Tracy K. Smith is a Pulitzer prize winning poet, professor and librettist who served as the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017-2019. She’s published five poetry collections, two librettos and one memoir-manifesto. She is also a Professor of English and African and African American Studies at Harvard. Her most recent Libretto for the opera The Righteous is currently running at the Santa Fe Opera house through August 13th.
Pulsing through Smith’s long list of accomplishments is her belief that language, and specifically poetry, is a pathway to the fullest versions of ourselves- selves that today’s world often doesn’t allow us to be.
“I think poetry is a really vital form and force,” Smith says. “I think there are more new readers and writers coming to poetry now. And some of the reasons for that, I think, are because poetry is a vocabulary that doesn't have an initiative, or motivation that's connected to the market. It's not trying to sell you something. It's trying to create a pathway for you to access a large, full and fluent version of yourself. And I believe that's a version of the self that we are swindled out of in a lot of ways by the culture that we live in.”
In this episode of DB|BD, hosts Jessica Helfand and Ellen McGirt sit down with Smith to talk through the writing process of two of her most recent works: the libretto for The Righteous and her 2024 memoir-manifesto To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul. Smith also candidly engages in conversation about how she finds faith when you otherwise feel empty, how she uses history to inform her analysis of the current moment and how her employer and alma mater, Harvard, can emerge from this period of institutional struggle.
And stick around to the end of the episode to hear Tracy K. Smith read one of her poems live on air!
On this season of DB|BD, co-hosts Jessica Helfand and Ellen McGirt are observing equity by highlighting the “redesigners” — people who are addressing urgent problems by challenging big assumptions about how the world can and should work — and who it should work for.
This season of DB|BD is powered by Deloitte.
Visit our site for more on this episode and to view a transcript.
Tracy K. Smith’s website.
Full text of “An Old Story”.
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Transcript
Tracy K Smith I think poetry is a really vital form and force. Many of us have long felt that way, and I think there are more new readers and writers of coming to poetry now, and some of the reasons for that — it's actually not trying to sell you something. It's trying to create a pathway in for you to access a large, full, and fluent version of yourself. And I believe that's a version of the self that we are swindled out of in a lot of ways by the culture that we live in.
Ellen McGirt Welcome to the Design of Business,
Jessica Helfand The Business of Design.
Ellen McGirt Where we introduce you to people from all over the world, from different industries and disciplines,
Jessica Helfand Who are here to talk about design, business, civility and the values that govern how we work and live together.
Ellen McGirt This season, we're observing equity.
Jessica Helfand I'm Jessica Helfand.
Ellen McGirt And I'm Ellen McGirt. This episode of The Design of Business | The Business of Design is powered by Deloitte's DEI Institute. Deloitte believes that bold actions can help drive equitable outcomes, and conversations like this can fuel the change needed to continue to build a more equitable society. Visit Deloitte's DEI Institute site at deloitte dot com slash U.S. slash DEI Institute for more of their research and perspectives on equity. Later on, we'll hear from Kwasi Mitchell, Deloitte's Chief purpose and DEI officer. Hey, Jessica.
Jessica Helfand Hey, Ellen. To kick things off on today's episode, I just want to say one thing for you to react to. Poetry is anti-capitalist.
Ellen McGirt Who knew? Right?
Jessica Helfand Right.
Ellen McGirt This is just one of the many brilliant and profound ideas are brilliant and profound. Guest will introduce us to in today's episode. And let me just say for our audience, this one really knocked Jessica and me off our feet.
Jessica Helfand The brilliant and profound guest in question is the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, professor, and librettist Tracy K Smith. Tracy served as the US Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. She's written five poetry collections and one memoir slash manifesto, that we're really going to dig into in this episode. She is also a professor of English and African-American studies at Harvard.
Ellen McGirt We felt like Tracy absolutely needed to be part of our redesigners season of DBBD, in part because she has such an elevated, unique, and hopeful way of reimagining what a free and nurturing society could look like. And I'll tell you this she tells a story in this interview that both brought me to tears and helped me rethink how we can catalyze true systemic change through reflection, truth telling, and forgiveness.
Jessica Helfand I think the first thing I said to you when we hung up was that Tracy exists on a separate planet. She is a higher form of life. And what really shines through, I think, in how she discusses her approach to her written work and her teaching, is this incredible humility about everything she observes and thinks about and participates in as an artist, really. She has a truly skilled way of weaving her depth of historical knowledge into her writing as a way to hold up a mirror to our current moment. I think many people who sometimes turn to history do it in a in a punitive way. She does it in an inspiring way.
Ellen McGirt She does, and she makes that higher plane seem accessible to everybody. Her body of work is really vast, almost intimidatingly big. But in this interview, we focus on two of her recent works. One is the libretto she wrote for the opera The Righteous, which debuted at the Santa Fe Opera House and ran through August 13th. And the other is what Tracy calls her memoir manifesto, which was released in January of 2024. It's called To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul. The book shifts backward and forward through slavery, World War One, the Civil rights era. But most importantly, as it exists through her own family's history. She began writing the book in 2020 as a way to hold herself together during what she calls the din of human strife and division. And Jessica, I do make the joke, and I think about it a lot — most of us had big, lofty ideas for the book we were going to write during the pandemic, and she actually did it.
