This blog post was shared by Writing the Community teaching artist Logan Phillips, on Tracy K. Smith's latest release: Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times. The Poetry Center's K-12 Education Department has a limited supply of complimentary copies for educators (classroom teachers, teaching artists, community educators, and librarians). To inquire about a free copy, please contact Eva Sierra at emsierra@arizona.edu.
Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times by Tracy K. Smith, November 2025 (Norton)
Poetry is a bundle of mysteries.
Why do we feel the impulse to write? Why do we endeavor to read? How is it that a poem can affect us so profoundly? How does a poem transcend individual experience to impact the world?
When I come across a poet brave enough to tackle these questions, I’m always eager to dive into their answers – especially when those answers are considered with the brilliance and experience of a writer like Tracy K. Smith.
Smith’s recent book, Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times, has its origins in a lecture given towards the close of Smith’s first term as Poet Laureate of the United States, here expanded to a “meditation on poetry as a counterpoint to the larger value system” (152) of modern U.S. society, of which fear has become a defining characteristic.
It’s a defining characteristic of books like Fear Less to make bold claims about what poetry is and what it isn’t –– a classic of the genre being Claims for Poetry (available in the Poetry Center library and online at Open Library) edited by Donald Hall and released in 1982.
I return to books like these to ground both my writing and teaching practices, reminding myself of my purposes and impacts.
So, what are some of the claims Smith sets forth in Fear Less? Well, I’d encourage you to read this wonderful (and compact!) book, and to watch Smith’s reading at the Tucson Humanities Festival. But here are three takeaways that may be immediately useful to writers-who-teach and teachers-who-write:
1) Poems are acts of attention
“Beyond literature, beyond works of art, poems are acts of attention,” (49) and “there is nothing in a poem that does not wish to be noticed.” (11)
One of the pleasures of reading a book like this – or reading poetry! – is finding confirmation that there’s someone else out there whose subjective experience in some way mirrors or relates to our own. I’ve frequently told students that “we are what we notice, and we become what we pay attention to,” as a way of inviting them into acts of metacognition – understanding how they’re learning what they’re learning.
The stakes are high, because attention is inseparable from perception: “what we permit ourselves to hear has bearing upon what we are able to see,” (114) and “our view of reality dwells in patterns of thought and expectation that reside in language.” (80)
The quality of the attention cultivated by poetry can itself be a door to imagining new worlds defined by new sets of relations: “language is the engine for our sense of the possible.” (80)
2) We write because we don’t know
“It is curiosity, not foreknowledge, that leads a reader (and a poet, and a poem) beyond the limits of habitual understanding – questions, rather than answers, being the building blocks of insight.” (19)
This reminds me of a scene I’ve encountered often: a student, pencil in hand, staring blankly into the abyss of a blank page. “Are you ok,” I’ll ask them. “Yeah,” the student might reply, “I just can’t think of what to write.” Gently, I remind them that the invitation I’ve given isn’t to think of a poem, but rather, to start writing, to be brave, to follow the words where they lead.
As Smith says, “a poem embarks on a journey of improvisation,” (57) going on to quote Robert Frost: “For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.”
This is what I always hope to facilitate for students, an experience of that delight which is on the other side of the struggle, unrest, unsettling that Smith names as among the origins of our impulse to write (115, 117). “A productive engagement with the nature of uncertainty and irresolution,” (20) “poetry is a place writers go not to deposit meaning, but to seek it out.” (151)
3) Poetry brings us towards “an active and improvisatory empathy.”
Smith places poetry “at the heart of a search and recovery mission, which rejects the calculated deflections of power-based hierarchies in favor of an active and improvisatory empathy.” (106) This empathy, which is perhaps the salient point of the book, is posited as the antidote to pervasive fear of the other.
“To care about poetry is to attend to a host of complex faculties that equip you to consider yourself alongside and in light of equally worthy others” (32, emphasis added), which is perhaps why the teaching of writing poetry is so essential during students’ teenage years, as they journey across the borderlands between childhood and their adult selves-in-the-making. It is in these years that convictions are formed, consequences learned, and thinking patterns established.
Again, we’re reminded that the stakes are high: through a poem’s exploration of “prevailing dynamics of authority and submission, power and coercion” (99) can offer ways of countering “biases distorting a culture’s view of certain groups of people [which] almost always begin in language.” (103)
Is it possible to help our students imagine a more just United States, one in which wounds of the past have begun to heal? Perhaps it is possible. But certainly not without the many tools required, which just so happen to be afforded us by the reading and writing of poetry.
We continue to write through the many mysteries – and towards one another – remembering that time spent with the beautiful struggles of poetry is never wasted, for:
“A poem is an act of reckoning and offers the hope that individual consciousness might not operate alone,” (115) and “all acts and utterances travel forward and leave behind a wake. Even if unobserved or unremarked, no ripple persists unfelt.” (119)