Pulitzer prize winner, former poet laureate, Poetry alum, and current professor at Harvard, Tracy K. Smith '97 has published a new book, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, with Norton Press. In this new book—part literary criticism, part memoir, part academic guide—Smith lays at the arguments and necessity for this literary tradition, especially in times that seem to undermine its very existence.
Appointed the U.S. Poet Laureate in 2017, Smith came into the role at a particularly fraught time. As she recounts in a piece in The Harvard Gazette, "Maybe all times are delicate, but by 2017 we’d come to find ourselves in a climate of language—I’d call it a national vocabulary—grounded in fear, derision, and the notion of an intractably divided nation. The guardrails of courtesy were gone, and the limits of shame—or was it shamelessness?—had been set further out than almost ever before…Almost daily during the long and histrionic news cycle leading up to the 2016 election, I had found myself thinking, Poetry wouldn’t allow us to behave this way. I just knew that poetry, a kind of mother to so many, would find a way to jostle us out of our rote engagement with one another. Poetry would insist that our listening be permitted to lead us, even briefly, out of our rigid stances, our staunchest habits."
In six chapters, Smith works to demystify the art form and argues for its very human tendencies, its innateness to "our capacities to love, dream, question, and cultivate community." Offering insight into the mechanics of the form, Smith offers up suggestions of poets to consider, placing classical writers (Dickson and Millay) next to contemporary practitioners like Joy Harjo, Danez Smith, and Francisco Márquez. Featured in the book is an appendix containing the biography and summary of all 27 poems that Smith references.
Tracy K. Smith is a poet and scholar from Massachusetts. She completed her undergraduate education at Harvard—where she studied with Helen Vendler—before she completed her MFA at Columbia. She is the author of four books of poetry: The Body's Question (2003), Duende (2007), Life on Mars (2011), and Wade in the Water (2018). The Body Question won the Cave Canem Prize, awarded to Black poets on completion of their first book. Life on Mars won the Pulitzer in 2012. Smith’s memoir, Ordinary Light (2015) was a finalist for the National Book Award for nonfiction. She serves as The Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She is also the host of The Slowdown, a public radio program and podcast sponsored by The Poetry Foundation.
You can purchase Tracy K. Smith’s newest book here.
