← On Being with Krista Tippett
On Being with Krista Tippett
Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith – "This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful."
01:09:10
From Krista: These days I sometimes have to remind myself to keep breathing. I think this is true of human beings across all of our differences and divides. But in a room in New York City just before the turn of this year, I was regrounded by this fierce and joyous conversation with Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith. I invite you to settle into your soft breathing body with these two wise women as companions and with a sense of poetry as a technology, as Tracy describes in her new book: a technology for rising to our truest, highest selves, even amidst grief and mystery and danger, and bearing witness to each other as we do so. I think all of us in the room left a little more lighthearted and alive as this conversation unfolded. I hope that will be your experience too. Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo are former U.S. poet laureates, beloved On Being guests, and friends. They are each wildly and deservedly awarded and not just as poets — Tracy also as a teacher and professor at Harvard, J...
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- [00:00]
Krista Tippett
In the introduction I wrote after my first interview with the wonderful Joy Harjo, I read this sentence from her memoir, Crazy Brave. Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world, nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm. I know this is not exactly what she was talking about, but these days I often have to remind myself to keep breathing. I think this is true of human beings. Across all of our differences and divides those maps and instructions in our hearts can feel hard to access or believe in. But in a room in New York City just before the turn of this year, Joy summoned them together with me and her fellow poet and friend, Tracy K. Smith. I invite you now to settle into your soft breathing body with these two wise women as companions and with a sense of poetry as a technology, as Tracy describes in her new book, Poetry as a Technology for rising to our truest highest selves, even amidst grief and mystery and danger, and bearing witness to each other as we do so, I think all of us in that room left a little more light hearted and alive as this conversation unfolded. And, and I hope that will be your experience too. I'm Krista Tippett and this is on Being. Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo are both wildly and deservedly awarded, and not just as poets. Tracy also is a teacher and professor at Harvard. Joy as a saxophonist and painter. We were brought together at Symphony Space in Manhattan to celebrate their newest books. I think you're as happy to be here as I am. I want to thank Symphony Space before we begin so much. Yeah, I don't think I've ever said yes to an invitation more quickly than I did to this one. To sit with these two together. I interviewed each of you when you were Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, the 22nd U.S. poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019, and Joy Harjo, the 23rd U.S. poet LaureATE from 2019 to 2022. Traci and I did a live event here in New York City. By the time we interviewed Joy, we were in the middle of pandemic and lockdown. And so we met on Zoom. We've never met in person. Now I usually start interview Ferran being with a question about origins, which was inspired by some Benedictines who were important in my life a long time ago, who would take up a big theological question and say, answer the question through the story of your life. I think that these two books that they've written here that we're also here to celebrate tonight are really, you could say, one way I might talk about them is that they're each kind of long unfoldings of this exercise. What is poetry? The question, through the story of your life and, Tracy, I actually thought I might ask you to read the first page of Fearless because it's such a beautiful way in.
- [03:34]
Tracy K. Smith
Oh, thank you. I'd love to. Throughout my reading life, poems have greeted me with what feels like urgent compassion when I'm lost or afraid. The speed speakers of poems assure me that my feelings are nothing to hide from or deny. Indeed, that vulnerability, uncertainty and even desperation are not only signs of life, but tools for moving forward toward courage, hope and purpose. 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, somehow the poems I've loved for years managed to keep evolving, meeting me where I am. And then, how do they do it? Leading me still further along toward what will startle, console, and even change me. I shouldn't be surprised. Our very selves from day to day are the result of where we've been, what we've seen, how we've hurt and healed, and what we are on the threshold, even now, of discovering. We never cease in our becoming. Neither does this art form, this confidant, this tool designed to remind us how it feels and why it matters to love, to remember, to ache, to fear, to be astonished by what our minds can make and what our spirits can withstand.
- [05:24]
Krista Tippett
Thank you. Thank you. Enjoy. There is a passage in your book that I'll read. It's a little shorter. That seemed to me a way you might begin to answer the question of what is poetry? Answer the question through the story of your life, you said. I see poems as transformational stations, like electric transformers. I have learned that you can put just about anything in a poem if it will fit and if it is necessary, to the poem. I have washed my mother's body in a poem when I was not allowed the opportunity at her death. I have stood in the stars and looked out on the earth in admiration. I have walked into the future and returned with my arms full of flowers.
- [06:18]
Joy Harjo
Oh, I didn't. Okay. I don't remember writing that.
- [06:23]
Krista Tippett
It's nice when that happens, isn't it? To hear your words come back at you that you.
- [06:26]
Joy Harjo
It is. I hadn't. Yeah.
- [06:29]
Krista Tippett
Do you think that's such a mystery of writing and I just can't even imagine what it's like for the two of you with what you've written, that
- [06:36]
Joy Harjo
I've always had a hard time talking about the writing of poetry.
- [06:40]
Tracy K. Smith
Yeah.
- [06:40]
Joy Harjo
You know, or Tracy has in her book, this book, her book Fearless, has the best response to, you know, how does poetry matter? Or why does poetry matter? And for me, I think I've come to the conclusion that I'm involved in a study of time, which is a study of timelessness. And I think it became for me as a way to open doorways, to surprise, to the unknowing, which is, you know, a poem can carry what words. I mean, I love contradictions. That's why I'm living here in these
- [07:19]
Krista Tippett
times,
- [07:22]
Joy Harjo
is that that's what poems do, is they carry. They carry contradictions. And that's often the surprise that you will find in a poem is how can this fit with this?