Jessica Helfand She actually delivered. And she was so unbelievably generous throughout this entire conversation, candid about everything from her writing process to how she finds faith when she otherwise feels empty, to how her employer and alma mater, Harvard, can emerge from this period of institutional difficulty.
Ellen McGirt And if you stay until the end, you will hear Tracy read one of her poems live on air, which was thrilling.
Jessica Helfand And.
Ellen McGirt Yes.
Jessica Helfand Brace for impact. You'll get to hear a cameo from her dog, Bruce.
Ellen McGirt Yes, well, this has been a real season of the dogs for DBBD. Anyway, without further ado, here is our conversation with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Tracy K Smith.
Ellen McGirt Tracy, I wanted to just say that — a funny story. I almost met you at the Santa Fe Literary Festival this year. You'd come off stage, I was in the green room. I was the moderator in another conversation, and I was about to shyly come over and say hello with a copy of your book, and then you suddenly got engrossed in conversation with these wonderful poets: Hakim Bellamy, and I think it was Wang Jiaxin and Arthur Sze. And so, like this bustling, we're all eating lunch. We're all preparing like that nervous energy backstage. And then four poets got together and sat there and started talking, and it changed the whole vibe in the entire room. And we all got quiet. It was like, oh my God, the poets are on this now. It just felt so good to be in a room where creative people were finding each other and like, something good is going to happen now that you'd found each other. It was such a delightful indictment of the nature of poetry to capture our attention. It was like happening in real time. So we thought, we'd start— we'd kick you off- have you — we thought we'd have you kick us off with just a big picture view of the role of poetry in society today.
Tracy K Smith Oh, I love that question. I think poetry is a really vital, form and force. And, many of us have long felt that way. And I think there are more new readers and writers of coming to poetry now. And some of the reasons for that, I think, are because poetry is a vocabulary that doesn't have an initiative, or motivation that's connected to the market. It's not trying to it's actually not trying to sell you something. It's trying to create a pathway in for you to access a large, full and fluent version of yourself. And I believe that's a version of the self that we are swindled out of in a lot of ways by the culture that we live in. We have a lot of devices and, you know, products and platforms that are seeking to capture our attention, monetize our attention, and replace our innate vocabulary with something that serves their ends, serves their purposes. We have a lot of incentive in our culture to engage in outrage. Not even merely debate, but, clapping people down or, refusing to listen to, and, and agree to empathize with their positions, their questions, their-their views and their needs. And one thing I really love about poetry, is that it invites us into a quiet and beholden space where there's another voice, maybe it's the poet's voice. Maybe it's the voice of someone the poet has imagined or invented. But it has something to say that if you can listen in the right way, can give you access to many things beyond just that single imagination.
Jessica Helfand I love the idea of poetry as a form of anti-capitalism, and I think we should make you T-shirts and we'll all wear them.
Tracy K Smith Oh, I would love that.
Jessica Helfand /laughs. It's interesting to me. I read and heard both in interviews you've given talk about the imagination and talk about living words. And as someone who cares deeply about history, in your work and in your writing and in your most recent project that I think we're going to get to in a moment, I wonder if you could unpack for us a little bit what you think of as living words.
Tracy K Smith Yeah. Well, there are lots of sites of living language or living words. Sometimes I feel that nature is one of the, you know, chief, articulators of living language. And I say that because of the grounding effect that wind and rain and birdsong have on the addled human mind. But I think we also, we hold a lot of living language, you know, there the terms that emerge that we haven't been-that haven't been put on our tongues, you know, so when I think of the deadest, most, you know, the opposite of life giving or living language, I think about, you know, like liking and clicking and following and subscribing and posting and doing the analytics on all of the posturing that we do with so much of our time. And the other end of the spectrum are the words that hold so much feeling that we have to unpack them constantly. Like love, like fear, like need, like care. And all of the really homespun or instantaneous ways that we come to repopulate those terms with the kind of precision that they insist upon. And maybe that's another way that I think poetry is so useful because it says, yeah, we have these, these familiar feelings, but they occur as powerful because they are utterly disorienting and unfamiliar when they-when they, you know, be far less in some way, for better and worse. And so we've got to do the work to name, claim, understand and respond to them afresh every time.
Jessica Helfand Beautiful answer.
Ellen McGirt So let's talk about another word that we'd love you to dig in — The Righteous. This is your latest libretto for the opera that is currently in performance at the Santa Fe Opera House. Can you tell us a little bit about the origin of this work? And I know Jessica and I are both really curious about your process and how it's different from creating libretto, and also memoir, and poetry.
