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

16:31Tracy K. Smith:Yeah, 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.

16:59Joy Harjo:And it took you so many places.

17:02Krista Tippett:Yeah. I mean, I remember finding that, finding your book. She Had Some Horses. The book came out in 1983 originally. 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.

18:15Krista Tippett: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 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 trying to say. It just gets more complex.

19:00Krista Tippett:Yeah, and 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. Right. Right.

19:19Tracy K. Smith: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 also 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'm 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, it's, it's, poetry is essentially ceremony.

20:07Tracy K. Smith:A poem, I think, considered 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, 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, a healer speaking or singing, people speaking and singing a state of mind into existence. And for me, that's the root. And it can be about falling in love and falling out. I mean, that's ceremonial, too, of a sort.

20:49Krista Tippett:That poem 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 are 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?

21:31Tracy K. Smith:And where does that come from? I mean, how did I know to write she had some horses she loved? I mean, how did any of us, you know, anyone, you know, a composer, a dancer, I know Melissa's out there, a dancer, how do any of us, there's something that 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 sometimes it feels like it's not me painting, but there's something I'm following.

22:17Tracy K. Smith: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?

22:55Joy Harjo: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'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, right? And you with the daughter of a Hubble Space Telescope engineer.

23:35Krista Tippett:Yeah, I mean, it brought to mind Einstein's description of the, oh, you know, I can't even remember that. I'm bad with the optical delusion.

23:45Joy Harjo:Yes, thank you.

23:45Krista Tippett:The optical delusion, 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 toward something that feels like credible evidence that I am you.

24:38Krista Tippett: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.

25:21Tracy K. Smith: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. Wow.

25:39Joy Harjo:That means a lot. That's a lovely thing to take in. You know, you have been Poets Laureate in such an extraordinary time, right? 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 want to. we've kind of pretended like we normalized it, right? That's what Einstein and I was talking about. Like our five senses and our brains are just desperately trying to create a sense of order for us. But it's often not in touch with reality. And we also can't let in the complexity of reality. I mean, I love what you just said, that a poem, like it's time out of time, right?

26:25Joy Harjo:that moment stops that, as he also said, that stubbornly persistent illusion, the time is this arrow moving forward, progressing ever forward. It actually plants us in time as it, the mystery of time and the spaciousness of time as it works. Most people trust Einstein.

26:50Krista Tippett: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 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 toward this other view or in need of it.

27:54Joy Harjo: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 and walking through this time now. And they both said that when you are poet laureate, you do not have time to write poetry.

28:24Joy Harjo: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, you called it the?

28:44Krista Tippett:American Conversations.

28:45Joy Harjo:American Conversations. And yeah, as you say, going in all these places where people aren't going for poetry readings necessarily. And you really wanted to, I felt like you were just really, you 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 in this bizarre time where 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?

29:36Joy Harjo:So, yeah, have you thought about what you might want to offer?

29:42Tracy K. Smith:Yes, we have.

29:44Joy Harjo:Okay. Who would like to go first? I'll let you choose.

29:49Krista Tippett:I'll go first so that I can really just listen to Joy. 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 João.

30:39Krista Tippett:and he would ask for money or a favor or to borrow your car, and you were made to repeat, now, João, which is no João. And there was such a mistrust of this João that was, you know, instilled.

30:56Joy Harjo:And it's funny, but it's also serious.

30:59Krista Tippett: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 problem for me. Now, João, 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, João 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.

32:06Krista Tippett: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, Joao, 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?

33:15Krista Tippett:A busboy with lips like a ripe question And a pale kitchen net Hiding your crown of dark coil 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 part at the door after pushing an empty room service cart into the hall? You called me senora Dipped your head as I passed Wait, João Every version of me wants to know Does this world still insist on telling you no? No? Thank you.

34:35Joy Harjo: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.

35:11Joy Harjo:You know, 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.

35:26Krista Tippett: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 active 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.

36:25Krista Tippett: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.

37:15Krista Tippett:So what do we do with them?

37:16Tracy K. Smith:But it's an attention and care to language. And can you imagine the Senate being conducted? You know, with poetry, with a sense of oratory, you know, was deeply prized by 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.

37:48Krista Tippett: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.

38:03Joy Harjo:Yeah. Joy, do you have a poem?

38:07Tracy K. Smith:Yeah, it kind of works off all of this too, I think.

38:09Joy Harjo:And you have a new book of poetry coming out in 2026 as well. Right.

38:14Tracy K. Smith:This is from it called Cloud Runner.

38:17Joy Harjo:And also an album with Esperanza Spaulding.

38:20Tracy K. Smith:Yes, coming out from Folkways in April.

38:28This was, I was in, it's funny how poems are.

38:34Tracy K. Smith: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 it winds up, it turns into a love poem at the end.

39:18Tracy K. Smith:It's called Overwhelm. There was a door between the men arguing and me in a 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 in 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.

40:05Tracy K. Smith: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.

40:46Tracy K. Smith:Which is similar to what you it's very similar to what you just went through.