- [07:34]
Krista Tippett
Right.
- [07:34]
Joy Harjo
You know, how can we see what we're seeing? And it's called leadership, you know, and, you know, how does all of this. It's, you know, we're in a huge. If you want to talk about what we're in as a poem, it's not there yet. It's this huge moment of chaos. But the thing I've learned about chaos is that, and I've learned this in the writing process or making music or whatever else I'm doing, raising family, et cetera, is that 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's coming out of it, something's going to emerge. And you just have a lot of poems around to help you find your way, you know, find your way through the chaos and then your own creative self. Because everyone is here, because everyone here is a creative force in some way or the other.
- [08:36]
Krista Tippett
Tracy, you said something that kind of reminds me of that about, again, talking about poems. And I want to say, like I've always said, the point of talking about poetry is not talking about poetry. It's about where poetry comes from in us and therefore reveals to us and what it works in us distinctly from other forms of words. And, you know, you said, like poems use words that are not about words and you actually kind of mirror this electrical transformer imagery, like the ways cars use fuel and electricity, but are about something more far reaching.
- [09:14]
Tracy K. Smith
Yeah, well, I think that poems for me, and I think for many of us provide a pretext for going toward the sites of unrest or mystery or danger that are roiling within us all the time, but that we have a lot of forms and functions in our day to day life that tamp that down or mask it very well. And poems are things that say, I know you don't have a handle on that. And to help you remember that, I'm going to show you this journey. I'm going to invite you into a conundrum that I'm dealing with or that has crossed my path or upended things for me. And talking about the poem after the experience of it, I find is a way to open up that space and invite others in and witness something in each other. This is a big part of what the project that I did in the laureateship was. It was traveling to rural communities, oftentimes with an audience of people that wasn't like a self declared group of poets or poetry lovers. Sometimes there was skepticism or fear, but we would read a poem, we read poems by Joy, we'd read poems by American poets. And I would say, what do you notice? What does this poem cause you to wonder, remember, feel, or even long for? What does it nudge? And then people were talking about the most powerful, vulnerable, mysterious, even regrettable experiences that they had firsthand experience of. And what we were talking about was life, right? And there's so much that distracts us from this topic of conversation that is probably more important than anything else.
- [11:18]
Krista Tippett
Life as it is, messy as it is. We don't. We've never, I think in this country done well with just letting pain and fear and the mess of life show themselves raw. And now we have all these ways that seem to speak of that or yell about that, but it's actually also not getting at it the way poetry does. I mean, I think the. So one of the things I was doing is I was thinking about how we could confine this to an hour of this conversation is looking at how your books talk to each other. And so one of the really important points, one of the really, really important truths I think we get to dwell with is that even as a poem might be about those very personal human depths, this is not merely individual finding healthy ways to both let that show and transmute it and also share it with others. That it is as individual and collective has collective import. And so in your book, then in this chapter called Falling Aw. So both of these books, I should say, are prose, essentially, but with poetry. And in the context of the chapter Falling Awake, one of the poems you pick up to wonder at is Joy's poem She had some Horses. And this was published in did you make a face? Well, we talked about. So it's a long poem. I was thinking also, if I were still on public radio. I would worry because it's such a long poem, but I'm not on public radio, so I don't have to worry about that clock. But I think it's. First of all, it just felt too good to be true for tonight in that, you know, I thought it might be interesting for Tracy to be sitting with you while you read it. Now, it is a long poem, and
- [13:10]
Joy Harjo
it's a. I'll read it fast.
- [13:12]
Krista Tippett
It's intense. No, don't read it fast. It's raw. There's a lot going on, but. Yes. So would you read that to us and we'll dwell with it?
- [13:25]
Joy Harjo
Yeah. It's funny. I can remember sitting there at the typewriter in the olden days at the typewriter. I can remember sitting there writing it, but I don't remember the Genesis or. Yeah. She had some horses. She had horses who were bodies of sand. She had horses who were maps drawn of blood. She had horses who were skins of ocean water. She had horses who were the blue air of sky. She had horses who were fur and teeth. She had horses who were clay and would break. She had horses who were splintered red cliffs. She had some horses. She had horses with eyes of trains. She had horses with full brown thighs. She had horses who laughed too much. She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses. She had horses who licked razor blades. She had some horses. She had horses who danced in their mother's arms. She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars. She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon. She had horses who were much too shy and kept quiet in stalls of their own making. She had some horses. She had horses who like creek stomp dance songs. She had horses who cried in their beer. She had horses who spit at male queens who made them afraid of themselves. She had horses who said they weren't afraid. She had horses who lied. She had horses who told the truth who were stripped bare of their tongues. She had some horses. She had horses who called themselves hoarse. She had horses who called themselves spirit and kept their voices secret unto themselves. She had horses who had no names. She had horses who had books of names. She had some horses. She had horses who whispered in the dark who were afraid to speak. She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence. Who carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts. She had horses who waited for destruction. She had horses who waited for resurrection. She had some horses. She had horses who got down on their knees for any savior. She had horses who Thought their high price had saved them. She had horses who tried to save her and climbed in her bed at night and prayed. She had some horses. She had some horses she loved. She had some horses she hated. These were the same horses.