Tracy K Smith Well, in a nutshell, The Righteous is the story of, a preacher named David in the 1980s. The story, set from 1979 to 1990 in an unnamed part of the American Southwest. And he's somebody who emerges on this stage, initially with a really powerful, earnest sense of faith and trust. And his wish in creating a congregation is to, you know, help and serve and care for people. But he becomes involved in, you know, the enticements of the world. He's- he marries into a powerful family. Midway through, he he goes into politics, he, you know, he's elected governor of his state. And questions of compromise, you know, political compromise and also personal compromise and betrayal, kind of like run through his life as they run through many lives. And it's a story that's allowing us to think about culture and some of the, the early kernels of the kinds of cultural division, the weaponization of-of faith in some ways or the, you know, the wielding of it as a political, political tool. The vocabulary of division that emerges from the war on drugs, the AIDs epidemic and the forms of regard and disregard that got codified into public, or civic discourse, all of those things feel so useful to the world that we find ourselves in right now. And so looking at them across a distance of several decades allows us to become, willingly vulnerable to them in a different way, or to get a different vantage point.
Jessica Helfand And just for if I can jump in for our rea-, for our listeners, our readers, hope there are readers listening today. It's set in the 80s, and that's why you bring up the AIDs crisis.
Tracy K Smith Yeah.
Jessica Helfand And some of these other things.
Tracy K Smith Yeah. This takes place across the decade of the 80s. And, a lot of the story has to do with interpersonal relationships. David's best friend, is a gay man who's semi-closeted, named Jonathan. His sister, Michelle, becomes David's first wife and, a member of the congregation who's got a slightly mystical, vocabulary for Christianity, whose name is Sheila, becomes David's second wife. And so the you know, the story is full of operatic intrigue and, you know, disappointment and opportunity. But I think it's really a story about humility. Like, what happens if we can look at someone who we might think of as a villain and resist the urge to condemn and judge and categorize him in a way that suits, you know, our sense of self righteousness or correctness and, think about how his failures and, vulnerability actually might reflect or speak to facets of ourself.
Jessica Helfand You use the word weaponized earlier, which I-it keeps coming back to me. And and in listening to you talk about the faith part of this story, there's a line in the, you read-I listen to reading from the libretto where you say, quoting one of the characters: When I'm empty. It's the quiet voice of God that fills me. And I believe there's a refrain — When I'm empty, and I'm often empty. I was so taken with this, you talked about the culture of distraction of devices and the externalization of so many things in the world, the weaponization of things like faith, the things like it's like like personal belief systems suddenly becomes this very, I think, loose -there is slippage between what is internal and personal and what is public and consumed and ridiculed by others. And it seems to me that this is something you think about a lot when you think about systems of power, when you think about psychic violence, when you think about that history has perhaps misconstrued, or we have we ourselves have misconstrued history. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, in particular with its libretto, perhaps why it's set in the 80s. What is it about that era and our 20/20 hindsight perhaps, or not 20/20 hindsight, in looking back these many years to understand where things became righteous or wrongly righteous, or failed in terms of their aspects of humility, that might have served us in a different way.
Tracy K Smith Yeah, well, you know, the 80s is a period where our relationship, I guess we're always going through changes in our relationship with like, media. But the 80s was a moment where suddenly people had TVs in many rooms of their houses, and there that the move toward, near constant news cycle was really beginning. Product placement was taking off in ways, you know, I grew up in that decade, and I'm embarrassed at how many jingles I still have full access to in my memory,
Jessica Helfand /laughs
Tracy K Smith Despite how much all its important stuff I've forgotten. And so that felt like a useful corollary. You know, there's an innocence to it, and it's in a way and there are, you know, TVs and screens that occur, in the opera to kind of like give us a another vantage point on what we once looked like and how-how different, and how much simpler in a way that appears now. And if that time seems simple, I hope an audience member might say, well, where are we on the spectrum that continues even beyond the final act of this-this opera? That's the real wish. And maybe even the introspection of the characters is a way of saying, yes, we live in a world co-, you know, countless external processes, but we carry that world within us and we have to find and claim or locate ourselves or something that can anchor us. Faith, you know, there are genuine facets of faith that have served that purpose and that do. And then there is this other, you know, return to the opposite of living language. You know what- when is the moment in our living memory when, God became aligned with certain political ends, earthly ends?
Ellen McGirt Well, maybe that's where history and your love of history and your interest in history is really a useful guide here, because I just as you were talking, I remember the I remember the 80s, I remember the preachers, I remember AIDs, I remember all of it. I remember all the jingles going back a little earlier, I were little I'm a little older than you. But I, I'm thinking now, as you're talking about the kinds of division and misinformation and the constant streams, it's not just TV anymore. It's constant streams of of bad information and insights and hot takes and the people walking through thier lives, regular people for whom there are people in public sphere talking about the United States, but lots of places that there's no information we could give you about them that would make them seem human to you anymore, that would make them redeemable in your eyes. You know, they are just the enemy. And it can be any type of person from any political party or any corporation or, you know, any point of view. How do you- I think I know the answer, but how do you cope with that?
Tracy K Smith Oh, gosh. I mean, I try and go back to the bedrock of, okay, what is an individual life? What are the pressures upon it? What are the moments when a failure, can be claimed, admitted and and learned from, you know, and art helps me do that, you know, to move toward either a figure from history or a figure, you know, who's wholly fictional. And to say, I don't like this person, but I have actually in order to create them or write from their point of view, I have to love them in some way. And to me, that feels like really good practice for the kind of civic engagement that we really need to, embrace. Because the-the, the alternative is a dead end, right? Like you're saying, to say there's nothing that can humanize these people that have been so neatly, dehumanized. The outcome is a kind of annihilation, psychic and otherwise. And so to say: Okay, here's a character. I don't feel like she and I agree, but she's saying this thing and I actually hear myself in it. Or, you know, she's doing something that I can't help but, feel for even if the wish is to help her not do it. And so that's a position I, I feel eager to put myself in and to invite others into as well. And opera is such a powerful art form because it's not just the language, it is also the power of the voice and the music. I mean, these unamplified voices that are literally like vibrating across a theater to reach you.
