tumultuous times. Framed by readings from their new books and iconic poems, the exchange is alive with wit, wisdom, and the conviction that poetry is not only an art but a tool for living, connecting, and navigating collective and personal transformation.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Nature and Power of Poetry

• Poetry as Technology for Living

  • Tracy K. Smith calls poetry a “technology”—a means for “rising to our truest, highest selves, even amidst grief and mystery and danger, and bearing witness to each other as we do so.” (00:56, intro)
  • She describes poetry as meeting her “with what feels like urgent compassion when I'm lost or afraid.” (03:34)

• Poetry as a Collective and Spiritual Tool

  • Joy Harjo sees poems as “transformational stations, like electric transformers.” Poetry is a place for contradiction, ceremony, and healing, where one can “find your way through the chaos… because everyone here is a creative force.” (06:17–08:36)
  • Poetry is described as more than individual expression; it holds collective import and possibility.

The Transformative Dynamics of Chaos, Contradiction, and Time

• The Creative Power of Chaos

  • Harjo reflects: “When you get to a point of chaos, confusion, and despair, that is the most creative… something is going to emerge.” (07:34–08:36)
  • Poetry’s capacity to hold contradiction and surprise is central to its power.

• Poetry as Ceremony and Timeless Practice

  • Harjo: “Poetry is essentially ceremony… a healer speaking or singing a state of mind into existence. That’s the root.” (19:17)

• The Cinematic, Collective & Cosmic Perspective

  • Smith references Einstein, challenging the “optical delusion” of separateness and underscoring our interconnectedness, describing poetry as a “moment at a time” to “move toward credible evidence that I am you.” (23:36–25:22)
  • Harjo adds, “It really shifted something in me” to see poetry as both “civic work” and “cosmic work.” (25:22)

Fear, Healing, and Radical Compassion

• Poetry as an Antidote and Companion to Fear

  • Smith: “Poetry wouldn’t allow us to behave this way. Poetry would insist that our listening be permitted to lead us, even briefly, out of our rigid stances, our staunchest habits… come, sit, calm yourselves and attend more generously to one another.” (34:28–35:26)

• Fear as Instinct and Training

  • Smith cites Elizabeth Kubler Ross, suggesting the only innate human fears are loud sounds and falling; the rest are learned and often manipulated. (41:44)
  • Poems can help us “acknowledge and claim vulnerabilities… and empower us to behave differently in the face of threats.” (42:51)

• Radical Compassion through Poetry

  • The poets urge “radical compassion”—to bridge perceived divides by imagining ourselves and others within a unified, interconnected ‘we’. (54:47, 56:18)

The Value of Listening, Curiosity, and Collective Story

• Curiosity as a Moral Muscle

  • Tippett: “Curiosity really is a moral muscle… obliterated by, as you say, not just the fear, but the reaction to the fear, the fearing, the fear itself.” (49:04)
  • Naming and sitting with truths (including fear) through poetry offers grounding, presence, and creative relation even with what disturbs us.

• Living in "Chrysalis Time"

  • Harjo likens both adolescence and our current historical crisis to “chrysalis time: that place of deconstruction and reinvention… where wings emerge from chaos.” (52:27)

• Connection Across Difference

  • Both poets speak of connection—through art, music, ceremony, eating together, or simply being in a room together—as the essential work and hope of our time.

Memorable Quotes & Notable Moments

• On Why We Need Poetry

  • Tracy K. Smith:

    “When I'm confident in my convictions, poems alert me to complexities I failed or been unwilling to regard. And like the best of friends... they keep evolving, meeting me where I am… We never cease in our becoming. Neither does this art form… this tool designed to remind us how it feels and why it matters to love, to remember, to ache, to fear, to be astonished…”
    [03:34]

• On Contradiction and Creativity

  • Joy Harjo:

    “Poems carry contradictions. That’s often the surprise that you will find in a poem…. When you get to a point of chaos and confusion and despair, that is the most creative, that what’s happening in there is all of this stuff is being stirred up because something is coming out of it, something’s going to emerge.”
    [07:18–08:36]