- [16:20]
Krista Tippett
Well, that translation off the page out of your voice was amazing.
- [16:25]
Joy Harjo
Yeah. It's different. I thought, oh, no, do I have to read that again?
- [16:28]
Tracy K. Smith
But that's literally what she said. Yeah.
- [16:32]
Joy Harjo
But then I told myself. I tell myself that. Read it. This is a whole. Read it. According to. Because the audience is very much a part of this. There's always this interaction going on in this space, too, in what's gone on here in this building. I mean, it's all living materials. And so I just wanted. I tried to hear it in a different way. So I've never read it quite like that before. Yeah.
- [17:00]
Krista Tippett
And it took you so many places.
- [17:02]
Tracy K. Smith
Yeah. I mean, I remember finding that. Finding your book. She had Some Horses. The book came out in 1983, originally.
- [17:11]
Joy Harjo
Yes.
- [17:12]
Tracy K. Smith
I found it when I was working on my first book in the early 2000s. And I felt rescued by the risk and the fearlessness and the wind and the contradiction and the power that you summon and the way that logic falls down and becomes susceptible to things that are much more powerful and potent. And it teaches us to think about our lives in a cinematic way, in a way that confounds the borders of time. And for someone like me, who had come out of so many, you know, recently, out of so many workshops and so many forms of education, academic training to make art, it told me that many of the things that have been valorized constrain the large things that poems can do. And I just felt like that poem, that book, your voice, reminded me that there's something sacred about this art form. And I really was excited to write about that poem because every time I've taught it, it offers my students something. Something similar and, of course, unique for them. But one of the wonderful things that it allows us to do is to move through with questions that allow for expansive and intuitive and cumulative answers, as opposed to what sometimes happens for students, which is. Let's narrow this down. Let's drill down on this and figure out what the poet is, quote, trying
- [18:59]
Krista Tippett
to get more complex.
- [19:01]
Tracy K. Smith
Yeah. And it's. It makes us understand that we live with complexity. We're carrying it all the time, and it doesn't have to adhere to uniform, flattening, sanctioned terms.
- [19:17]
Joy Harjo
Right. Right. I didn't do well in workshops, some of them, but I do remember. What I do remember is and what compelled me to write poetry was writing W R I T I N G and then. And also writing like writing into the space, into what I didn't know. And I've always been very rhythm oriented. I just bought a drum kit too, but I really rhythm oriented. And I just. All I know, all I can remember about that is just moving into it and letting go any of those constrictions about, you know, what I had been. Poetry can be this or it can be this. And yet, if we look at, you know, how poetry has always been, poetry is essentially ceremony. A poem, I think, consider poems essentially a ceremony. And that's how at the root every one of us has experienced poetry is in ceremony, whatever, whether it's your religion or the ceremony of sunrise to sunset, you know, and how the sun and the moon, the full moon right now, moves through its cycle. I mean, that's the root of poetry and healing or a healer speaking or singing, you know, people speaking and singing, a state of mind into existence. And for me, that's the root, you know, and it can be about falling in love and falling out. I mean, that's ceremonial too, of a sort of that poem.
- [20:51]
Tracy K. Smith
Also, if it is a ceremony, it leads us to a collective capacity that I talk about in the book as radical compassion to go to that power through the journey of the poem, feeling all of the dynamics of these figures and the relations that they suggest or bring to mind. And then to get to that conundrum, 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. And for me, when I love a poem, I try and take it as a charge. And so what does it mean if this is a possibility that we can work toward?
- [21:31]
Joy Harjo
And where does that come from? I mean, how did I know to write she had some horses she loves. I mean, how did any of us, you know, anyone, you know, composer, a dancer. I know Melissa's out there. A dancer. Any. How do any of us. There's something that we. We work with, you know, that force of. You can call it a force of beauty, contradiction, the depth of creation that we work with. And I'll be riding along and I find these spaces and I think, whoa, thank you. I do. I'll say not out loud, but, you know, because that's, you know, when you're involved in that process. I've started painting again and. And sometimes it feels like it's not me painting, but there's something I'm following. Yes. I've Sketched. I've got all these sketches. I've got stuff I've printed out. And the same with poetry, you know, with research. You know, we were talking about how we research things, and that all piles up, and then you dream stuff, and it's all there. And then when you go into that process, it's amazing, you know, you revise. But somehow that's why I call it a study of time, because there's these different layers of knowing or being that coheres into this transformative shape. It's like food for the spirit, you know?
- [22:56]
Krista Tippett
Yeah. Tracy, it also took you to. I mean, it's like we're talking about, as you say, like, the cinematic drama and all the contradictoriness that is inside every human being. And I. I'm thinking so much in this time about how if we could actually just dwell with how we ourselves are so full of contradiction and therefore capable of change, even that surprises us. If we could just imagine that. That is also true of everybody else. But it also took you to this. Well, like this cosmic place, right? This Einstein, you with the daughter of a Hubble Space Telescope engineer.