Ellen McGirt I'm here with Kwasi Mitchell, Deloitte's chief purpose and DEI officer and good friend and sponsor of today's episode. Good to see you, Kwasi. Thank you for joining us.
Kwasi Mitchell It's good to be here, Ellen.
Ellen McGirt I want to ask you a question with your Purpose Officer hat on, which was the first conversation we ever had.
Kwasi Mitchell mhhm.
Ellen McGirt And as soon as I heard what your job was, I wanted to have it immediately. It just sounds like a wonderful way to walk into the world.
Kwasi Mitchell /laughs.
Ellen McGirt But there are so many people, majority culture folks, for whatever reason who feel threatened by inclusion work. And it can be challenging. Self-reflection can be challenging. What have you learned about linking individuals and organizations through a purpose that can help people get through the hard parts of transforming their organizations?
Kwasi Mitchell One of my favorite things that I've learned with respect to linking purpose with driving change in organizations and society more broadly, is having people lean into their privilege, right, and Ellen, like the notion of privilege in the conversations, is that people get into self-reflection. They identify their privilege, and they can, in fact, view that as a detriment that they don't put to good.
Ellen McGirt Right.
Kwasi Mitchell Right. And so what I am telling people frequently is your privilege. Is your privilege, right? What I would like for you to take that and use as a force for good in the way that you sponsor, others who don't have the same level of privilege as you at work and how you lean into your specific communities, how you drive and find purpose and meaning in your work on a daily basis in support of others. So that's been one of the predominant things that I've found resonated with so many people and has driven them towards using their privilege through self-reflection and then driving concrete action and creating a better workplace and society more broadly.
Ellen McGirt Thank you so much for highlighting the importance of people's identities. Kwasi. That's so important.
Kwasi Mitchell Thank you for the opportunity, Ellen.
Ellen McGirt To the degree to which we had running sort of gallows humor during the pandemic, we were all going to write a book. And you actually did.
Tracy K Smith /laughs
Ellen McGirt So take us back to. I guess maybe you started writing in August 2020. I'm talking, of course, about, To Free the Captives: Plea for the American Soul. I think in retrospect, you wrote the book that we needed you to write, and you weren't sure what it was going to be, whether it's going to be another memoir. And, could you tell us a little bit about what was happening for you when you sat down at your desk,
Tracy K Smith Yeah.
Ellen McGirt And started to write?
Tracy K Smith I was going through that heavy, fearful time. I was realizing, along with much of America, how much we haven't resolved, particularly across lines of race and racial difference. I was excited by the vocab- th-the emerging vocabulary for, you know, racial justice that was coming up in places where it hadn't previously operated. And I was disheartened by all of the roadblocks to that, you know, which begin with fear of change, fear, on the part of some people who believe they have something to lose by making space for others and their needs and voices. And so I-I started meditating. I felt like I didn't have, courage that was strong enough to get me through some of the challenging encounters that I was experiencing and witnessing, you know, with, with much of the world. And, I started talking to my— I've always talked to my parents, who are deceased, but I also started making space for other voices to enter into that meditative process, to say, who is here, who has experienced this or worse, who can give me some perspective, or at least, fortify me for the the challenges and the dangers that I feel myself to be facing. And in some ways, it started out as like, almost just a wish or a rant or a prayer. I wasn't expecting to receive something, but I was sitting in my yard. I was hearing that birdsong. I was thinking about how all the animals were confident in their work while we were quaking. And suddenly I began to hear and perceive other kinds of insight and information and consolation. And so the book began to take shape. I didn't know what it would be, but I was journaling and I was writing a lot of poems. Many of the poems that were published in Such Color were written in- in that same yard during that, in those same conditions. And then, I really began to work in earnest on To Free the Captives as a volume in 2021 and beyond 2021. And, realizing that one way of thinking about what I was working on and burdened by, was to think about the American imagination and the ways that freedom and, roadblocks to freedom have been sort of like percolating there for centuries. They've been instilled within our perspectives of ourselves and one another. And much of the work, I think, of, of waking up to that has to do with being willing to say I am complicit in things I don't even believe. And if I can name that, if I can describe what it means to resist that, maybe that would be helpful to others. And so part of the book is, is really thinking in those very personal terms about family, family history, and that feeling of both vulnerability and hope. And part of it is really thinking, thinking about these patterns in our behavior, in our in our ways of thinking about each other. One idea that really startled me, was to realize: Oh, in the American imagination, many people are perceived to be free and to have always been free and to be invulnerable to anything but freedom. And, there are people who appear to descend from these histories of power, ownership, you know, subjugation of others. And the rest of us, though we're told that we're, you know, free citizens or members of this culture, we're actually sitting under a lower ceiling because we're not free but freed, which means we come from histories of subjugation and that which we are permitted to criticize or demand is different from what it would be for somebody who's-who's, you know, free and entitled to everything. And it really hurt me to recognize that. But I could see it in the archive. I could see it in my own family history and the documents that I could find about, you know, my ancestors, but also my parents. And when I was really being honest with myself, that dynamic plays out in my life as well, both in, you know, interpersonal relationships and in the relationships that I have to institutions in this country.
