Tracy K. Smith on Poetry and the Art of Productive Intolerance – The Marginalian

“What do you consider the lowest depth of sorrow?” asked the Proust Questionnaire. “Living in fear,” replied David Bowie.

The most dangerous word of the three is very small, because fear is really something that lives inside, not – a cage, a tomb, a small dark room that will cover the world as the hand trembles outside the pocket where the key is kept. The best key I know to the prison of fear is curiosity, and the best kind of curiosity I know is poetry.

An inquiry, an invitation, an invitation, poetry opens a side door to knowing, past our usual barriers of thought and feeling, allowing us to enter the unknown of what it is like to be someone other than ourselves, to the desolate places inside us that words have not yet reached. Poetry is a form of prayer: to be present, to understand, to see the world up close to appreciate it deeply. To compose, to understand, to give dignity and to hold – these are the gifts of poetry, and these are also the antidote to almost all kinds of fear.

In Be Little Afraid: Poems in Dangerous Times (public library), poet extraordinaire and former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith offers what is a guide to loving life more, based on the knowledge that “the opposite of love is not hatred or nationalism but fear” and a passionate insistence on “how important—how important—it is to understand that there is and always has been a desert between each of us.”

You write:

Vulnerability, uncertainty, and despair are not just signs of life, but tools for moving forward in courage, hope, and purpose.

[…]

It is curiosity, not foreknowledge, that leads the reader (and the poet, and the poem) beyond the limits of ordinary understanding – questions, rather than answers, become the basis of understanding. Questions, arising from the unconscious mind's capacity to remember, understand, and guess (Was he desperate? Alone? Did he do it out of grief?), they are able to bridge the distances of time, place, loyalty, belief, and any other boundary that is said to be used to separate people from each other. In addition, creating a question is an active form of creation, a way to declare: I pay attention! I am ready to observe, remember, intuit! Curiosity is in the heart, courage; readiness not for a fixed or predicted outcome, but for a kind of random encounter — fun.

The essence of the poem's “non-assertion of answers and certainty” invites “a productive form of self-examination,” the return of which is the surprising power of wonder that prevents us from entering our image:

We are surprised. We despise the summary. Poetry is a form of art in which we may see and better appreciate the conditions under which you and I live – even for ourselves – a kind of mystery… The occasional obstacles to confirmation and resolution in poetry and in life are an invitation to use different faculties of understanding and understanding.

[…]

In life, when mystery, doubt, and silent fear arise, our tendency is to seek the assurance of answers, strategies, expert advice. We hedge our bets, make contingency plans, stick to assumptions. We do what it takes to stay physically and emotionally strong. But poetry is a different kind of business, involving the deeper sources of wisdom, memory, and emotion that we all possess. So instead of fixing a state of confusion or denying validity, the poem may seek to work within these conditions.

It is precisely these situations that often evoke fear. In making them something to 'think about, grapple with, wonder about,' poetry offers a powerful antidote to that pallor within the unknown. A generation after Audre Lorde insisted that poetry gives us a kind of intimacy with ourselves when “those fears that rule our lives and make our peace begin to lose their power over us,” Smith writes:

Fear is amazing, it clouds our options, it convinces us that it's better to be quiet and still, to accept, to go along with the hope that eventually everything will feel normal again. Fear, sustained long enough, convinces us that the lack of character we find ourselves in is normal. Fear prevents us from believing our bodies, our hearts, our deepest memories. Fear of alienating, alienating technology. In extreme situations, fear prevents us from facing or even fully considering what, in order to survive, we must try to change.

But poetry can ease fear by making it easier to negotiate. A poem may ask its author, What wakes you up in the middle of the night? What are you running from? And when the poet responds, the poem will almost certainly stand out, inviting: Sit down here in this chair where you are completely safe. Now, let's approach it together.

Fear, Smith notes, often results from “the opening of a rift between us and ourselves,” the remedy for which is attention, awareness, active curiosity about what lives in that abyss — a curiosity that begins with finding words for what we feel, holding on to what we don't want to hear. You write:

Our relationship with language has a profound effect on our ability to be awake and at home in an imperfect world and in our full complexity. Our ability to ask and grapple with difficult questions. Our willingness to accept uncertainty, resistance and discomfort. It is the curiosity we face with the other person's point of view. These things strengthen us to be aware of and celebrate the complex emotions that we and others are vulnerable to. And while engaging with poetry is not a way to strengthen our ability to listen and respond, to ask and give, poetry is amazing in its ability to increase our resilience in such activities. Beyond literature, beyond works of art, poetry is an act of attention. Can we be more willing, more compassionate towards ourselves and others?

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To create new patterns of language, as there are poems and poets, is to change or correct the course in our story of facts. From a state of fear to one of understanding, or from the thought that you are small and bound by circumstances in your life to the acknowledgment that you are great and your purpose is eternal – that kind of transformation begins in language, in speaking and listening to yourself, to others, to the word on the page. Language is the engine of understanding what is happening, and poetry encourages a productive impatience with the idea that things as they are cannot or should not be changed.

In the remainder of the A Little FearSmith offers a guided tour of some of his favorite poems – among them the treasures of Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Hayden, Robert Frost, Mark Doty, and Joy Harjo – and a glimpse into his process of exploring the art behind the mystery of the power of poetry. Combine it with Audre Lorde in poetry as a tool for change and feeling as an antidote to fear, and revisit this brilliant example of Smith's masterpiece “My God, It's Full of Stars.”