- [23:36]
Tracy K. Smith
Yeah. I mean, it brought to mind Einstein's description of the. Oh, you know, I can't even remember. I'm bad with the optical delusion. Yes, thank you. The optical delusion. I have an illusion which is that we are separate from other things, other people. But essentially, all that is, all that exists, exists at a distance from us. And he challenges us to wake up to the reality that that's not true and that our work here as humans is to move away from that delusion and toward a willingness to accept our connection, our interrelatedness. And he says it's impossible, it's an impossibility, but moments at a time, it's a worthwhile undertaking. And I think poems, all poems, are those moments at a time when we can move towards something that feels like credible evidence that I am you, that the speaker of your poem is speaking through my life to reveal something to me that I haven't recognized, but that I do recognize in your voice. Poems that are brief, poems that are playful. There are poems that, you know, the kinds of rhymes that children grow up reciting, offer this in different ways. I feel like that adds up to, yes, cosmic work, but along the way, civic work. That's really important. I think that poems and a relationship to that feat equips us to participate in a nation and its conundrums with a better set of tools and more willingness.
- [25:23]
Joy Harjo
I think when you wrote that in your book. It really shifted something in me, and it helped me actually think about coming at poems in a renewed way. To see a poem, to experience a poem in that way,
- [25:40]
Tracy K. Smith
that means a lot.
- [25:41]
Krista Tippett
That's a lovely thing to take in. You know, you have been Poets Laureate in such an extraordinary time. Right. Such. Such years, including, you know, into the pandemic years, which was its own thing and I think is also still shaping this time more than we.
- [26:02]
Joy Harjo
Yeah.
- [26:02]
Krista Tippett
Than we want. We want to. We've kind of pretended like we normalized it.
- [26:06]
Tracy K. Smith
Right.
- [26:06]
Krista Tippett
That's what Einstein. I was talking about. Like, our five senses and our brains are just desperately trying to create a sense of order for us. And.
- [26:14]
Tracy K. Smith
And.
- [26:15]
Krista Tippett
But it's often not in touch with reality, and we keep. And we also can't let in the complexity of reality. Except, as you. I mean, I love what you just said, that a poem like, it's time out of time, right. That moment stops that. As he also said, that stubbornly persistent illusion that time is this arrow moving forward, progressing ever forward. It actually plants us in time as the mystery of time and the spaciousness of time. Time as it works.
- [26:48]
Tracy K. Smith
Most people trust Einstein. Many people mistrust poems. But when they're speaking of the same thing, it gets very exciting to me. And it begins to unsettle the notion that many people, everyone, doesn't have access to the relationship to time that you just, you know, attributed to joy. It begins to alert us to the fact that this is the innate function of our presence within or beside time. It begins to remind us that all of the voices that say, that's not something you're permitted to believe or practice are misguided. They're working from faulty evidence. And I'm very excited about having these conversations more and more with more people who haven't always felt that way and now find themselves inclined, you know, inclined toward this other view or in need of it, you know.
- [27:55]
Krista Tippett
Yeah. It's a strange thing about us that we sometimes have to get to a point of real desperation to actually look up and out and transform the way we want to. I asked the two of them in advance if they would bring a poem that they wrote as poet laureate that might be something that's with them in walking through this time now. And they both said that when you are poet laureate, you do not have time to write poetry. So I wonder, but I wonder if I'd love to just hear a poem from each of you that is with you now and that perhaps was informed, let's say, Belatedly, by the experience that you had. Now, Tracy, you, as you said, you were really out in the country. You were all over, and you were really. What was the. Was it the American.
- [28:43]
Tracy K. Smith
You called it the American conversation.
- [28:45]
Krista Tippett
American conversation. And, yeah, as you say, going in all these places where poet. Where people aren't going for poetry readings necessarily. And you really wanted to. I felt like you were just really wanted to, like, place your hands and your heart, you know, on the psyche of our country and the heart of our country. And then, Joy, you were, you know, in this bizarre time where, you know, this. This huge experience which had so much trauma and loss and also, I think, really gave us to see every single reckoning that is before us existentially for the whole century, but also reminded us that civilization revolves around bodies breathing in proximity to other bodies. Right. So. Yeah. Do you. Have you thought about what you might want to offer?
- [29:43]
Joy Harjo
Yes, we have.
- [29:44]
Krista Tippett
Okay. Who would like to go first? I'll let you choose.
- [29:50]
Tracy K. Smith
I'll go first so that I can really. And just listen to Joy, this. Yeah, you don't write poems while you're a poet laureate. But I found myself thinking a lot about the divisions that we accept, the borders that have been erected between people and also between us and ourselves. This is a new poem, but in a way, I believe that it's grappling with that. And I will say I have been in Brazil recently, but my very first trip TO Brazil was 20 years ago. And before I went, I checked out all of these Portuguese language cassettes from a library and was studying. And in every of the lessons, there was this guy named Joo, and he would ask for money or a favor or to borrow your car. And you were made to repeat, now, Joo, which is no, Joao. And there was such a mistrust of the Zhuo that was instilled. And it's funny, but it's also serious. And so I came back to it this summer, and this is a poem that I think allowed me to think about why that seemed like such a. Such a problem for me. Now, Joao, I learned all about you from a set of Portuguese language cassettes borrowed from the public library 20 years ago. You were a bad boy. Sweet talker, A whisperer of secrets and irresistible lies. Everyone in every lesson told you, no. Now, Joao, I was made to repeat it over and again. When you pleaded for money, promising to repay me next Monday. And when your motorcycle was in the shop and you needed to borrow my car, your eyes would have been devilish and deep, long lashed and quietly Laughing all the time, eyes that follow a person and then, when met, appear bored, bemused. You were a magnet of a man, and I was forewarned, rehearsing the only reply. Now, Joao, Joao, now. But now, traipsing your city all these years later, while my own country flirts with strong men and the dangerous little boys who look up to them, you refuse to turn up. Oh, Joo, where is your harried plea for a night on my posada floor? As friends and nothing more. I suppose I'm too late, traveling with my teenage daughter, old enough to know better, I could finally be your mother. If like much else here, Joao, you've stayed the same. Or was that you in the elevator of my hotel, A busboy with lips like a ripe question and a pale kitchenette hiding your crown of dark coils. Now that I can recognize in you the restless, undefeated soul. So like my father once, or my sons soon did you arrive only to ask nothing. Holding parted the door after pushing an empty room service cart into the hall. You called me senora, dipped your head as I passed. Wait, Joao. Every version of me wants to know. Does this world still insist on telling you no?