Jessica Helfand But I wonder, just staying on the topic for a moment of the book, what written forms did you find? Just the simplicity of the letter D at the end of free and that little beautiful kind of grace note observation of the difference between free and freed. What else in the writing, what was the the form the writing took that allowed you to explore these themes in particular?
Tracy K Smith I love that you asked that question and that you hear that because a lot of the process of writing this book had to do with hearing language, partly because I was actually trying to think with other imaginations, to open myself up to another kind of energy or insight. And so I was writing with my brain, but I was also writing with my ear and my body, and that meant I was sometimes moving towards sound and finding an idea within a sound that was, not of my own making, if that makes sense. I talk a lot about it in the book because I'm shy about it, and because I also am so excited by the fact that this is, I don't know, I believe this is part of our human birthright to have, you know, the capacity to connect with others across space and time, through meditation or through a kind of intentional seeking. And maybe that's another one of these interventions upon the the dead language or the market driven forces that we live in to say, this doesn't make a kind of literal sense, but what if it is, a counter logic that can help us make better sense of the world that we live in, the world we've inherited, and that we have to help, to to correct course.
Ellen McGirt I want to acknowledge, the pain. That you felt and you expressed as you were doing this work as a journalist who focuses on race and equity and business and life and corporate life. These institutions are filled with people who are wrestling with all kinds of pain, and sometimes it's triggered on a daily basis. And I'm also thinking about the pain of being complicit in a story that unfolded before you were born. People who don't understand the distinction between free and freed, who are from the free and are now having to revisit all of these stories, all of the people who have been part of the mythologizing of American life, who should have taught them different, who should have known better and who didn't. And now we're fighting about the flags. Now we're fighting about kneeling at football, and we're fighting about all these things that feel so disorienting and who may not have the kind of, and you talk about sobriety in a number of ways in the book that was so moving to me, the cultural sobriety and the courage to be present with these stories, because it means losing a big part of the identity that gets them through their lives. So from that point of view, and of course, this is where you win the second Pulitzer because you solve the biggest problem, we're all facing in this — right? /laughs/ Is that what advice do you have or what guidance do you have for someone who is who may be experiencing a loss of status as a result of understanding their complicity in the story they didn't write?
Tracy K Smith Yeah. It's important. I mean, there are so many forms of pain, in our culture that must be tended to. And that's one because as you're saying, it's a it's a roadblock to other forms of, of healing and progress. And I go back to the scale of the intimate scale, because I imagine in that position, it's easy to say all of them are against me, and all of them are trying to sever my love for my family, my people, my-my, you know, my home. And so I would say, let's forget about all of them. Forget about the sea of faces that you're just imagining. And what happens if you can put yourself in an- even an imagined encounter with just one other person? Literature is really great for that because it's one voice on a page. And for the time that you're reading, it really does feel like it's speaking to and for you, directly to you. I there's an anecdote at the very end of that book, where I'm in the poet laureateship and reading some Civil War poems, in rural Kentucky and, the, the reading concluded, and a white woman from the audience came up to me afterward and said, I-those voices in those letters — and I'll just explain that I read a cycle of poems that are archival letters written by African-American soldiers and veterans of the Civil War, letters that they, wrote to their family members, their family members wrote to them, and letters written to, you know, President Abraham Lincoln and others, just simple appeals for information and for care and for help — and this woman said, those the voices in those letters are so powerful. And they really reminded me of people in my family. Can you wait for me to go home? I want to get something for you. So she rushed home and an hour later came back and her demeanor was quite different. She was, stricken looking. She looked worried and, but she said, I wanted to get this for you. It's a CD of my grandmother telling stories and singing songs from her childhood in Kentucky, and we recorded her at the end of her life because we loved her so much, and we knew that she was going to eventually pass. And then she looked at me and she said, but my grandmother would never have wanted to hurt you. You have to understand this. And suddenly I understood what I held in my hands, right, a CD that is going to be, repeating stories that she was given that she inherited from her people, many of which would be hurtful to me, many of which would denigrate the perspective of an African-American person in her time. I didn't know what to do with that for the longest time. But in writing about it, I realized that woman went home and she had to situate her grandmother in space with these other lives, lives her grandmother had not been taught to revere. And something happened in that encounter. I like to imagine that, her grandmother said to her, listen, this changes everything. We have to start remembering history differently. We have to start telling new stories. And so she came back and she fulfilled this commitment to me, a total stranger. But in doing so, she she shared with me the sense of a different kind of conviction. I don't know what she's gone on to do. I don't know where she would stand in relation to the story as I just told it. But it gives me great hope to imagine that at the personal scale, the interpersonal scale, not the massive collective scale, we can bolster the kind of willingness to rethink things and to situate all that we've held tightly to alongside other things that we must begin to care differently for.
