Tracy K. Smith, Pulitzer Prize winner and 22nd Poet Laureate of the U.S., moved to Newton with her family in 2021 when she joined the faculty at Harvard. In her recent TEDx New England talk and her new book, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, she has focused on the role of poetry in promoting meaningful civic discourse.
“Poetry is an art form with extreme relevance for our democracy, for our ability to approach strangers with interest, care, and courage,” she says.
From her experience, in times of polarization and strife, groups of people listening to poems and discussing them together “reminds us of the things we share, while also highlighting the differences between us, advocating implicitly for the validity of our differing perspectives.”
In an era of “vague, inaccurate, and misleading language,” she says that “feeling and responding to a poem is one way of pushing back against forms of oversimplification and erasure that reduce us to types, numbers, obstacles, and targets.”
Life in Newton
Smith and her husband bought their Newton home during the pandemic, touring it only remotely. “It’s been one of the best changes for my kids. Being so close to Boston is wonderful for kids at this stage of life to explore.”
In her busy life, Smith finds time to connect with neighbors, with other families through her three children in Newton Public Schools, and with other dog owners in Cold Spring Park. She now seeks ways to help Newton put into practice what she is communicating in her new book and on stage.
“I love what poetry can do in terms of allowing us to let ourselves listen to one another in a grateful way. It’s a wonderful way of getting closer to other people’s feelings and perspectives. When there’s an opportunity to offer that, I get very excited, because it changes me. I receive so much from being in that space, and it does feel like community becomes deeper, even if it’s just for those hours that you’re together. But I think it lasts in other ways.”
22nd Poet Laureate: American Conversations
As Poet Laureate of the U.S., while teaching at Princeton, in 2018 Smith initiated the American Conversations project, through which she traveled across the U.S. to rural areas to engage people with poetry – “leaping past small-talk and collapsing the distance between strangers.”
The project was based on American Journal: 50 Poems for Our Time, an anthology she edited to show “the ways that poems can shed meaningful light upon the most vivid and powerful aspects of our lives.” Through poetry readings and discussions across rural America, the groups she led “found a counter-narrative of careful listening and mutual respect.”
She says she would love to do a similar program in Newton, to “bring in poems that allow us to get close to topics [of importance] but without the vocabulary of political talking points. …It’s so much better to approach them through a human voice.”
TEDx New England
TEDx New England invited Smith to speak at its annual event, held this year on October 30 at Groton Hill Music Center. The overall theme was agency. She says, “My first reaction was fear …and that reaction usually tells me it’s something I need to do.”
The TEDx style of preparation and delivery is very different from how she usually writes and talks. “They have a very orderly way of helping you visualize the argument and think about supporting points. That isn’t how I write. I write with questions, and I move toward discovery and insight – a different kind of process. …They were really generous with me. They let me write it the way I would write it [and then we worked on it], and they were so great about that.”
The other challenge for Smith was that it is a memorized performance with no teleprompter. “I’ve memorized poems by other poets in my life, especially as a student, but it’s not part of my practice, and I don’t deliver my work in the way that a performance poet does.”
But TEDx has what Smith called “a beautiful coaching program.” Each speaker has a performance coach, and Smith worked with her coach for about an hour a week on Zoom, from August through October. With her coach she worked on memorization and delivery – and to “visualize a perfect outcome, to visualize comfort and sense of connection.”
She found that memorizing the talk word-for-word was not constraining but liberating. With the words memorized, she said, “I can think about how I hear the phrase, what the point feels like in the space of the audience and in my body, and in the context that I’m coming out of or thinking toward.” She plans to apply that skill to her teaching. “I teach lecture classes periodically, and I think it would be really great to be less tethered to the notes that I have.”
Fear Less launches Nov. 18
Following five poetry collections, two memoirs, and three opera libretti, Smith’s new book, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, is a collection of six essays that explore how reading and writing poetry helps people to “confront …uncertainties and losses, build camaraderie with strangers, and understand ourselves more fully.”
The book is aimed at both those who love poetry and those who do not. Smith notes that the book is “asking people who already love poetry to dig into the facets of it that draw us toward others and make us aware of our own fears and biases in order to move beyond them.” And for those who may be afraid of poetry, she hopes the book will demonstrate that poetry “is a practical tool for getting more from and contributing more to our everyday interactions.”
“Poems speak a language we all speak …a language of care, of dream, of feeling, and of questioning,” she says.
The book will be available in local bookstores on November 18. Prior to the launch, Smith will speak in a webinar as part of the Norton Speaker series on November 13 at 1PM (register here).