- [34:17]
Krista Tippett
Tracy, I. Something you write in the book. This was in the years before you became poet Laureate.
- [34:28]
Tracy K. Smith
So.
- [34:29]
Krista Tippett
Yeah, you said. Almost daily during the long and histrionic news cycle leading up to the 2016 election, I had found myself thinking 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. Already I could hear Mother poetry saying, come, sit, calm yourselves and attend more generously to one another. You know, it's. It makes so much sense, this paragraph, to me, and, I think, to people in this room. And yet it's such a gift to be given it, to think right, to state it.
- [35:26]
Tracy K. Smith
Well, it's helpful to me to make concrete some of the things that are happening, maybe even imperceptibly, when we read poems. And what I believe the prime act that occurs is us leaning toward another voice, the voice of a stranger with everything in us, as though they're speaking a different language because they're speaking in a different way, about experiences that may or may not seem familiar to us. And we're kind of submitting to an act of translation that allows it to become legible and useful. And when we do, it offers us something about them, the world, but also about ourselves. And when I think about the ways that we are encouraged to stand one another down and debate and denigrate these perspectives that are different from our own. I think it is a fear based response. I think it's activated by things like the marketplace that says your opinion as a consumer is more important than anyone else's or anything else. But poems allow us to be larger than that and to be larger than that by way of a deep humility and a willingness to let someone go the distance. Let's see what they're leading us toward. Maybe I need to get there too. I think if we do that enough as readers. This is my romantic idea. We are better equipped to do that in real time with strangers or with people we know and butt heads with. And we're equipped to, I don't know, step into that sense of, there's horses I love and there are horses I hate, but they're the same horses, so what do we do with them?
- [37:17]
Joy Harjo
But it's a care of language. It's an attention and care to language. And can you imagine the Senate being conducted, you know, with poetry, with a sense of. Or oratory, you know, was deeply prized by our, you know, our peoples. A sense of being able to speak in a way that was metaphorical. We're losing metaphor with texting and so on, but a way that was metaphorical and touched on deeper, resonant truths with humility.
- [37:48]
Tracy K. Smith
Yeah. But I believe we have to allow ourselves to imagine it's a journey, but that some type of recovery like that is possible so that we can make it so, you know.
- [38:04]
Krista Tippett
Yeah. Joey, do you have a poem?
- [38:07]
Joy Harjo
Yeah. It kind of works off all of this too, I think.
- [38:10]
Krista Tippett
And you have a new book of poetry coming out in 2026 as well.
- [38:14]
Joy Harjo
Right. This is from it called Cloud Runner
- [38:17]
Krista Tippett
and also an album with Esperanza Spalding.
- [38:21]
Joy Harjo
Yes. Coming out from Folkways in April. This was. I was in. It's funny how poems are. If I show you the notes for the poem, it's very different because. And then the poem went different places. But I was in a small motel, they called it a hotel in a little town in Colorado, way out. I was out there for some kind of poetry thing. And I remember getting on the elevator with this guy. He was huge. He was big and he was carrying a case of beer. Well, it turns out he was in the room next to mine. And you know how some of those rooms have. They have doors that open for family. Later on I realized I was in a room with that door and the fight was going on over there. But. But it winds up. It turns into a love poem at the End it's called overwhelm. There was a door between the men arguing and me in the small town hotel when I returned late to my room. Then they went quiet, which can be more dangerous. I became stealthy in my mind. Bad spirits find doorways and stupor. I used to seek lift from the overwhelm and drink. I'd ride over the meadow of doubt flowers to the field of miracles where anything was possible in the blur. I never drank alone. It was the circle that drew me from the haunting to the waters. We remembered songs that we thought we had forgotten. And we were beautiful beyond belief. The profane danced wildly with the sublime. How ridiculous now to think we were happy in the quick shelter we sought from truth. I now understand how a whole country can drink from the waters of illusion and go down. And how easy fury can turn to gunshots then give way to torpor. I needed a respite from the story then as in now. I counted the steps from midnight to home to your arms. The dark skies of eternity were lit with small fires. They showed me the way. Which is similar to what you. It's very similar to what you just went to.
- [40:53]
Krista Tippett
And I think they both ask us to look at the presence of fear as a feature of our life together now, of maybe just being alive in this time, which is also. I mean, it's in the title of your book, but it is arguably the most powerful force in a human body, perhaps only matched by love. Because I think that that fear, which happens below the level of consciousness so much of the time, is what stops the leaning in, even makes the curiosity. I think it seems like it blocks the place in us the curiosity comes from. I just would love for. I'd love to hear both of you reflect on this and how you're working with this now.