Jessica Helfand This does, to me, get back to teaching. I was for many years at Yale, and I always worked with primary sources, and I remember thinking —as a child of historians — that there had to be a way to get students to recognize and hear and pay attention to voices that were not familiar to them and resources that were not familiar to them. And Yale has a marvelous collection of Holocaust audio testimonies and they're-they're messy and rickety, and they're from the 70s, and they're not sexy at all. And to bear witness to those voices and to listen to those stories and to learn something that you might not hear because it's not part of your world. I remember thinking I had these tiny classes, but I was eager to find a way to engage in a conversation with one student at one time, looking at one new thing: the first time they saw onion skin paper, the first time that woman from Kentucky heard something in your reading. And, you know, I'm reminded of, again, you have this very public life. You have this very public remit as a as a Pulitzer Prize winning two time poet laureate. And yet, in a moment like that, the intimacy of that conversation with that woman went very, very deep. And in a way, teaching is probably both of those things. It's public and it's private. It's you hold them all to the same standard, but you treat them each individuals, and they probably come from all kinds of walks of life, as students do. And during Covid, could you talk a little bit about how you first of all, I can't even imagine how you manage children and teaching and writing and memoirs. And I mean, really just tell us what vitamins you take because we would like some.
Tracy K Smith /laughs.
Jessica Helfand But I wonder if you could talk about the challenges of teaching in these last few years.
Tracy K Smith Well, there is a really present, unabashed form of need and emotional vulnerability that has emerged since 2020. It was brewing before then. We were talking about student anxiety, you know, threats to their, you know, literal survival, before 2020. But it was exacerbated and heightened by just the fact that we were all so isolated. That was the time in my teaching career that I felt I found myself having far more one-on-one interactions with my students, despite the fact that it was it was all virtual, and we weren't always talking about the material. They just needed to talk. They just needed to bear witness to what they didn't know, what they were worried about, what they-what they needed from a poem, what they hope one day they might be able to do. And, taking the time to be in that kind of, you know, it was mediated by Zoom, but that kind of proximity was really, I think it changed my teaching forever. I understand that we read poetry because it touches us emotionally. It helps the heart. It helps the, unmoored mind. And I know that. But my classes before, that kind of literal realization were really rooted in craft and literary history. And now I really make space to say: Okay, what is this poem asking you to do? What is it asking you to recognize? And that could be a poem that you're reading, or a poem that you're writing. So that, you know, the whole self enters into the space. It doesn't mean that we're not still grappling with difficult material. It doesn't mean that we all will agree. But to understand that you're in the room not just with brains, not just with, you know, robust young resumes, but with people. That's huge. And, I hope we really don't go back to the other model of, like, expecting them to distance all of that from what happens when they're in the presence of their their teachers. And students are really eager to bring all of their energy, experience and expertise to bear, not just upon excelling in a class, but on helping people. I understand my students really want to help the world because they recognize that it's in peril. And so they're writing poems, or they're writing about literature in a way that seeks to make sense to the challenges that we find ourselves in the midst of. I understand they have an even more robust vocabulary of conscience as a result of the last several years than they did before, and I'm really grateful for that.
Jessica Helfand There's a reason for hope right there.
Tracy K Smith Yeah.
Ellen McGirt There is, there is. And Harvard's been going through a lot in the last few years. How would you characterize some of the more public, issues that Harvard's been having in terms of how they're dealing with their own reckoning in the world?
Tracy K Smith Yeah, it is a it's, every time I'm tempted to say it's a tough time for Harvard, I realize what's going on everywhere else in the world. And that gets tempered. And I think that's a helpful kind of, corrective to the the sense that, oh, this institution, is struggling with public criticism, political pressure and, you know, divergent views about what it means to belong and how we must, safeguard the belonging of all people, all groups, all perspectives. I have a lot of faith that the long standing institutional imagination at places like Harvard, and Harvard is not alone right now /dog barking/ in its struggles, can unlearn the need to be the authority and can unlearn the need to venerate its own history at the expense of acknowledging its vulnerability. Because it's the vulnerability /dog barking/ I'm sorry, my dog is barking.
Ellen McGirt Tracy, do you have a do /laughs/
Tracy K Smith /laughs/ I do have dog and the mail must be here. I'm sorry.
Ellen McGirt Oh, my God, there's a dog in a mailman issue happening /laughs/
Tracy K Smith Yeah. t's like 1950.
Ellen McGirt That's the best /laughs/
Jessica Helfand /laughs/ What's the dog's name?
Tracy K Smith His name is Bruce. /laughs/
Jessica Helfand Oh,.
Ellen McGirt Bruce!
Jessica Helfand What's. What's not to love?
Ellen McGirt Oh my goodness.
Tracy K Smith Yeah.
Ellen McGirt It's great.