• On Poetry’s Sacred Function

  • Tracy K. Smith, about Harjo's "She Had Some Horses":

    “I felt rescued by the risk and the fearlessness… There’s something sacred about this art form… it teaches us to think about our lives in a cinematic way, in a way that confounds the borders of time.”
    [17:02]

• On Ceremony

  • Joy Harjo:

    “A poem… is essentially a ceremony. At the root, every one of us has experienced poetry in ceremony… whether it’s your religion or the ceremony of sunrise to sunset.”
    [19:17]

• On Radical Compassion

  • Tracy K. Smith:

    “If it is a ceremony, it leads us to a collective capacity that I talk about in the book as radical compassion…. there are horses she loved, there were horses she hated. These were the same horses. And to think about what it means to claim that.”
    [20:50]

• On Grieving and Hope

  • Joy Harjo, reading “Lullaby”:

    “When the tears are too heavy to bear, they flow downstream. A flood and then there we are, so young and deep in your babyhood. …This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful. That's all I want for you. What my mother wanted for me, her mother for her and her mother. …We stay there for a while until we are full, then leave to return to the story, knowing we will make a mess of it, knowing we will lose everything, then find it again.”
    [62:13]

• On the Reality and Hope of Division

  • Tracy K. Smith:

    “To go into the pandemic with this proof [of people’s generosity and shared humanity] was really heartening. And to live through these times of heightened and violent division and rhetoric of dehumanization, it tells me that's actually not our story. That's a tactic that's being used right now, but our story is different. And that's been life saving, I think, in a lot of ways, or heart saving for me.”
    [56:26–58:19]

Important Segments (Timestamps)

| Timestamp | Segment/Topic | |-----------|----------------------------------------------------------| | 00:00 | Introduction, setting context, the “maps in our hearts” | | 03:34 | Tracy K. Smith reads from "Fearless" | | 06:17 | Joy Harjo on poetry as “transformational stations” | | 13:25 | Harjo reads “She Had Some Horses” | | 19:17 | Poetry as ceremony; Smith on radical compassion | | 23:36 | Smith on relativity, the illusion of separateness | | 29:49 | Smith reads “Now, Joao” (new poem) | | 38:07 | Harjo reads “Overwhelm” (from new book, Cloud Runner) | | 41:44 | Fear, vulnerability, the work of poems | | 52:27 | Harjo on “chrysalis time” and collective transformation | | 56:18 | Smith on bridging divides through the Poet Laureate work | | 62:13 | Harjo reads “Lullaby” (grief, hope, continuity) | | 63:28 | Smith’s untitled visionary poem |

Final Reflections & Tone

The conversation is both intimate and epic, gently witty and deeply serious, intimate and civic. Both poets resist neat answers, instead modeling curiosity, humility, and the willingness to dwell in contradiction—the “mess” of life that is also its generative ground. The episode leaves listeners grounded in hope: not a naïve hope, but one forged through grief, clear-eyed engagement, and steadfast return to “everything good, everything beautiful,” with poetry as a guide.

Selected Poems Read

• Tracy K. Smith:

  • Opening from "Fearless" [03:34]
  • “Now, Joao” [29:49]
  • Untitled piece about visioning after collapse [63:28]

• Joy Harjo:

  • Excerpt from memoir [05:24]
  • “She Had Some Horses” [13:25]
  • “Overwhelm” (from forthcoming Cloud Runner) [38:07]
  • “Lullaby” (Cloud Runner) [62:13]

Additional Highlights

• Harjo and Smith reflect on their time as U.S. Poet Laureate during profoundly unsettled years—finding that poetry, even (especially) in crisis, is deeply sought-after, “allowing a voice up against something that seemed impenetrable.”
• The importance of allowing ourselves, and one another, complexity rather than flattening or polarizing experience.
• Both poets stress the civic and ethical importance of poetry, imagination, and radical compassion for collective healing and transformation.

"This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful."
—Joy Harjo, [62:13]