- [41:44]
Tracy K. Smith
After my father passed away, I was reading a lot of books about life after death. Elizabeth Kubler Ross is one of the first authors who help me think beyond death as absence. And she said, as humans, the only things we really naturally should be afraid of are loud sounds and falling. There is nothing else that we should fear. Which means that much of the fear response that we hold and that we. You even maybe felt, as you were describing fear as this powerful thing is learned and activated in very deliberate ways. We're encoded with the fear response because we've been habituated to it, because it serves some to have others afraid and disoriented and to feel powerless.
- [42:51]
Krista Tippett
And we have this equipment in our brains that's so good at, like, clicking into Action.
- [42:57]
Tracy K. Smith
When we name and recognize a thing, it becomes smaller. And I think that poems, by leading us to our vulnerabilities and to acknowledge and claim them and think them through and redirect them in language almost as if it were an experiment we were conducting, it empowers us to behave differently in the face of these threats. And I also really believe, and I would like to invite you to think about this, that it instills a dissatisfaction with the systems or the patterns that make us clench, make us small, and serve to narrow our sense of what is possible and what we ourselves are. And I think that it's a choice we can make. I think in some ways, writing a poem is a choice, you know, is one version of that choice, but there are others as well. Reading a poem might alert you to others. Reading a poem that scares you kills two birds with one stone.
- [44:04]
Krista Tippett
Yeah,
- [44:07]
Joy Harjo
I'm not. Yeah, that is such a great answer. I don't know. I think of how fear can be useful, you know, to tell you that, you know, speaking of, you know, you can sense. It's a useful thing. I guess what I want to say is fear is useful. It can alert. It's part of an alert system where it becomes. I think what you're talking about is where it becomes programmatic, where we fear other people, we fear certain things. Not, you know, because we've been taught, maybe falsely, from false beliefs. And, you know, that's where the. I guess that's where the danger. I mean, we're looking at it right now. We're in the middle of it. That's where the danger is. I don't know. I was thinking about it because when you started talking about fear, I got a visceral. Just talking about it, just saying fear. I had this visceral reaction going right through my gut. And I thought, well, that's interesting, because my intuition, you know, the intuition, the way we know things, or even what comes through in a poem at times are things that you don't know and then they appear. Well, like she had some horses she loves. She had some horses she hated. I mean, that's. Or, you know, it's like, there it is. Or that poem by. What is her name, the Ultra Black Fish was such a. I mean, that poem just came directly. It was a found poem, but it's just so absolutely perfect.
- [45:46]
Krista Tippett
Yeah. Do you want to just say what that was?
- [45:48]
Tracy K. Smith
Oh, yeah.
- [45:49]
Krista Tippett
This is from the book that I read.
- [45:50]
Tracy K. Smith
It's a poem. The poem's title is the Ultra Black Fish. It's by A British Ghanaian poet named Victoria Adukwe Bole in a book called Quiet. And it's a poem that is composed almost entirely of found material that is like journalistic reports about a discovery of a fish that was so black that it was unphotographable, that exists at a certain depth of the ocean. This material was published in the summer of 2020, when our nation was going through a reckoning about racial justice. And the poem uncannily speaks to, or maybe not quite predictably, in fact speaks to some of the patterns of disregard negation and also the ways that we've trained to perceive blackness as an intrusion or a threat, et cetera. So it allows these two streams to converge and remind us that.
- [46:49]
Joy Harjo
And it turns into almost a pure poem in the way that a poem functions, which is really cool. But I guess talking about fear, I think about collective fear and collectively, what we. You know, there's so much anxiety I've shared that suicide rates are up. The anxiety that was part of my drum kit. I mean, I'm a musician, but it's also. It helps me, you know, that there's a collective. So how do we. Because what happens if you start reacting to fear?
- [47:18]
Krista Tippett
Right.
- [47:18]
Joy Harjo
You know, that's a whole different thing than acting with curiosity and saying, okay, what does. And that's where poetry can come in, is a tool for that is, okay, what is this? Okay, let's just stop here. I'm going to sit you down here, Fear. And we're going to talk about. I'm going to see what you have to say, what in the hell is going on? You know, and it changes. There's a relationship. And maybe that's the key, is that instead of. There becomes a relationship, you start understanding that you have a relationship and you have a voice and you can, you know, it's like, well, okay, you can do what you're doing, but this is what I'm going to do. You know, it shifts. There's a shifting of how maybe fear can work in your life. And then the life after death thing is, you know, once you've been there and out in that space and interacted, then why do you fear? You know, it's so people, so many of us think, well, it's death that we fear. Well, it's inevitable. And we deal with it every day.
- [48:22]
Krista Tippett
Yeah.
- [48:23]
Joy Harjo
And it's part of, again, the space that poetry exists in that poetry, you know, poetry and people like Einstein, you know, theorists and theory, you know, and researchers and so on, deal with. It's the same Stuff, that sense of timelessness. And in that sense of timelessness, there is more knowledge there than there are in libraries. Yeah, but part of it is taking curiosity, and maybe that's one of the main things here, is a curiosity for, you know, even what disturbs you or what you don't understand.
- [49:03]
Tracy K. Smith
Yeah.