40:52Joy Harjo: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, you know, 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 at 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.

41:43Krista Tippett: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 helped 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 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.

42:50Krista Tippett:And we have this equipment in our brains that's so good at like clicking into action. But 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 of what we ourselves are.

43:43And I think that it's a choice we can make.

43:47Krista Tippett:I think in some ways writing a poem is a choice, 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.

44:04Joy Harjo:Yeah.

44:07Tracy K. Smith: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. They 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, that's where the, I guess that's where the danger, I mean, we're looking at it right now.

44:50Tracy K. Smith: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.

45:40Tracy K. Smith:It was a found poem, but it's just so absolutely perfect.

45:45Joy Harjo:Yeah, do you want to just say what that was? Oh, yeah. This is from the book. It's a poem.

45:51Krista Tippett:The poem's title is The Ultra Black Fish. It's by a British Ghanaian poet named Victoria Adukwe Bolle in a book called Quiet. And it's a poem that is composed almost entirely of found material, i.e. 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 been trained to perceive blackness as an intrusion or a threat, etc.

46:43Krista Tippett:So it allows these two streams to converge and remind us that.

46:48Tracy K. Smith: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've, you know, there's so much anxiety. I've said 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 right 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 as 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.

47:35Tracy K. Smith:What in the hell is going on? You know, and it changes. There's a relationship. And maybe that 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, 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.

48:19Tracy K. Smith:Well, it's inevitable and we deal with it every day. 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 theorists, 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.

48:45Joy Harjo:Yeah.

48:46Tracy K. Smith:And the part of it is, is, is, you know, is taking curiosity. And maybe that's one of the main, you know main things here is a curiosity for you know even what what disturbs you or what what you don't understand yeah i think there's a place tracy where you say

49:09Joy Harjo:if you ask of a poem what does it mean or is this true or whatever the questions that what it will ask you back is well what did you notice yeah which is such a gentle 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 So she said, like, when we all heard about a virus loose in the world, in that moment, like, this complicated, you know, intricate cascade of responses happened inside our bodies.

50:02Joy Harjo: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. Like, 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.

50:28Krista Tippett:And to also acknowledge that I have named this now. I'll have to name it again at some point.

50:35Joy Harjo:As many names.

50:36Krista Tippett:Yeah.

50:38Joy Harjo:You know, Joy, maybe we 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, you know, 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 every, 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?

51:33Joy Harjo:They are living in what? In chrysalis time. 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, 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 years. 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.

52:26Tracy K. Smith:I don't know. It's interesting. There's so many different kinds of reckonings going on, reckonings of our relationship with Ijanagaja 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 we'll make it through. But the trick is, you know, 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.

53:16Tracy K. Smith:That even as the individual, say for instance tribal nations, individual communities, individual cultural, etc., etc., that diversity is that is life. That is vitality. That is creativity. And that the theme of the age is how do we work together and move together with compassion and love or anagechka 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're not really, really connected. But maybe that's part of it.

54:08Tracy K. Smith: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? 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, every, we all, you know, it's about connecting. All these analog things. Yeah, it's about connecting. Yeah.

54:48Joy Harjo:Tracy, where does your mind go? 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

55:06Krista Tippett: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 way. 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 a person creative, honest in a way.

56:01Krista Tippett: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.

56:19Joy Harjo:And do you think that the time, that the experiences you had as a poet laureate have equipped you in a different way to do that? Oh, see that? This is where I get so happy.

56:29Krista Tippett: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, you know, 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.

57:23Krista Tippett:I'm going to, you know, 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, our heart-saving for me.

58:18Joy Harjo:Joy, how about you? How did it imprint you? How has that experience of being Poet Laureate with you now?

58:27Tracy K. Smith:Well, most of my experience was in my room.

58:30Joy Harjo:Yeah, I know. With a lawnmower in the background.

58:33Tracy K. Smith:I actually got a memoir written and music. I actually got a lot done, but in a lot of Zoom. But I also became poet, Laurie, 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 and, you know, 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, 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 that is very difficult to move through, especially singularly.

1:00:04Joy Harjo:I just want to say it's 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 use, like fear serves a purpose in us, right? Like 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.

1:00:54Joy Harjo: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 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 I don't want to close with poetry I 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 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

1:02:13Tracy K. Smith: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

1:02:27Tracy K. Smith: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

1:03:28Krista Tippett:I like the way that language allows us to move slowly in the face of what we do know is 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.

1:04:39Krista Tippett: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?

1:05:53Krista Tippett: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.

1:06:31Joy Harjo:Thank you so much, Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo. Thank you all for coming. Thank you, Kristen.

1:06:38Tracy K. Smith:Thank you.

1:06:56Joy Harjo: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 Muskogee 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.

1:07:46Joy Harjo: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 Fear Less. Special thanks this week to Drew Richardson, Jennifer Brennan, Vivian Woodward, Magdalene Robleski, 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.

1:08:30Joy Harjo:Find them at fetzer.org. Calliopeia 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 calliopeia.org. 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.