Tracy K Smith I don't know how to go back to—
Ellen McGirt Well, can I, can I build a bridge there because I got, listeners, Jessica just did me such a solid by jumping in with a lovely story of her teaching, because I was literally weeping at the end of the story of the woman who came back with her CD of her grandmother's songs and stories. And realizing in that moment that her grandmother was part of a system that was free and was hurtful to other people who had been freed and would continue to, to be, considered that way. And- but the act of imagination that you described, Tracy, was so simple, and it completely sort of blew my mind. When I think about change, I think about systems change. I think it has to be huge. I think we have to be all on board. But actually, no, what you described was a woman who had gone through whatever she'd gone through, had the courage to come back and talk to you with her beloved grandmother, who everybody loved, with the idea that if her grandmother was there today, understanding what she herself had just gone through, her grandmother would come to this conversation differently and that she was imagining the-her grandmother today, which you do in your books. We we feel like we know your parents because we've been reading your books and we're getting to know them in new ways as you are getting to know them in new ways. People who have been harmed by financial institutions and, you know, really aggressively harmed by the kinds of, you know, financial and and limits on financial, achievement and joyful achievement and family achievement that this country is known for. Now I'm hearing all these themes. Everyone should get to just be quietly sitting in a room where poets are working things out, like that's that's the goal. But the same thing is with Harvard is that can Harvard stop- and if what I heard you say correctly, thinking of itself as the standard and venerating itself and its history and bringing new imagination to every moment where they are encountering, encountering other people, students, community members, people who work in the cafeteria, people who clean the rooms, you know, all of this things that that's the moment that it's not system wide change where I need a pitchfork out in the streets, although I do love those moments, but they're moment to moment reimagining who we are and the people we love around us, and how we would meet the moment now, given what we are learning and discovering now.
Tracy K Smith I love that. And when you put it that way, isn't that the easiest thing we can do?
Ellen McGirt Well, yes, it is much easier then wh-what goes on in my head!
Jessica Helfand /laughs
Tracy K Smith /laughs/ Exactly. We can actually become reflective and, talk.
Ellen McGirt Yeah.
Tracy K Smith So as as wild as these times are and as, you know, heartbreaking as the past year has been, and grieving for President Claudine Gay, and, everything that she was made to experience, I believe that we can learn and be willing to change course. It's what people do all the time.
Jessica Helfand That kind of resilience and insight and, and I think humility in the face of, you know, closely felt beliefs about improper behavior, that forgiveness and flexibility, is, I think, are all qualities that, make me think of your poetry. And I wonder if this might be a moment for you to read us something.
Tracy K Smith /laughs/ I would love to read something. I'm going to read a brief poem called An Old Story. Because I wrote it at a time when I was really thinking about the, the work that mythology has done to authorize, the terrible, you know, all of the, the trends and patterns that we've been talking about that are, that have harmed people and that block us from being willing to correct course. Many of them have been authorized by the ways that they that history is told and remembered. And so I gave myself the assignment. And when I read this poem publicly, I invite people in the audience to fulfill this assignment in their own way, write a myth, write the myth that we need right now. Write the myth that will help us to move forward into the future that's on the horizon. So this was my attempt a few years ago.
Tracy K Smith An Old Story. We were made to understand it would be / Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge, / Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. // Livid the land, and ravaged, like a rageful / Dream. The worst in us, having taken over / And broken the rest utterly down. // A long age / Passed. When at last we knew how little / Would survive us — how little we had mended // Or built that was not now lost — something / Large and old awoke. And then our singing / Brought on a different manner of weather. // Then animals, long believed gone crept down / From trees. We took new stock of one another. / We wept to be reminded of such color.
Jessica Helfand Thank you for that beautiful poem. And for reading it to us so beautifully.
Ellen McGirt Thank you so very much. What a delight. Tracy, what's next for you? Something exciting, I know.
Tracy K Smith Well, there are a few more performances of The Righteous. It goes through August 13th, at the Santa Fe Opera. And I'm working on a couple of new books. Two books about poetry, that I hope will be helpful to kind of like reclaiming of, you know, the urgency of this art form for more people's lives. And there are always poems brewing as well. So I'm going to devote myself to all of that listening, across registers and voices. And seeing where they where it leads.
Jessica Helfand Right. We were joking before you joined that you need to start the Live Poets Society.
Tracy K Smith /laughs/ Yes.
Ellen McGirt We should all be so lucky to be in the room with you. Tracy, thank you so much for being here.
Tracy K Smith Thank you both. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Jessica Helfand I was having a really bad day yesterday when we stopped to do this interview, and it just changed my mood entirely. And one of the reasons it changed my mood entirely is that I sometimes think that language is so easily, as she says, weaponized. Language has become kind of a low hanging fruit, right? Prompt engineering — anybody who can string two words together, we're all going to be replaced by bots, right? It's easy to see that language becomes something that is not, you know, terribly reliable. And she not only disproves that idea, she is a sort of living, breathing exemplar of that. She-she's not she doesn't repeat herself. I felt that every answer she really thought about it is such an original mind. And she loves language. It's like a it's her medium. It's, it's it's this expansive, expressive, sometimes volatile, deeply emotional, heartfelt, personal means of actually making sense of the world not just for herself, but for the rest of us.
Ellen McGirt You know, Jessica, I felt exactly the same way. Just a sense of energy. You know, there's people who give you energy and there's people who sap your energy. She's- she just can imagine being one of her students. How wonderful that would be? But I change the way I approach my writing the next day, you know, based on her meditative practice, which is not something I typically think I have access to. And so the mood continues for me today. And I am rethinking the power of institutions and the institutions that we've accepted as being permanent. You know, love is an institution for Tracy. The imagination, the collective imagination is an institution. So thinking about that.
