Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith "This World Is Full of Everything Good, Everything Beautiful."

Why It Matters

By framing poetry as a transformative technology, the conversation demonstrates how art can help individuals and societies navigate uncertainty, fostering empathy and collective resilience in turbulent times.

Key Takeaways

• Poetry serves as a transformative tool amid societal chaos.
• Harjo likens poems to electric transformers, converting experience.
• Smith emphasizes vulnerability as catalyst for courage and purpose.
• Both laureates stress communal healing through shared poetic listening.
• Live readings illustrate poetry’s power to evoke raw, collective emotion.

Summary

The event, held at New York’s Symphony Space and recorded for Krista Tippett’s “On Being” podcast, brought together the nation’s two most recent U.S. Poet Laureates—Joy Harjo (2019‑2022) and Tracy K. Smith (2017‑2019). Host Tippett framed the conversation as a meditation on how poetry functions as a technology for navigating uncertainty.

Harjo described poems as “transformational stations like electric transformers,” capable of converting lived experience into language. Smith echoed this by calling poetry an “urgent compassion” that turns vulnerability into courage, hope, and purpose. Both emphasized that chaos and disruption are fertile ground for creative emergence, and that the “maps buried in our hearts” become accessible through poetic practice.

Memorable moments included Smith’s reading from Fear Less, where she declares poems “keep evolving, meeting me where I am,” and Harjo’s vivid excerpt from “She Had Some Horses,” a litany of surreal images that illustrates poetry’s power to hold contradictions. Tippett highlighted the laureates’ belief that poems are not about words but about the interior landscapes they reveal.

The dialogue underscores poetry’s relevance beyond literary circles, positioning it as a communal tool for healing, empathy, and public discourse in a fragmented era. By inviting audiences to breathe together and listen, the conversation models how art can bridge personal trauma and collective resilience, offering a template for cultural institutions seeking to engage citizens in meaningful reflection.

Original Description

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, Joy as a saxophonist and painter. We were brought together at Symphony Space in Manhattan to celebrate their newest books: Fear Less by Tracy and Girl Warrior by Joy.

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Photo credit: Allen Dobbins