- [49:04]
Krista Tippett
I think there's a place, Tracy, where you say, if you ask of a poem, what does it mean, is this true? Or whatever the questions that. What it will ask you back is, well, what did you notice? Which is such a gentleman, pleasant way into. I mean, curiosity really is a moral muscle. But yeah, it just gets really obliterated by, as you say, not just the fear, but the reaction to the fear, the fearing, the fear itself. You know, I did an interview and I think maybe the single most helpful interview I had in Pandemic was with this woman who works with the nervous system. And she also talked about how she said, like when we all heard about a virus loose in the world in that moment, like this complicated, intricate cascade of responses happen inside our bodies. But she also said naming what's going on is grounding. And I think I'm repeating something, but I'm kind of like underlining this. That a poem, first of all, it takes us out of that time bound cascade and it is a way of just naming truths and being able to sit with them
- [50:28]
Tracy K. Smith
and to also acknowledge that I have named this. Now I'll have to name it again
- [50:34]
Joy Harjo
at some point, as many names.
- [50:36]
Krista Tippett
Yeah, yeah. You know, Joy, maybe we'd just have a few more minutes left. You have this sense of time that you have. And I'd like to reflect in these last few minutes just on again, this moment we inhabit. Moment with a capital M. Right. So much all the way through your writing and your life and your thinking and your poetry is this notion that there's a story matrix that connects all of us that you say in this new book, every generation is a kind of person. Every moment in time is a point of origin. You tell a story about being with some teenagers who were dealing with really embodied, literal three dimensional pain and loss. And you were present to that. And you also looked at them and said, like, what did you say? They are? They are living in what? In chrysalis time. Just in their. A teenager in their bodies is inhabiting chrysalis time. And you just define that as that place of deconstruction and reinvention, the place where wings emerge from chaos. And I sometimes have been thinking, you know, we're like in the we we. I Think we came out of the 20th century thinking we were just so grown up, but, you know, like, if our species survives, I think these are going to look like the teenage. Yeah. So, yeah, I just. I feel like you have so much wisdom to offer about being alive now and kind of owning the magnitude of that, but also carrying it a little bit more lightly when that's possible.
- [52:27]
Joy Harjo
I don't know. It's interesting. There's so many different kinds of reckonings going on. Reckonings of our relationship with Ejanagaja or Mother Earth, reckonings with racial reckonings, reckonings with history and false history and reckonings with who is a leader and are they qualified for the job. Reckonings. There's so many going on, but among Native people, we just look at it all and say, we've seen all this before, We've seen it all before. It's just had different names, different stories, and. And we'll make it through. But the trick is, how do we want to make it through? We're going to. I think that the theme that we're going to look back at this age and see that the theme is, okay, everybody needs to know and understand how to come together, that they're even as they're the individual. Say, for instance, tribal nations, individual communities, individual cultural, etc. Etc. That diversity is. That is life. It is vitality, life that is creativity. And that the theme of the age is how do we work together and move together with compassion and love, or anagachka, with our differences, with our different ways of. With our different systems, how do we move collectively in a way that is nourishing? And maybe the Internet in some way. I keep putting it down because it connects people, but it's a false. We don't. We're not really, really connected. But maybe that's part of it. Maybe that was a part of an answer saying, okay, you can be connected, but what if we. How do you connect anyway without the false structure showing you that you're connected but you're not really? So now how do you connect? I mean, and we have. Then you go to the arts, you go to music, you go to eating together, you go to dance. I talked with Marilyn Nelson not too long ago, and she says we should have these dance parties all over where everybody, you know, you know, it's about connecting things. Yeah, it's about connecting.
- [54:47]
Krista Tippett
Yeah. Tracy, where does your mind go?
- [54:51]
Tracy K. Smith
I have been thinking and struggling a lot with the habit of us and them which we, you know, it's a pattern of thought, a pattern of organizing and distancing ourselves from others that we disapprove of or fear or feel threatened by. And the thing I'm trying to do right now is to say, let's step back, Tracy. Step back to a place where you can recognize that you and they belong to the same we. This is the mental exercise that I keep challenging myself to undertake and even to attempt to write from, because it's true. And so to what extent can I become willing to accept that, to believe that, and then to seek to operate within that, you know? And it's a really humbling exercise, but I think it also makes. Makes a person creative, honest in a way. And again, I'm really interested in this notion of radical compassion. I think it's a life skill we need to claim and learn, and I think this is helping me conceptualize that a little bit more.
- [56:19]
Krista Tippett
And do you think that the time that the experiences you had as poet laureate have equipped you in a different way to do that?
- [56:27]
Tracy K. Smith
Oh, see that? This is where I get so happy. Those were the most encouraging years. So I went in to the project because I wanted to move past this polarizing notion that there's a divide we can't cross. And so to go into rural communities with an art form that dwells in kind of like university towns, coastal places felt like one way of crossing an imagined or real divide. And every place I went as a stranger, I was welcomed with what I really believe is love. People who were willing to sit down, read a poem, talk about what it made them feel, notice, wonder, and then do the powerful, generous leap into. This reminds me of something I've dealt with or something I've done, I'm going to say. And this affirmed for me that the divide is bridgeable, if it exists, and that people are beautiful and we can teach one another so many beautiful things. And so to go into the pandemic with this proof 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.
- [58:19]
Krista Tippett
Joy, how about you? How did it imprint you? How has that experience of being poet laureate with you now?
