Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith – "This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful."

What It Covers

Poets Joy Harjo (23rd US Poet Laureate, 2019–2022) and Tracy K. Smith (22nd US Poet Laureate, 2017–2019) join host Krista Tippett at Symphony Space in Manhattan to explore poetry as a practical technology for navigating fear, contradiction, collective division, and personal grief while building radical compassion across difference.

Key Questions Answered

• •Poetry as nervous system tool: Tracy K. Smith's laureateship project brought poems to rural, non-literary communities across America, asking audiences one question: what do you notice, feel, wonder, or long for? This single prompt consistently unlocked raw, vulnerable conversation about grief, fear, and life experience — demonstrating that poetry bypasses defensive posturing and reaches emotional truth faster than debate or direct discussion.
• •Chaos as creative precondition: Joy Harjo frames periods of collective confusion and despair — including the current political moment — as structurally identical to the creative process in writing, music, and painting. When everything is stirred up, something is emerging. Recognizing chaos as generative rather than terminal shifts the psychological stance from paralysis toward active participation in what comes next.
• •Fear is largely learned, not innate: Drawing on Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, Tracy K. Smith identifies only two biologically hardwired human fears: loud sounds and falling. All other fear responses are habituated through deliberate social conditioning. Naming a fear explicitly causes it to shrink. Poetry accelerates this process by leading readers directly into vulnerability, giving fear a shape and language rather than letting it operate below conscious awareness.
• •Einstein's "optical delusion" as civic framework: Smith connects Joy Harjo's poem "She Had Some Horses" to Einstein's description of human separateness as an optical delusion — the false perception that we are distinct from others. Poems function as timed experiments in dissolving that delusion, offering brief but repeatable moments of genuine connection. Smith argues this cumulative practice builds the capacity for real-time empathy with strangers and political opponents.
• •Contradiction as the core unit of human experience: Harjo's 1983 poem "She Had Some Horses" ends with the line that horses she loved and horses she hated were the same horses. Smith teaches this poem regularly at Harvard, using it to help students hold complexity without forcing resolution. The practical application: resist narrowing ambiguous situations to single meanings; train attention toward cumulative, expansive understanding rather than definitive conclusions.
• •Radical compassion as a learnable civic skill: Smith proposes a specific mental exercise for bridging political division — stepping back far enough to recognize that "us" and "them" belong to the same "we." She tested this during her laureateship by entering communities skeptical of poetry and consistently found people willing to connect through shared emotional experience. Her conclusion: dehumanizing rhetoric is a tactic, not an accurate description of human nature or the actual divide.