Jessica Helfand I love that. I love that idea of the collective imagination or questioning the American imagination.
Ellen McGirt Yes.
Jessica Helfand And in her case, you really see that it's deeply tethered to questions about history.
Ellen McGirt Yes.
Jessica Helfand And again, it would be so easy for her as a Harvard professor, as a poet laureate, as a person with an unbelievable pedigree, to sort of have a certain sovereignty on this topic, to be superior to the rest of us as the opposite. Also, let's just talk about the fact that poetry, which seems, as you describe when you talked about those poets huddled in the corner—
Ellen McGirt It was so great.
Jessica Helfand —in your early anecdote. It seems a rarefied, distant, sort of way to engage in the world. And she makes it feel accessible and open. And and when she talks about living language, she really means it. It is living, breathing, active, changeable, fungible, way of actually connecting to people who might not agree with you. And that story that brought you to tears,
Ellen McGirt mhmm.
Jessica Helfand I think is a perfect example.
Ellen McGirt I agree.
Jessica Helfand You know what that music means.
Ellen McGirt It's big swing, small wins time.
Jessica Helfand I'm thinking you have something for us this week. Ellen. Hit me.
Ellen McGirt Yeah, I think you're going to. I think you're going to like it.
Jessica Helfand /laughs.
Ellen McGirt So we've had a lot to choose from lately. If you've been paying attention to what's going on in the world. But this week I'm going to give it to the Paris Summer Olympic Games. I'd say the opening ceremony in Paris thrilled some people, confused some people, and enraged others, which is typically the sign of a very big swing. But that's not all. What do you think?
Jessica Helfand The Olympics itself is the biggest swing for all participants, who endured an untold number of small wins to get there, and by participants, of course, I mean the athletes, but also the trainers, the families, the communities who support them, and the costume designers of the creative community who help every athlete represent their culture on such a big, really global stage.
Ellen McGirt And that has been so thrilling. But here's another piece of it that I just wanted to flag and celebrate. The biggest win of all. For the first time in history, the Olympic Committee has achieved full gender parity on the field of play, that's a quote. Having reached the goal of 50% female athlete participation. We'll know the full tally at the end. And there's a long way to go before girls and women have the same support in their athletic journeys as boys and men do, but it's an incredible achievement.
Jessica Helfand Gender parity has made amazing stories, and I think you have some great examples of a couple of athletes who've really made their mark on this particular set of Olympic Games.
Ellen McGirt So here's three. There's so many, like every every time you give a person that excellent the stage, you hear a story. But I don't know if you heard the story of Nada Hafez. She's an Egyptian fencer and a former Olympian. She was seven months pregnant during her-her bout and nobody knew. And speaking of babies and families, Allyson Felix, who's just an extraordinary athlete, helped establish the first nursery in the Olympic and Paralympic Village.
Jessica Helfand I'm s-I'm struggling to comprehend what it is to be a fencer who's pregnant. I just like that just stops me. There's-there's — oh my God, the bravery, the skill, the professionalism that must be required to just maintain your body in this altered state on a field of play that it's, and it's hot in there. It's true. Exactly.
Ellen McGirt Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't know if you knew anything about women's rugby. I didn't know anything about women's rugby. But there is a player for the U.S. named Ilona Maher who caught my attention on social media for her truly hilarious and occasionally poignant, Instagram Reels and TikToks where she she pretended that she thought the Olympic Village was the Olympic villa, which was such a good dating site, and she was there to find love.
Jessica Helfand /laughs.
Ellen McGirt It was like, she's so funny, but she's so body positive and she's so strong and she's so beautiful. And the U.S. rugby got my attention like no other commercial could ever have done. I followed them closely. I love her dearly.
Jessica Helfand It's kind of a beautiful example of citizen journalism, of when an athlete who's participating in the games chooses to take to their own channels to highlight, amplify, celebrate something. It's a beautiful example of of the collective, really at work. And as a media person, I would think that that's also thrilling to you. It is to me.
Ellen McGirt It is really it is really thrilling. These athletes are at their top of their game, athletically, but they're also in terms of being able to communicate their experience, how hard they work, what matters to them. And that that one or team to many voice is going to make a difference for generations to come. I'm sure of it. Anyway. That's it.
Ellen McGirt The Design of Business | The Business of Design is a podcast from Design Observer.
Jessica Helfand Our show is written and produced by Alexis Haut. Our theme music is by Warner Meadows. Justin De Wright of Seaplane Armada mixed and mastered this episode. Special thanks to Adina Karp and Focus Forward Podcast Studio in Providence for production support. And on this week'simprov Thank You's, we'd like a special shout out to Tracy Smith's mailman for triggering such a delightful cameo for Bruce.
Ellen McGirt And for more long form content about the people redesigning our world, please consider subscribing to our newsletters, Equity Observer and The Observatory at Design Observer dot com.
Ellen McGirt The Design of Business | The Business of Design is produced by Design Observer's editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcasts, speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel, nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the podcast.