- [58:28]
Joy Harjo
Well, most of my experience was in my room.
- [58:30]
Krista Tippett
Yeah, I know. With the lawnmower in the background.
- [58:33]
Joy Harjo
I actually got a memoir written. And music. Yeah, I actually got a lot done. So. But in a Lot of zooms. But I also became Poet Laurier at a time of, you know, in the middle of all of this, of all of these kinds of different reckonings. And what I found was how important poetry was to people who. Many had forgotten how important poetry was to them, because all over the country, people were coming to poetry, the poetry sites were blowing up, people were writing poetry who hadn't written poetry in a long time because it is, you know, it's a tool. And that's what I learned was really how deeply embedded in humans was this urge to speak in patterns, in patterning and in rhythm, and with metaphor in a way that was pleasing, but also allowed a voice up against something that seemed impenetrable or un. You know, it allowed people to, I guess, connect, to connect with each other and also to find their own voice in the middle of something they, you know, that is very difficult to move through, especially singularly.
- [60:04]
Krista Tippett
I just want to say it so heart lifting and opening, and it affirms the hope that I insist on holding to be with the two of you. And I'm going to name what we all know, which is that the story that we are piecing together up here of what it means to be alive now is not the official story. It's not in any media platform that any of us can think of today as the story of our time. And, you know, to come back to what you said, like, fear serves a. It serves a purpose in us, right? Like we do. We are supposed to stay safe, and our bodies are designed to help us stay safe. But part of what that story we hear tells us, and so we do need to stay safe. And, like, when you say, I want to be curious, you know, we're not called to be curious in the presence of somebody who might hurt us, right? But I think that the. The space of people who are very different and maybe uncomfortable and scary in that sense is much bigger. You know, that the space of real lack of safety is much smaller than we imagine. And it's such a gift to be in a room tonight and tell ourselves this other true story of our time that we are all part of. Because I don't think you'd be here if you weren't. And there's so many more of us who are part of it who aren't here. So I want to ask each of you to read. Give us another poem before we go. But first, before I do that, and I want to close with poetry,
- [61:45]
Tracy K. Smith
I
- [61:46]
Krista Tippett
want to thank Symphony Space again and say that they have all kinds of exciting events coming up this spring and you can sign up for their newsletter for more information and and Girl Warrior and Fearless and other books by Tracy and Joy are going to be available for sale in the back of the theater afterwards. Thanks to all of you for coming out tonight. And now maybe Joy, you can go first this time.
- [62:14]
Joy Harjo
I hadn't planned to read this one, this book. I lost a daughter. In three days it will be two years and this closes Cloud Runner and it's called 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. You live within the circle of my arms, beyond the memories that can hurt us. We are in the embrace of unspeakable love. 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. All the way back. 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.
- [63:29]
Tracy K. Smith
I like the way that language allows us to move slowly in the face of what we do know is, you know, sometimes danger or oftentimes danger or threat. This is a poem that isn't titled, part of an untitled sequence that runs through a new manuscript, but I think it's about visioning what we might choose to get to on the other side of this time. Sometimes I dream of a steep hill dotted with trees where we but who do I mean by we will one day find ourselves sitting staring out onto evidence of the end. It won't be sad, nothing will have ended but what had already revealed itself to be insufficient. Small fires will burn mounds of ember and ash. I keep trying to touch the name of the feeling that will have settled in our bodies by then, after knowledge and regret, after hope and steadier, more certain because more honest, more honest because we will by then have seen our biggest lies, the final and most dire shatter above us in the common sky, taking away everything with them that needed to go. I see us there on the hill. Who do I mean by us? Some combing fingers through long tufts of grass, others leaning back on our hands or hugging our own bent knees, watching in the same direction, out and down upon the passive distance. All of us. All, I guess, nothing remaining to battle over, nothing to hide, no rewards for what we've long prized. I see us astonished, finally, and each differently, some of the forest of us at home in the silence, others talking softly in our original voices.
- [66:32]
Krista Tippett
Thank you so much. Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo, thank you all for coming.
- [66:38]
Joy Harjo
Thank you, Kristen.
- [66:39]
Tracy K. Smith
Thank you.
- [66:57]
Krista Tippett
Joy harjo was the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. Among many honors, she has received the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal and a National Humanities Medal. She is the inaugural artist in residence for the Bob Dylan center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She lives on the Muscogee Nation Reservation in Oklahoma. Her new book of essays is Girl Warrior and forthcoming in 2026, is her 12th book of poetry and a new album co produced with Esperanza Spalding. Tracy K. Smith was the 22nd poet laureate of the United States. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is Boylston professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, professor of African and African American Studies, and Susan S. And Kenneth L. Wallach professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Among her many honors, she has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and is a Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her new memoir is Fearless. Special thanks this week to Drew Richardson, Jennifer Brennan, Vivian Woodward, Magdalene Roblesky and Chris Davis. Our funding partners include the Hearthland foundation, helping to build a more just, equitable and connected America, one creative act at a time. The Fetzer Institute Supporting a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Find them@fetzer.org Kaliopeia foundation dedicated to cultivating the connections between ecology, culture and spirituality. Supporting initiatives and organizations that uphold sacred relationships with the living earth. Learn more at Kaliopeia and the Osprey Foundation. A catalyst for empowered, healthy and fulfilled lives. On Being is an independent production of the On Being project, based in Minnesota and New York City.